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Claudia Conway isn’t your Katniss Everdeen — and she shouldn’t have to be

The comparisons between Claudia Conway — the 15-year-old daughter of former senior counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and The Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway — and “Hunger Games” protagonist Katniss Everdeen began late Monday night after she commented on her TikTok regarding the President Donald Trump’s condition. 

She wrote, “guys lmao he’s not doing ‘better,'” and “he is so ridiculous. apparently he is doing badly lol and they are doing what they can to stabilize him.” This tantalizing albeit unverified information came just hours after the president was released from Walter Reed Hospital and as his doctors continued to provide conflicting reports about the progression of his recovery. 

Conway’s comments were quickly screencapped and posted to Twitter, where some users — who were understandably hungry for more information about Trump amid what Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton aptly described as the “absurd Soviet-style propaganda campaign around his illness” — quickly began classifying the teenager as a kind of Gen-Z whistleblower who would lead a revolution against those currently in political power. 

“Claudia Conway is as close as we can get to a real life Katniss Everdeen,” one wrote, while another tweeted, “Not to be a millennial but we’re literally living in a dystopian novel and Claudia Conway is Katniss.” 

There were comparisons to other YA protagonists like Hermione Granger from “Harry Potter” and Beatrice Prior from “Divergent,” and the temptation to make those connections is understandable. This isn’t the first time Claudia has garnered massive support for her social media posts. She’s gone viral again and again with her short videos joking about Trump’s refusal to denounce white supremacy and her “Save Barron” TikToks. She was the one who announced on Friday that her mother had tested positive for COVID-19. 

“Update my mom has covid,” she wrote on one post, featuring a video of her wearing a mask. “Wear your masks. dont listen to our idiot f**king president piece of s**t. protect yourself and those around you.”

In a moment when it seems so many Republicans shy away from candid, public scrutiny and condemnation of the president’s actions, especially his response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, there’s something momentarily satisfying about watching this young woman defy her parents’ — especially her mother’s — conservative political views.

But Claudia Conway is not a real-life Katniss Everdeen (at least not in the way people mean in their statements) and, more importantly, she shouldn’t have to be. Classifying her as such simultaneously oversimplifies her complicated and allegedly abusive home life, while also wrongly absolving American adults of their part in the ongoing political fight. It also speaks to a larger societal hesitancy to recognize teenage girls as multifaceted, layered individuals who deserve more than for their character to be distilled into 280-character tweets. 

In an Aug. 22 tweet, Claudia told followers that she was seeking emancipation from her parents. 

“[B]uckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately,” she said. “Welcome to my life.”

This was about 24 hours before both Kellyanne and George announced they would be stepping back from their work at the White House and the Lincoln Project, respectively, to “devote more time to family matters.”

The next day, Claudia clarified on Twitter that she wasn’t seeking emancipation because of her mother’s job or political views. “[I]t is because of years of childhood trauma and abuse.” This isn’t the only time Claudia has publicly alleged that her parents were physically and emotionally abusive; in a now-deleted TikTok video, Claudia said her parents stepping down from their roles was just for show.

“They don’t give a s**t,”  she said. “My dad doesn’t care about me. He’s never cared about me. He probably doesn’t even know my middle name, which is really sad, but it’s true . . . My dad physically abused me a lot, right here is this very room, and same thing with my mom.” 

In a recent livestream, she spoke in a type of Gibberish, a language game similar to Pig Latin that sounds incomprehensible to the uninitiated, to tell her followers, “I’m on live right now ’cause I’m scared of my mom.”

Claudia hasn’t provided proof of her allegations of abuse, but the effects of her tumultuous home life are apparent. In September, she posted a tearful video with the caption: “Nothing feels real. Someone give me tips to stop dissociating.” 

Within this context, Claudia’s videos, even the ones that rightfully reprimand Trump and his staff, are an obvious cry for help, both from capable adults in her life and from the larger American public. Claudia and members of her generation — I’m thinking of other young voices who have been thrust into the political space like David Hogg and Greta Thunberg — shouldn’t be the ones pressured to save our country; American adults should leave them a better one. 

It struck me when people were classifying Claudia as a 2020 “Hunger Games” character that many neglected to make the connection that Katniss wouldn’t have had to be, well, Katniss if the adults in her society hadn’t so grossly failed her. She is forced to emerge as a symbol of survival and rebellion, becoming “the girl on fire,” while simultaneously being expected to sacrifice her childhood. Instead of having her youth guarded, she spends it protecting those who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the same for her. 

In his September essay for Mel Magazine, Miles Klee wrote about how, when you actually listen to Thunberg and “the Parkland group,” you won’t necessarily hear how they plan to enact systemic change. 

“Instead, they are telling the adults to get their act together, and wondering why it has fallen to the youth to voice any call to virtuous action,” Klee wrote. “Claudia Conway now has the duty of convincing people to vote against Trump when she’s not old enough to punch a ballot herself.” 

But instead of actually taking concrete action — phone banking, educating those in your community about mail-in voting, signing up to become a poll worker — it’s easier to retweet one of Claudia’s videos with the hashtag #ResistanceQueen. 

It’s also sometimes easier to do that than recognize Claudia, and teenage girls in general, as complex individuals whose personalities, beliefs and values cannot and should not be reduced to a hashtag or saucy headline. Yet the tendency to do so is present all throughout popular culture; I think of Erin Lee Carr’s 2019 documentary “I Love You, Now Die” which pushes back against the simplistic media characterizations of Michelle Carter, a 17-year-old girl who was accused of encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, via text to kill himself. 

As I wrote in my review of the documentary, at the time of the court case against Carr, “former HLN commentator Nancy Grace declared: ‘She just did this for the attention.’ And that is an easy narrative to distill: Carter was an attention-obsessed blackhole of neediness, something many would say categorically about teenage girls. Carter’s story just turned dark.” 

But Carr’s documentary digs deeper than that. 

Carter had suffered from a severe eating disorder and cut herself; she felt like a social outcast, despite the fact that she was someone who, prior to her case, was a stellar student and community member. With that in mind — and despite looking like an adult — at 17, could Carter really be this manipulative femme-fatale? Or was she a child who, like Roy, needed help, too? 

The documentary asserts that the truth is found somewhere in the middle; that Carter is the sum of her parts, experiences and emotions. They’re messy, conflicting and ultimately larger than just herself. 

The same is likely true in the case of Claudia Conway. She is an outspoken and rebellious voice of dissent against Donald Trump — and she has an unequivocal right to be —but she is also a teenage girl who is clearly facing some level of personal distress because of her unstable home life, and as such deserves a certain amount of privacy to deal with that, despite posting her play-by-play online. 

Yes, it’s sometimes difficult to look away, and the temptation is obviously there to spotlight her posts as the kind of resistance needed right now — but when that temptation arises, think about what Katniss Everdeen would do in our current political climate, and do it yourself, instead.

 

Pregnant women have COVID-19 symptoms that last longer than average, study finds

Pregnant women with COVID-19 can have symptoms that last more than two months, far longer than the average patient, according to a new study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology on Wednesday.

The study, led by researchers at the University of California–San Francisco and University of California–Los Angeles, is the largest study to date of non-hospitalized pregnant women. A quarter of the 594 women studied had COVID-19 symptoms that lasted two months or longer. Non-pregnant patients who experience symptoms for more than a month or two after testing positive are informally known as “long-haulers.”

“We found that pregnant people with COVID-19 can expect a prolonged time with symptoms,” senior author Vanessa L. Jacoby, MD, MAS, vice chair of research in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF, and co-principal investigator of the national pregnancy study, said in a statement. “COVID-19 symptoms during pregnancy can last a long time, and have a significant impact on health and wellbeing.”

The paper is part of an ongoing study in the United States called The PRIORITY study (a partial acronym for Pregnancy Coronavirus Outcomes Registry), which is focused on analyzing symptoms of women who are pregnant, or up to six weeks after pregnancy and have a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19. Nine percent of the women studied were Black; thirty-one percent of the participants were Latina. Notably, 67 percent of the women had contact with a person who was symptomatic or tested positive for COVID-19; 21 percent had a history of recent travel. Health care workers represented 31 percent of the women.

The study found that the most common early symptoms for pregnant women were a cough, sore throat, body aches and fever. Fifty percent of the participants had symptoms after three weeks of infection; 25 percent still had symptoms at eight weeks.

“The majority of participants in our study population had mild disease and were not hospitalized,” Yalda Afshar, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said. “Even so, it took a median of 37 days for symptoms to ease.”

The authors of the study noted that the prevalence of symptoms in the cohort of pregnant women was different than those in the nonpregnant populations. Specifically, there appeared to be a lack of prevalence of pregnant women having a fever, which is a common symptom for the nonpregnant population.

“For instance, in a nonpregnant population–based cohort of 1,099 patients in China, the most common presenting symptoms were fever (43.8% on hospital admission) and cough (67.8%), compared with cough (20%) and sore throat (16%) as the most common first symptoms in our cohort, with fever present in only 12% of the population,” the authors of the study stated. “One week after symptom onset among PRIORITY participants who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection, cough (41%) and fatigue (33%) were prevalent but fever remained uncommon (5%).”

This study continues to shape a theory that pregnant patients “have a different clinical presentation of and morbidity from COVID-19 compared with the nonpregnant population,” the authors note.

“We demonstrate that the presenting symptoms in this primarily outpatient cohort of pregnant patients differ from those in nonpregnant populations, with a lower prevalence of fever and higher rates of fatigue, body aches, and headaches,” the authors write. “Pregnancy also confers a prolonged course of disease for patients with COVID-19, where 25% of patients have persistent symptoms 8 weeks or more after disease onset.”

While there are still a lot of unknowns about COVID-19 and how it affects the pregnant population, researchers hope these results can better inform clinicians.

“Despite the potential risks of COVID-19 for pregnant people and their newborns, there are large gaps in our knowledge on the course of the disease and the overall prognosis,” Afshar said. “Our results can help pregnant people and their clinicians better understand what to expect with COVID-19 infection.”

Here’s what you need to know about tonight’s debate: Mike Pence shouldn’t even be there

Mike Pence should be in isolation — not on a stage in Salt Lake City where he could well be spreading a deadly virus to everyone around him.

His very presence is an affront to public health guidance the rest of the country is supposed to be following.

The American people should listen to his words only in this essential context: On that stage, he will be the embodiment of the profound personal irresponsibility expressed by Donald Trump and his loyalists; behavior like his is precisely what’s going to kill tens of thousands of Americans who would otherwise live.

This context couldn’t be clearer or more dire, but it is largely escaping our elite political reporters, who refuse to break out of the traditional strictures of campaign coverage. Those strictures forbid journalists from taking sides in argument, and require both sides to be presented as equally valid.

That’s why you had a Washington Post story up for much of the day Wednesday headlined “Pence, Harris teams at odds over plexiglass at debate” — a textbook case of false equivalence.

That’s why the New York Times treated Pence’s refusal to accept safety measures as just so much normal back-and-forth, writing: “The complaint from Mr. Pence’s staff — which was quickly brushed aside by Ms. Harris’s team — was another salvo in the fraught negotiations over the debate scheduled for Wednesday in Salt Lake City.”

That’s why the Times’ “What to Watch for” on debate day acknowledged that the “debate has been shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic,” but doesn’t address how dangerous and ridiculous it is that the debate is actually being held in person.

That’s why the Associated Press lookahead story only noted in passing that Pence “has faced questions about whether he should be at the debate at all” — quickly batting those questions aside by writing that Pence “has repeatedly tested negative for the virus, and his staff and doctors insist he does not need to quarantine under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.”

That, by the way, is an awfully credulous way to refer to the public spectacle on Tuesday of the once-vaunted CDC once again being casually abused as a political tool by the White House.

I really hate quoting Bill Kristol, but he got it exactly right:

Pence was literally front row at Ground Zero of the GOP outbreak: the Rose Garden event on Sept. 26 to celebrate the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. That means he was near a super-spreader (who the White House is going to great pains not to let anyone identify) for a prolonged period — not to mention many other possible exposures before, during and after. He should have gone into isolation for at least 14 days after that.

Ryan Bort, writing for Rolling Stone, quoted a number of public health experts who explained that Pence shouldn’t be allowed out of his house yet, not to mention onto a public stage.

Those included Dr. Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona: “It would be grossly negligent to break quarantine to come out for [the debate], especially after such significant exposure. … He sat right in front of somebody for a very significant period of time, and that doesn’t even account for any indoor activities. It would go against public health guidance and all of the recommendations that we’ve been giving the public.”

Bort also quoted Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University: “It’s better to be 12 feet apart than seven feet apart, but at the same time it is completely possible to be infected by inhaling the virus from somebody who is producing respiratory droplets more than six feet away from you. … A lot of it will depend on the size of the room and the ventilation, but really the best thing to do would be not to have an in-person debate at all.”

And consider these tweets from experts I follow on Twitter:

The view that this debate shouldn’t be taking place is hardly a radical one. It’s mainstream, common sense:

People at the New York Times who are allowed to express opinions certainly got it. A Times editorial proclaimed that “under the current circumstances, it would be irresponsible for the show to go on as planned.”

Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote that “the Commission on Presidential Debates, as much as it may want to carry out its usual civic role, has enough evidence now that it cannot put on a safe production, in this pandemic, with candidates in person.”

This, incidentally, is what the Pence people were fighting against — at least until they actually saw it:

The egregious Post story was eventually updated. The new version noted that top Pence staffer Katie Miller — who had mocked Harris for wanting to “use a fortress around herself” — found out hours later that her husband, the notorious Trump adviser Stephen Miller, had been infected.

This is madness. Campaign reporters will lose themselves in the moment, churning out the obligatory he-said-she-said coverage. But that means losing sight of the bigger picture.

Pence being there is a super-spreader event for irresponsibility and, eventually, death.

Feeling guilty about wishing Trump ill? Therapists say it’s a normal reaction to being disempowered

When President Donald Trump tweeted that he tested positive for COVID-19 last week, the internet reacted with a mix of sympathy, shock, and other less savory emotions. The New York Times wished Trump well in the name of American unity. Presidential candidate Joe Biden said he was praying for the “health and safety” of Trump and his family. 

Many others struggled to feel sorry for Trump.

As my Midwestern aunt said: “The Christian in me is struggling; I find it very hard to have sympathy for him.” She said the calculus of sympathy was affected by Trump’s unresponsiveness towards the pandemic and its victims: after months of downplaying the coronavirus — which has taken over 200,000 Americans’ lives, ruined the economy, and left millions of people out of work with minimal federal government relief — the news about Trump’s health, to my aunt and millions of others, appeared to be karmic retribution; or poetic justice; or maybe just what happens when you don’t listen to scientists.

That schadenfreude was, it seems, a common emotion among the public — and also, a rancorous reaction that plagued many with guilt, and sparked discussions over decorum. “There’s something downright poetic about the possibility that — after years of being forced to watch Trump’s every move on TV — we might be getting to watch him die,” Carlos Maza opined on Twitter. Meanwhile, many right-wing pundits and news sites, including Breitbart and the Washington Times, scolded prominent figures who had wished death upon Trump. Twitter itself said it would take down any tweets wishing him death.

Some on Twitter qualified that they don’t wish Trump ill; they merely want him to go away, or suffer the consequences of his actions for once. “I don’t want Donald Trump to die. I want him to go to jail. Get better soon,” wrote author Emma Kennedy. 

Various religious texts, including the Bible, promote forgiveness as a pillar of a healthy human existence. Western culture, which draws heavily on Christian notions of morality, is deeply influenced by this notion of forgiveness. Yet many, clearly, find it hard to forgive those who have deeply wronged or hurt us, whether physically or psychologically. That’s led to complicated public emotions as we watch Trump grapple with a deadly virus while infecting other people around him.

Hence, many are torn between figuring out the “right” or “wrong way” to respond. Yet therapists tell Salon this could be an opportunity for society to have a bigger conversation around emotional health.

“When we talk about emotions we can have multiple emotions at once and all parts can be true,” therapist Amalia Miralrío, LCSW, LMSW, M.Ed, told Salon. “So we can be really happy that he’s sick, and we can also hold this value that we don’t like to wish ill on people — both parts can be true.”

Mel Schwartz, a psychotherapist and author of “The Possibility Principle,” told Salon that “either/or thinking” — meaning when we believe something is either right or wrong, or good or bad and there’s no nuance in between it — can be harmful.

“In Western culture, our minds have been trained to think reality exists in these two separate compartments,” Schwartz said, adding that in therapy he often encourages his clients to reach a point of “authenticity” which involves “complexity.” “Authenticity shouldn’t be confused with the truth, but authenticity is more about my truth, and my truth should be open to reconsideration and reevaluation, and that’s the process I take my clients through.”

Schwartz said he’s had clients who have struggled with their responses to Trump getting sick, to which he self-disclosed his own process around the situation.

“My first instinct was ‘Ah there is a God, how just,'” Schwartz said about when he first learned Trump had the coronavirus. “As heinous as I find [Trump], he was a victim of his father’s emotional and psychological tyranny…. then I tried to get in touch with a higher level of compassion and try to find an underbelly here.”

Schwartz provided an example of how a person could communicate that they are struggling with having sympathy for Trump, and acknowledging the truth of their emotions.

“A part of me feels good and affirmed that he fell prey to this virus, but do I wish him harm? It’s a tough question, I struggle with that, I’d like to say I wish him a recovery because I’d know it would be the right thing or the virtuous thing to do,” Schwartz said. He noted that, from politicians on both sides, we only hear these straightforward “right” responses. “We’re not genuine in our communication, which requires complexity,” he added.

As many experts have pointed out, Trump’s leadership behavior mimics that of an emotional abuser — from gaslighting to name-calling to blame-shifting and lying. In a way, there are parallels between the public grappling with complicated emotions around feeling sorry or not feeling sorry (or feeling both) for Trump, and what survivors of abuse can face.

Miralrío said that a reaction of joyful schadenfreude to Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis could be a way for some to reclaim power in an otherwise powerless relationship dynamic.

“It’s a way of reclaiming that sense of power, a way of feeling like someone who has exerted abuse of power and control over you and when that person suddenly loses some of that, you feel that you are gaining a greater sense of equality in the dynamic,” Miralrío said. “It’s normal to have this emotional response when you are feeling really disempowered in a relationship and feeling that someone is actually trying to harm you.”

Finally, David Grammer, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist said that he doesn’t believe people are responsible for their immediate reactions.

“We have our animal instincts that are like ‘Take him down,'” Grammer said, adding he wasn’t pleased with his own initial response to learning about Trump’s diagnosis. “It’s more about how we overcome those responses. For me it brought up some work around ‘How can I let go of some of my own personal feelings about what he’s done?’ Because beyond voting, I can’t do anything to change his choices and how he’s handled things, so it’s a bit of letting go of what we can’t control.”

Like many US workers, Trump staff has little recourse if asked to work alongside sick colleagues

On Wednesday President Donald Trump’s chief of staff announced that White House staffers who come into contact with the president, who has COVID-19, will wear masks, gowns, gloves and eye gear to protect themselves from getting infected with coronavirus. Still, that puts White House workers in an odd position, as their boss — the most powerful man in the country — is going to work sick. Meanwhile, workers who may have compromising immune conditions or merely don’t wish to put themselves at risk are now expected to feel safe because of a little bit of PPE between them and a coronavirus-ridden boss who eschews mask-wearing.

The labor situation in the White House is not unique, as experts explained to Salon: many workers around the country who don’t have the option of working from home are put in similar situations every day, where they may be expected to show up to work despite having sick colleagues or bosses, and there is little they can do about it. In June, for example, Tesla workers claimed they were fired after choosing to stay home to avoid getting COVID-19, even though they say they had initially been given permission to do so. 

Ironically, the White House staffers who are stuck between a rock and a hard place have their boss to blame, as does the rest of the country. That’s because the president has power to see that labor laws and labor safety regulations that might protect such workers are (or aren’t) enforced, as experts explained to Salon — and this president has done little to make sure that ordinary Americans are similarly protected if their bosses want them to work in conditions that put them at risk of being infected with the novel coronavirus.

“Last summer, Trump ordered the meatpackers back into the meatpacking plants, using a law, while pointedly NOT imposing minimum health and safety standards on the meatpacking employers,” Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon by email. “Many teachers are being pressed back into schools that are risky; waiters and waitresses into indoor dining jobs, public service jobs (in transportation, health care, etc.) without adequate [personal protective equipment] provision[s].”

The case of meatpacking employees may end up being comparable to the situation in the White House. Sharon Block, the Executive Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, explained that workers at meatpacking plants “were told to continue to show up for work even as their coworkers were testing positive in high numbers and even dying.” “As different as these workplaces may seem, the dynamic is similar — especially for the non-partisan staff in the White House, many of whom are people of color who are not highly paid. Because of the failures of the Trump Administration and their political objectives, workers’ health and lives are needlessly being put at risk.”

Catherine Fisk, a professor at University of California, Berkeley Law, noted that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the watchdog agency responsible for enforcing safety standards in the workplace, fined two meatpacking companies that failed to protect their workers after several died of COVID-19. 

So could the White House be fined by OSHA in a similar manner if it does not properly protect its staffers from their infected boss? 

That may not happen because of a catch-22, which Fisk noted. Namely, Trump himself is responsible for enforcing existing laws meant to protect workers from unsafe conditions like those that could lead to them to contracting coronavirus in the workplace. 

“Enforcement of workplace safety laws is notoriously weak, even in the case of employers that do not have the power of the President of the United States,” Fisk wrote to Salon. “Given the way that coronavirus risks have been politicized, it’s not surprising that enforcement agencies such as OSHA may feel themselves powerless to protect West Wing workers from exposure to the virus by the president.”

“Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, employees in the United States have a right to refuse to work when they reasonably fear serious injury or death,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and history at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. “In my view, COVID-19 presents such a threat, especially in a work environment when employees are being asked not to wear protective gear. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has proven time and again that it will not stand up for workers. That’s why workers need new leadership at OSHA and across government.”

Block echoed Sachs’ views.

“I’m sure you are hearing from many labor and employment law experts that the Occupational Health and Safety Act is the primary law that should be protecting workers, like White House staff, from being forced to go to a workplace where they are in danger of being exposed to COVID-19,” Block wrote to Salon. “While it isn’t legal for employers to force workers to expose themselves to serious risks to their health or lives, that protection is dependent on the willingness of the Administration to enforce the law and this Administration has failed to do so.”

Specifically the Occupational Health and Safety Act focuses on protecting workers from contexts in which they might be placed in “imminent danger.” Debbie Berkowitz, the Worker Health & Safety Program Director at the National Employment Law Project, wrote to Salon that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has already decided that it “does not consider exposure to COVID 19 to be an imminent danger.”

The Trump administration has previously seemed to have an inconsistent approach toward applying safety protocols within the White House. Trump himself has previously downplayed the importance of wearing a mask, denigrated other people who do so and refused to wear one himself. As of Tuesday a number of Trump staffers and other people from his inner circle have been diagnosed with COVID-19, including First Lady Melania Trump, campaign manager Bill Stepien, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, senior advisers Stephen Miller and Hope Hicks and various other staffers.

Despite claiming to have only exhibited mild COVID-19 symptoms, Trump was treated during his stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C. from Friday through Monday, to an aggressive medication regimen including the steroid dexamethasone, the antiviral drug remdesivir and an experimental monoclonal antibody treatment called REGN-COV2 from the biotechnology company Regeneron, one that is not yet available to the public — and which his staffers, should they become ill, would be unlikely to be able to access.

Salon spoke with experts earlier this week who agreed that a patient who is prescribed these types of drugs is usually much sicker than the Trump White House has admitted, although it is also possible that the doctors are acting out of an abundance of caution.

Likewise, experts say that, because Trump first reported being sick last week, it is likely that he is still highly infectious.

“When you get exposed, the incubation periods for the virus is about 14 days,” Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, told Salon on Tuesday. “That’s why we have the 14 day quarantine period, the median time it takes to actually show symptoms after being exposed, where the virus has to grow and develop a sufficient concentration to develops symptoms. It’s about four to five days to symptoms onset. So if you’re infected, roughly four to five days from that infection is when you start developing symptoms.”

The bottom line is that, while employers have an ethical and legal responsibility to protect their workers, it is up to the government to make sure those laws are enforced. This applies to everyone from meatpackers and Tesla workers to service staff at the White House.

“Take away children” no “matter how young,” top Justice Department officials instructed: report

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, were a “driving force” behind the Trump administration’s child separation policy despite repeated denials, according to a draft Department of Justice inspector general report obtained by The New York Times.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly denied that there was any policy of separating families at the border, and Sessions claimed in 2018 that the administration “never really intended to do that.” But an investigation by Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that Sessions and Rosenstein directly ordered prosecutors to separate children from their families — no matter how young they were.

“We need to take away children,” Sessions told five U.S. attorneys in 2018 after they expressed they were “deeply concerned” about the welfare of the children, according to participants’ notes. If the parents “care about” their kids, “don’t bring them in,” Sessions went on to say, according to the report.

Rosenstein went even further a week later, telling the same prosecutors that “it did not matter how young the children were” after prosecutors declined to prosecute two cases “simply because the children were barely more than infants,” according to The Times.

Texas U.S. Attorney John Bash, who declined to bring the cases before he was “overruled” by Rosenstein, told staff after the call that “those two cases should not have been declined.”

“Per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,” he wrote.

The report makes it clear that the administration’s denials were false, and Justice Department prosecutors encouraged the separation of children.

“The A.G.’s goal,” Rosenstein told investigators, “was to create a more effective deterrent so that everybody would believe that they had a risk of being prosecuted.”

“It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children into the harsh circumstances that are present when trying to enter the United States illegally,” a Border Patrol official wrote to a Justice Department attorney in 2017.

DOJ officials have also repeatedly claimed that they believed children would be reunited with parents within a matter of hours — not days or months. But the investigation uncovered an internal memo noting that average sentences for adults prosecuted for misdemeanors for crossing the border illegally ranged from three to 14 days.

“We found no evidence, before or after receipt of the memorandum, that D.O.J. leaders sought to expedite the process for completing sentencing in order to facilitate reunification of separated families,” the draft report says, adding that Sessions and top officials “were aware that full implementation of the zero-tolerance policy would result in criminal referrals by D.H.S. of adults who enter the country illegally with children and that the prosecution of these family-unit adults would result in children being separated from families.”

The administration separated thousands of children from their families, sometimes for months at a time, before Trump ended the policy amid worldwide condemnation. Despite ending the policy, the government has still been unable to reunite all of the children years later.

Sessions has tried to distance himself from the policy, allowing Trump and the Department of Homeland Security to shoulder the blame, even though he announced the “zero tolerance” policy himself.

“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” Horowitz’s draft report said.

Sessions refused to be interviewed for the investigation. Rosenstein, who stepped down in May 2019, submitted a 64-page response defending himself.

“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” he said in a statement, according to The Times. “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”

The report details repeated concerns raised by prosecutors over the policy. In one case, prosecutors were alarmed over a secret 2017 pilot program in Texas.

“We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants,” one prosecutor wrote to a superior. “I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.”

The report also found that Border Patrol officers missed serious felony cases, because they were too focused on enforcing the policy. One Texas prosecutor warned Justice Department officials that “sex offenders were released” as a result. U.S. Marshals were also forced to cut back serving warrants in other cases.

Despite pushing for the separations, top Justice Department officials rejected responsibility for tracking the children. 

“I just don’t see that as D.O.J. equity,” Rosenstein wrote.

Despite the report’s findings, the Justice Department still denies that it was responsible for the policy, pointing the finger at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The draft report relied on for this article contains numerous factual errors and inaccuracies,” Justice Department spokeswoman Alexa Vance told The Times. “While D.O.J. is responsible for the prosecutions of defendants, it had no role in tracking or providing custodial care to the children of defendants. Finally, both the timing and misleading content of this leak raise troubling questions about the motivations of those responsible for it.”

Rep. Joyce Beatty, R-Ohio, who sponsored a bill to end the policy, called the administration “heartless” and “cruel” in response to the report.

“This policy to rip children away from their parents was heartless and disgusting. It was also illegal,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, one of the state AGs who sued the administration to stop the policy, said.

“There must be accountability for this,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said. “A deliberate and cold-blooded mass human rights violation.”

Fox News host drowns Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp in bad polls: He “acted irresponsibly”

Fox News host Sandra Smith grilled Trump 2020 campaign senior adviser Mercedes Schlapp over “the irresponsible nature” of how President Donald Trump handled his COVID-19 infection.

Smith began her interview with Schlapp on Wednesday by pointing to a recent CNN poll which found that 63% of Americans believe Trump acted “irresponsibly” after testing positive for COVID-19.

“So many are wondering how the messaging might change coming from the White House, coming from the campaign,” Smith said. “What’s the messaging?”

For her part, Schlapp slammed shutdowns caused by the pandemic and she claimed that the stress on children is “alarming.”

“At the end of the day, the president will share that strong message of we can’t let this dominate us,” she explained. “We cannot surrender like Joe Biden is saying. We have to stay strong, defeat this virus together.”

“A lot of that sounds very similar to the messaging we heard prior to the president’s diagnosis,” Smith observed. “. . . But I just read you off that poll where a majority of respondents said that they believe the president had acted irresponsibly, specifically when it comes to his COVID infection.”

The Fox News host then revealed a second survey question in which 63% of respondents said that it’s “not likely” the president will change his response to COVID-19 following his infection.

“The president is not changing course,” Schlapp insisted. “The president is focused on solving this very difficult global pandemic that’s impacting all of our lives.”

“Don’t you fear that won’t address concerns?” Smith interrupted. “You’re telling me there’s no change in course. These polls are showing people are concerned obviously about the irresponsible nature, as the poll put out, about how he’s handled it. So you don’t see the need, the campaign doesn’t see the need to change course on the messaging?”

“We are all concerned about this global pandemic,” Schlapp shot back. “I just shared with you what my children are going through, where so many children and parents are dealing with the day-in and day-out stress of COVID by keeping our schools closed.”

“I’ll speak to you as a parent, Mercedes,” Smith said, shutting down her guest. “I’m a parent, as well, and we all see the need to buckle down and do what’s right so we don’t have to have another shutdown, so we don’t have to have our kids not go to school.”

“Fingers are still being pointed at that [White House] Rose Garden event, where so many people have now contracted the virus,” the Fox News host added. “We do know that people weren’t properly social distanced and many were not wearing masks there.”

You can watch the video below via Fox News: 

President Trump defies coronavirus quarantine to return to Oval Office for stimulus briefing

President Donald Trump on Wednesday apparently ended his COVID-19 quarantine and returned to work at the Oval Office.

White House deputy communications director Brian Morgenstern told reporters that Trump was being briefed on the status of coronavirus stimulus negotiations and Hurricane Delta.

Trump returning to the Oval Office was first noticed by reporters, who spotted a Marine outside the door, which is seen as a sign Trump is in the office.

“Mark Meadows is with Trump in Oval, and Dan Scavino, per White House. The president came in from the colonnade, which kept him away from West Wing hallways where staff still working,” Bloomberg News’ Jennifer Jacobs reported.

“Trump has gone to the Oval Office, over the objections of aides who wanted him to remain isolated in the residence while recovering from the coronavirus,” New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker reported.

Trump suspended stimulus talks on Tuesday, but then restarted talks with public negotiations on his Twitter account late in the evening. Meanwhile, Hurricane Delta is expected to strike Louisiana on Friday.

Michael Ian Black: Trump’s “anachronistic sense of masculinity . . . is literally killing people”

Masculinity isn’t inherently “toxic.” Yet within the current necessary cultural reckoning about inequality and abuses of power, the complicated issues around what it means to be male right now have been harder to define and discuss. So when Michael Ian Black’s son was preparing to leave for college, the actor, director and author decided to write him a message. The result is new book called “A Better Man: A Mostly Serious Letter to My Son.”

You may know Black more for his roles in the “Wet Hot American Summer” series, “Burning Love,” “Reno 911!” or maybe just his Twitter feed than his gender studies, but it’s his experience as a dad that lends to his credentials.

Black recently appeared on “Salon Talks” to discuss the tragedy that inspired the book, feminism and being “a guy often known for talking about Cabbage Patch Dolls on VH1.” Watch my episode with Black here, or read a Q&A of the conversation below.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written about your family and your experiences with fatherhood before. Now, as your son was turning 18, what made you say, “This is a moment where I want to tell a particular story right now”?

There were a lot of events leading up to it. He was in his senior year of high school. He was going to graduate. He was going to leave home. Like any dad, I was feeling somewhat sad about that, and hopeful about that. Then in the winter of that year, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting happened in Florida.

I’d been paying a lot of attention to gun violence over the last many years since Sandy Hook, which happened when my kids were in elementary school and happened about 10 miles from my house. When Marjory Stoneman Douglas happened, I just started asking the obvious question, which had never really occurred to me before: Why is it boys who are doing this? Not just these big, horrible shootings, but the day-to-day violence that we see so often in our lives. It’s almost always boys. Why?

You say that in the book, it’s always someone’s son, because it’s always a boy. That’s a very humanizing and empathetic way to come into this conversation.

It was hard to look at the faces of all these boys and young men who were committing these crimes, and not see the obvious parallel that I have a son who looks a lot like them. Most of these crimes, the big shootings like that, they’re almost always white. Why? What is going on? I’ve wrestled for years with losing my own dad when I was 12. I never had conversations about manhood with him. I wanted to just give my son something that might be useful for him as he heads out into the world.

You bookend the book with these shootings, which is a powerful choice, because there are so many ways into a conversation about masculinity and manhood and boyhood. I guess it’s because that is also what is now defining Gen Z, in a lot of ways.

These things are becoming a more common. We saw these sorts of shootings happen pre-COVID, on average, once a day. I say in the book, “They’re as common as sunsets,” and they are, in this country. It’s inexplicable in so many ways, and also explicable in so many ways. A lot of it is rooted — in my opinion — in the way we think about boys and men and masculinity. This book isn’t about gun violence, but it definitely relates to it.

You also go into a conversation that’s hard for a lot of us to have, which is about the other side of that. What happens when we use phrases like “toxic masculinity”? What happens when we start demonizing an entire gender? You talk about your own experiences with that growing up. What effect did that have on you, hearing those kinds of messages as a kid, this implication that “male” is bad?

I grew up in a lesbian household. My mom and dad divorced when I was five or six, my mom was involved with another woman. They considered themselves pretty ardent, and at times strident, feminists. That phrase “toxic masculinity” didn’t exist then, but the phrase that did was, “male chauvinist pig.” They loved to describe pretty much all men as male chauvinist pigs, not realizing that between them they were raising three boys in the house, who were hearing this on a daily basis. Its effect was, for me, really corrosive. It made me mistrust men in general, but also kind of mistrust myself a little bit, and mistrust who I was as a boy, and then as a teenager, and young man. The effects of that were really lingering. On the flip side of it, it did force a kind of introspection about gender that I may not have had otherwise. Maybe I was more receptive to thinking about these topics than I might have been without that, but on balance, yeah, it was sh*tty.

It’s not easy to bring up the problems that boys have, that white boys have, that white men have in our culture right now. There’s not a lot of empathy in that regard. I love that you got blurbed by Peggy Orenstein who wrote a beautiful book that takes on a lot of the pressures and the problems, and the mental health issues that boys are facing right now.

An amazing book called “Boys & Sex.” I’ll plug her book. I’m happy to.

You’ve dealt with trolls before, you are not afraid of getting backlash on the internet. But to start that conversation where you say, “How can we have a more empathetic and kinder conversation around gender in general?” what were you thinking going into this?

I was very reluctant to go into it. I really was. Writing a book about this topic happened in a very organic way, and in a quick way, because it started with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. I wrote a Twitter thread about it. Then the New York Times asked me to write an op-ed about it. Then a publisher asked me to write a book about it. It happened very quickly and I was very reluctant to do it for a lot of reasons. One, I didn’t feel like I was qualified. I didn’t feel like I had any business sticking my beak into this particular puddle. I’m not an academic, I’m not a historian. I’m not a gender theorist, but I felt like, you know what? I’m a dad. These things are important to me as a father, and as a man, and maybe I could contribute something just from the perspective of that. Of a kind of run of the mill, boring suburban dad.

But I didn’t want to get on a soapbox. I didn’t want to say that I’m a better dad than anybody, or certainly a better man than anybody. I’m very upfront in the book about my flaws and faults and the ways I struggle. And I worried about being serious. I’m a comedian by trade, and I worried about whether anybody would be receptive to hearing word one from me; a guy often known for talking about Cabbage Patch Dolls on VH1.

So for all those reasons, I was reluctant. I wasn’t afraid of the Twitter trolls. I wasn’t afraid of any of that. I was afraid that I would get enough things wrong, that I would upset the people that I really want to support. I was worried, and continue to be worried, that maybe I’m getting things about women wrong, or that I didn’t include enough — hardly anything about the trans community, about people on sort of all parts of the gender spectrum. But I also didn’t want it to be a kind of catch-all for everybody. It is a letter to my son. There’s a lot that I worried about and a lot that I continue to worry about, but I’m getting more comfortable, having written the book, talking about these things and fully admitting, I don’t know everything. And please tell me where you disagree with me.

Part of the book really is your own reckoning with yourself, with your father, with your own life. In doing that and going back and revisiting your own life, were there things about it that surprised you? Were there things that you then took a second look at it and said, “Oh, wait a minute. Now that I’m this age and I’ve reached this point in my life, I see things really differently”?

I came from a background that had no relationship to the arts or anything like that. I made a career for myself in the arts. I always sort of prided myself, stupidly, on being different because I was off being an actor and whatever. What really got driven home for me, in particular with writing this book, is how I am exactly like so many other men. In some ways, I’m exactly like my dad, who I always thought of myself as so different from. We share the same emotional reticence. We share the same difficulty, sometimes, in communicating who we are, and what we want. We have the same reticence asking for help. These are unfortunate cultural norms for all men. I stupidly thought I had kind of escaped them. I hadn’t. That’s just me. I’m that guy. I may be better at acknowledging it than other guys, but it’s as embedded in my DNA as every other American dude.

When you were starting out, were you going to people you know and saying, “Who do I have to read? What do I have to understand? What is the beginning of this conversation for me, so that then I can have this conversation with my son?”

It was a wild goose chase of ordering things from bookstores, of casting a very wide net in the beginning, and just seeing what was out there. It was surprising to me how little there was, that was written from a kind of everyday perspective about masculinity. Things that weren’t academic, things that weren’t rooted in gender theory, for example, or sociology or history. There just wasn’t. That conversation just wasn’t happening in a kind of mainstream way. I read a lot of the history and the sociology and the gender theory, and loved it.

I feel so indebted to feminism, and I think I’m developing a much better sense of what it means. A richer sense of what it means. When I grew up in a feminist household, it meant something very different and it meant something very abrasive to me. I always thought of myself as a feminist, because it just felt like that’s the right thing to be, you know? But it definitely came with a really hard tinge to it, and a kind of serrated edge that I felt like it was nicking me a lot of the time. And I think, in this broader cultural understanding of what feminism is, that’s still true for a lot of people, which is why so many people reject it, men and women.

The antagonistic labeling that it has.

I think that’s true. Any social movement that’s bucking up against the status quo has to develop that edge, by necessity, because you’re trying to cut away at something. It took me a long time, and I think I’m still wrestling with my relationship with feminism, to feel comfortable inhabiting it in a way that I feel like I do now. But I think for a lot of guys, that word, “feminism” immediately turns them off because it implies that to be a feminist, you therefore have to be feminine, and it doesn’t allow guys to kind of step forward into really looking at what it means. What does it mean to ask for, or to demand equality? They don’t tie that equality to say, the civil rights movement, or to any other movement for equality. Feminism is threatening to a lot of, I think, people who would be otherwise totally sympathetic to it.

You use the scarcity model. If there’s “too much” feminism to go around, there’s an implied scarcity for men. Those ideas about empathy and vulnerability you can find embedded in other books that are about empathy and vulnerability; they’re not really male specific. It becomes very difficult to tease that out of where it is in the conversation.

The books that I found that are written on this subject are generally written by women. For good reason; women are crying out for men to be more empathetic, and to be more vulnerable for very good, pragmatic reasons: first and foremost, their own safety.

Your book is really about kind of the branding issue that we have around masculinity, and feminism. I’m curious now we’re at this moment, where there are aspects of our culture that are really putting the “mask” in masculinity. What have you been watching and noticing during this pandemic, that you want to talk to your son about?

It’s been amazing to watch the top leadership in our government fully embracing everything that I think is wrong about masculinity, spearheaded by the guy at the top. It comes down to this same argument that I talk in my book, about how masculinity is about creating a sense of invulnerability, because to allow yourself to be vulnerable is to demonstrate weakness. And weakness is traditionally antithetical to masculinity. Even when it comes to something as elemental as saving your own life, or saving the lives of people around you, the impulse is to reject the thing that is proven to be helpful in that regard. It’s more masculine to go, “I don’t give a sh*t about this plague” than to go, “I care about myself and my family and the well-being of others.” The fact that those two thoughts should co-exist equally, and that one should be considered more masculine is ludicrous. But we’ve got the guy in charge who so fully inhabits that anachronistic sense of masculinity, that it’s literally killing people. He’s literally killing people. He’s holding these rallies where he’s basically saying, “If you wear a mask, you’re kind of a pussy.” It would be absurd if it wasn’t so tragic.

When you’re looking at these Gen Z kids going to vote in the presidential election this year, what is it about now, your son and your daughter, that gives you hope?

So much. I’m somebody who believes that every generation is the same generation. We label generations, I think somewhat foolishly. Every generation has every kind of person in it.

What I see from kids in my children’s generation is a lot of anxiety first and foremost, for good reason. But also a much greater awareness of the world and their place in the world than I had when I was their age. A lot of them, I think, are showing a tremendous desire to be helpful. Maybe that happens with every generation that the young people are idealists, and want to be helpful. At the very least, I see it with this generation too. I see a lot of good kids. I see a lot of young people who are really trying, and want to be good and are cognizant of the way that the culture is changing around them, and aren’t resisting it as strenuously as maybe people in my generation and older are. Even if they’re not leading the change — and my kids aren’t thought leaders in any way, shape or form — they’re aware of what’s going on. And I think they want to be helpful.

Donald Trump Jr. baselessly accuses Nancy Pelosi of having “substance issues” on “Fox & Friends”

Donald Trump Jr. claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has “substance issues” as he fired back at her for her latest criticism of his father, President Donald Trump. 

During an appearance on Fox News, Trump Jr. was asked to weigh in on Pelosi’s criticism of the president’s decision to abruptly and unilaterally end negotiations for the next stimulus bill. More specifically, the president’s son was asked about his reaction to Pelosi raising concerns about whether or not Trump is mentally capable of making such critical decisions since he is said to be on antiviral medications and steroids due to complications of coronavirus.

According to Trump Jr., Pelosi has “her own substance issues,” although he offered no specific details about the allegation. He continued by echoing more baseless claims repeatedly perpetuated by his father. 

“Nancy has her own substance issues, according to the press and according to the media,” Trump Jr. said. “I won’t get into that. It’s obviously nonsense. The reality is this: Nancy Pelosi was trying to stack literally, probably a trillion dollars of excess nonsense to bailout Democrat cities, to push for cashless bail, to get illegal immigrants stimulus checks as part of that package while the American taxpayer gets to foot the bill for her radical agenda.”

Trump Jr.’s remarks about came less than one day after Pelosi reacted to Trump shutting down stimulus negotiations. During an appearance on ABC’s “The View” Wednesday morning, Pelosi reiterated her concerns. 

“I said yesterday to my colleagues, I said there are those who say that the steroids had an impact on people’s thinking, I don’t know, but there are those health care providers who say that,” Pelosi said. “Also, if you have the coronavirus, it has an impact, as well. So the combination is something that should be viewed.”

She also expressed concern about Trump’s “erratic behavior.”

Pelosi added, “I think it’s true to form. I think that the president has always had erratic behavior. Right now it’s very, very dangerous, because he knows the danger of the virus, but he’s in denial, as he was right from the start. Denial, delay, distortion.”

Her remarks came amid the president’s ongoing tweet storm on Tuesday, contradicting himself more than once. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted and retweeted more than 50 times just between the hours of 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., according to The New York Times. 

In addition to Pelosi, the president lodged attacks on a number of Democratic leaders and lawmakers including Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the journalist Lester Holt.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Department of Justice frees federal prosecutors to take steps that could interfere with elections

The Department of Justice has weakened its long-standing prohibition against interfering in elections, according to two department officials.

Avoiding election interference is the overarching principle of DOJ policy on voting-related crimes. In place since at least 1980, the policy generally bars prosecutors not only from making any announcement about ongoing investigations close to an election but also from taking public steps — such as an arrest or a raid — before a vote is finalized because the publicity could tip the balance of a race.

But according to an email sent Friday by an official in the Public Integrity Section in Washington, now if a U.S. attorney’s office suspects election fraud that involves postal workers or military employees, federal investigators will be allowed to take public investigative steps before the polls close, even if those actions risk affecting the outcome of the election.

The email announced “an exception to the general non-interference with elections policy.” The new exemption, the email stated, applied to instances in which “the integrity of any component of the federal government is implicated by election offenses within the scope of the policy including but not limited to misconduct by federal officials or employees administering an aspect of the voting process through the United States Postal Service, the Department of Defense or any other federal department or agency.”

Specifically citing postal workers and military employees is noteworthy, former DOJ officials said. But the exception is written so broadly that it could cover other types of investigations as well, they said.

Both groups have been falsely singled out, in different ways, by President Donald Trump and his campaign for being involved in voter fraud. Trump has repeatedly attempted to delegitimize ballots sent through the postal service, just as the country experiences increased voting by mail spurred by the coronavirus pandemic. He has also raised the specter that the ballots of military members, among whom he enjoys broad support, might be suppressed.

The DOJ and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Experts who reviewed the revision said they were concerned it could be exploited to help the DOJ bolster Trump’s campaign.

“It’s unusual that they’re carving out this exception,” said Vanita Gupta, the former head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama. “It may be creating a predicate for the Justice Department to make inflated announcements about mail-in vote fraud and the like in the run-up to the election.”

In a break from long-standing practice last month, a U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania publicly announced that the DOJ was investigating whether local elections officials illegally discarded nine mail-in military ballots. Attorney General William Barr personally briefed Trump on the case before it was publicly announced, The Washington Post reported. Trump later cited it as an example to support his claims of widespread mail-in voter fraud, a false assertion Barr has has helped amplify. It’s not clear where the federal probe stands, but Pennsylvania’s top elections official said early indications point to an error, not fraud.

The new policy carveout, Gupta said, could be designed to both justify the widely criticized Pennsylvania announcement and open the door for more such moves in the coming weeks.

Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division, also expressed concern that the department could be encouraging prosecutors to make more public announcements about incomplete investigations, as they did in the Pennsylvania case.

“It alarms me that the DOJ would want to authorize more of the same in and around the election,” he said. “It’s incredibly painful for me to say, but given what we’ve seen recently, Americans shouldn’t trust DOJ announcements right now.”

The Friday email was sent to a group of dozens of prosecutors around the country known as district election officers. They monitor election procedures and take complaints on Election Day from the public about alleged crimes and serve as the federal points of contact for local election officials.

For decades, the work of federal prosecutors has been guided by a strict policy of non-interference in elections.

A 281-page document titled “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses” is the handbook for district election officers. The latest edition, from 2017, warns against launching public investigations, without approval granted for extraordinary cases, into alleged fraud before an election is over.

Such a step, the handbook says, “runs the obvious risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities. It also runs the significant risk of interjecting the investigation itself as an issue, both in the campaign and in the adjudication of any ensuing election contest.”

One current DOJ official told ProPublica that prosecutors have historically been warned not to allow themselves to be dragged into candidate disputes. “That’s what they drill into us: the policy of non-interference and never, ever, ever announce an investigation,” the official said.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Mitch McConnell admits White House has engaged in “risky behaviors” during Fox News interview

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell weighed in on President Donald Trump’s latest antics as he distanced himself from the madness currently taking place at the White House. 

While discussing his plan to move forward with the vote on the Senate floor for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, McConnell offered his take on all that has transpired over the last several days.

When asked if he thought the White House was engaging in risky behavior, the Kentucky lawmaker admitted that he did. However, he also insisted Senate Republications bare none of the blame despite many of them attending the Rose Garden event and other public events without masks or social distancing.

“I do think there have been risky behaviors, but not in the Senate,” McConnell said. “And this nomination is now in the Senate. We know how to handle this. We’ve been dealing with this since May, and we’ll handle it successfully.”

“So you’re saying you think the White House has taken too many risks?” Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked.

“Well, there’s no question that some of the infections occurred elsewhere and not here,” he replied, likely in reference to the Rose Garden superspreader event. He also assured that the Senate would “follow the CDC guidelines and get the job done.”

Although McConnell has vowed that Senate Republicans will follow mitigation guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), history has highlighted the inconsistencies in their efforts to do so. As of Wednesday morning, three Senate Republicans that are in quarantine following positive COVID-19 tests. Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., have all tested positive for COVID-19 over the last week. 

Photos and footage from the Rose Garden event captured Lee and Tillis socializing at the event without masks. Although McConnell is facing multiple COVID challenges as he continues his efforts to move forward with the vote on the Supreme Court nominee, he is still fighting to move forward. 

With so many senators battling coronavirus, McConnell may soon end up disregarding the very CDC guidelines he has vowed to abide by just to move forward with his own agenda.

Martha McSally trails Mark Kelly by double digits in Arizona Senate race: poll

For many years, Arizona was a deep red state that was closely identified with Sen. Barry Goldwater and later, Sen. John McCain. But Arizona has evolved into a swing state in recent years. And if a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Oct. 5 is accurate, Arizona could end up with two Democratic senators in 2021 — and President Donald Trump might lose Arizona’s electoral votes to former Vice President Joe Biden.

According to the poll, incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally is trailing her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, by 11% in Arizona’s 2020 U.S. Senate race. That poll is even worse for McSally than a Times/Siena poll released in September: that one found Kelly ahead by 8%. And if Kelly defeats McSally in November, a Democrat will taking over the U.S. Senate seat once held by Goldwater and later, McCain.

Meanwhile, the Times/Siena poll found Biden ahead by 9% in Arizona in the 2020 presidential race. If Biden wins Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, he would be the first Democrat to win a presidential race in that southwestern state since Bill Clinton in 1996.

The Times/Siena poll follows a USA Today/Suffolk poll that was released on October 2 and found Kelly leading McSally by 9%.

Arizona already has one Democratic U.S. senator: Kyrsten Sinema, who defeated McSally in the 2018 midterms. Sinema took over the seat formerly held by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a hardcore conservative who has been quite critical of Trump at times and has endorsed Biden in the presidential race. And McSally ended up in the Senate in 2019 after Republican Gov. Doug Ducey appointed her to Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat.

The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin, discussing the Times/Siena poll, explains, “The same constituencies lifting Mr. Biden — women, younger people and Latino voters — are also propelling Mr. Kelly. Both Democrats are benefiting from the alienation some more moderate Arizona Republicans feel toward the hardline, Trump-led party.”

Martin also notes that in Arizona, Trump’s “standing with female voters and independents in the state has plunged since his victory four years ago — and significantly, there appears to be far less interest in third-party candidates this year.”

Recently, Trump supporters in Arizona were furious when John McCain’s widow, Republican Cindy McCain, endorsed Biden — which they viewed as another kick in the teeth following Flake’s endorsement of Biden. Cindy McCain, however, has not made an endorsement in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race.

“There’s something wrong”: Pelosi thinks Trump was “medicated” during State of the Union address

President Donald Trump has raised concerns about his medicated state during his coronavirus treatment, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been concerned about his drug use for much longer.

The president returned to the White House after three days at Walter Reed Medical Center, and Pelosi told “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg she’s not going anywhere near Trump to discuss the pandemic relief bill he killed via tweet.

“I wouldn’t go anywhere near the White House,” Pelosi said. “It’s one of the most dangerous places in the country, both in terms of the assault that it makes on truth as well as health.”

Trump has shown possible side effects from the dexamethasone he’s taking for his COVID-19 infection, which has spread through many of his staffers and some Republican senators, but Pelosi said he seemed drugged the last time she saw him in person early this year.

“Last time I had an interaction with the president was the State of the Union address, and then after that, I said to my staff, I said, ‘I think he was medicated, there’s something wrong with how he came on and presented,'” Pelosi said.

Pelosi said so at the time, and said Trump had also seemed to be sedated during the 2019 congressional address, but she said the president — who accused Joe Biden of taking drugs before their debate — didn’t seem to be thinking clearly this week.

“I said yesterday to my colleagues, I said, there are those who say that a steroid has an impact on people’s thinking,” she said. “I don’t know, but there are those health care providers who say that. Also, if you have the coronavirus, it has an impact as well.”

The White House is telling two stories about how often Trump gets tested

President Donald Trump has not been tested daily for the coronavirus, the New York Times reported Tuesday, which raises questions about whether the White House lied about the issue recently in on-the-record emails with reporters.

Citing “two people familiar with the practices,” The Times reported that “the president himself was not tested every day.”

However, Salon had asked senior press staff in an Oct. 2 email whether the White House had stopped testing people close to Trump daily in recent weeks, or whether the president had skipped or lapsed in his daily test routine. White House deputy spokesperson Judd P. Deere responded, “No.”

In other recent emails, administration officials told Salon that Trump was tested “regularly,” but would not specify. Deere did not reply when asked to confirm his denial for this article.

It is still not clear when the president, who was hospitalized with the virus over the weekend, last tested negative. The critical piece of information, which both the White House and the president’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, have declined to provide, would indicate whether Trump had been infected before the first presidential debate last Tuesday, or ahead of a fundraiser he attended Thursday at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club.

Citing an individual familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported that Trump and the first lady had tested negative on a rapid test ahead of the Bedminster trip on Thursday morning. But when Salon asked for confirmation, the White House could not affirm the claim.

Trump first announced his positive test in an early Friday morning tweet. The White House released a memo around the same time in which Conley says he had “received confirmation” that the president and first lady had tested positive for the virus.

However, CBS News later reported that Trump had received a positive rapid-test result earlier that day, which he declined to mention during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. Instead, the president discussed the recent positive diagnosis of top aide Hope Hicks.

“I just heard about this,” Trump told Hannity, even though Hicks had tested positive that morning. The news had reportedly prompted Trump to take a rapid test upon his return from Bedminster, which came back positive and triggered a second PCR test to confirm the results.

The White House has created the public impression that the president is tested daily. In late July, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that Trump was being tested “multiple times a day.” Though Trump disputed the claim later that day, he said, “I do take probably on average a test every two days, three days.”

In early May, Trump told reporters at the White House that he and his inner circle would be tested daily. The announcement came hours after one of Trump’s personal valets tested positive for COVID-19.

A spokesperson for the Cleveland Clinic, which hosted Tuesday’s presidential debate, told Salon that the Trump campaign told it “on the honor system” that the president had tested negative ahead of arrival, but the White House has yet to confirm. The Trump family did not wear masks in the auditorium, and they brushed off a debate staffer when reminded.

The debate came on the heels of a heavily-attended Rose Garden celebration for Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, after which several attendees tested positive for the virus — including several who helped prepare Trump for the debate.

The White House denies that the nomination festivities were a superspreader event.

Since mid-August, the White House has used a new rapid test from Abbott, which claims 97% accuracy based on screening individuals within seven days of first symptoms. Given that Trump first tested positive on Thursday, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Kaiser Health News that the president’s infection “likely happened five or more days ago.”

“If so, then he was widely infectious as early as Tuesday” — the day of the debate — Osterholm said. 

The White House kept Hicks’ diagnosis so mum that even campaign manager Bill Stepien and adviser Chris Christie, who helped prep Trump for the debate in close quarters over the course of several days, did not find out until news reports. Both tested positive, and Christie, who like Trump is obese, announced that he checked in to a hospital on Friday “out of an abundance of caution.”

Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, 76, was also in the prep rooms, and told Salon on Tuesday morning that he had so far not tested positive. Giuliani, who coughed noticeably during a Fox News appearance Monday, added that anyone who wondered if he might have COVID-19 “has become consumed by hate and it’s eating away at them. The Left, the Democrats have let it get out of control.”

“No symptoms of any kind,” Giuliani said. He did not reply to follow-up questions through Wednesday.

“Fox & Friends” host blames Trump for killing stimulus: His tweet “cost people a lot of money”

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade cast blame Wednesday on Donald Trump for killing stimulus talks after the president called off negotiations before bartering with himself on Twitter.

Trump declared Tuesday on Twitter that he had instructed his administration to “stop negotiating until after the election” before tweeting that he would sign bills to extend portions of coronavirus relief immediately.

Trump’s tweet announcing the end of stimulus talks sent the stock market plummeting. The tweet came about an hour after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned Congress that inaction would result in “tragic” consequences, and there was little risk in lawmakers “overdoing it” by pumping more money into the economy.

“For the president to come out with a tweet like that, with the markets still open, just crashed the market and cost people a lot of money,” Kilmeade said on Wednesday’s edition of “Fox & Friends.” “You have 30,000 people who are about to lose their jobs and be furloughed through no fault of their own. The tourism industry — the hospitality industry has been destroyed. If you work in a hotel, you don’t need me to tell you.”

He added that Powell had just warned that failing to provide “more help in the economy would risk weakening the tenuous recovery.”

“I understand negotiating tactics, but not at this point. I actually think the president now has more pressure on him now than he had before his first tweet, because Nancy Pelosi clearly could turn around and say, ‘It’s not my fault. I was having talks,'” he said. “So it looks like the president is the one to blame now. I don’t know how he has leverage.”

The stimulus talks have stretched since May, when House Democrats passed a $3.4 trillion bill, which included aid to cash-strapped cities and states, a second round of $1,200 stimulus checks, billions to save airlines and small businesses and health and education funding, among other measures.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refused to negotiate for months and by late summer pushed for a counterproposal, which included just $1 trillion in spending. Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently upped the offer to $1.6 trillion. House Democrats agreed to compromise, too, passing a $2.2 trillion bill, which included largely the same provisions as the first bill but reduced the length of time the relief programs would be extended.

Talks had restarted in recent days, but Trump shut down them down on Tuesday. The biggest impasse appears to be the funding for cities and states. Trump claimed on Twitter that the funding was a “bailout” to “Democrat states” that is in “no way related to COVID-19,” even though Democratic and Republican governors alike say they need hundreds of billions to cover budget shortfalls caused by the pandemic.

His tweet came shortly after Powell told the National Association of Business Economics that federal inaction would be devastating and urged lawmakers to do more — not less.

“Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy and holding back wage growth,” he said. “By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller.”

Pelosi slammed Trump after the tweet as “an act of desperation” in a letter to House Democrats.

“Today, once again, President Trump showed his true colors: putting himself first at the expense of the country, with the full complicity of the GOP members of Congress,” she wrote.

Some Republicans criticized Trump’s decision, too. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, one of the most vulnerable lawmakers this election cycle, said delaying talks until after the election would be a “huge mistake.” Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., said “we cannot afford” to stop negotiations “with lives at stake.”

But Trump, who is trailing by double-digits in a slew of recent polls, likely has more to lose by killing stimulus talks than anyone with just weeks left until the election. Within hours, he appeared to contradict his own claim that talks would end and demanded that Congress approve stimulus provisions without the much-needed aid to states and cities.

“The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business,” he tweeted. “Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!”

“If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” he added, hours after declaring that there would be no more talks until after the election.

Trump’s bizarre negotiating tactic, which he has used repeatedly with little success, prompted Pelosi to question whether the steroid treatment he had received for his coronavirus infection had impacted “his thinking,” according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

“Economists said Mr. Trump’s decision could set back the recovery by ensuring that millions of unemployed Americans and thousands of struggling small businesses are forced to go months without additional help from the federal government,” The New York Times reported. “That could produce a spiral in which weak demand hurts businesses and leads to bankruptcies and foreclosures, prompting more layoffs.”

“You are pulling the rug out from underneath this economy at a point where we’re still in the infant stages of this recovery,” Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the outlet.

Economists told The Washington Post that Trump’s decision would likely be followed by mass layoffs.

“If there isn’t more stimulus, the recovery is in danger of collapsing,” Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland who has previously supported Trump, told the outlet. “It’s that simple.”

Mnuchin made a similar point during a Senate committee hearing last month.

“We should act quickly because they need the support now,” he said of struggling businesses. “They don’t need the support next year.”

Trump’s incoherent COVID bluster is destroying him — but America continues to suffer

President Trump spent Tuesday night tweeting madly for hours about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and various conspiracy theories about the 2016 election. Twitterati speculated that his experimental drug cocktail and steroid treatment for COVID-19 might be making him manic and grandiose. But how could you tell, really? This is pretty much his normal modus operandi. The only reason one might suspect that his drug treatment was contributing to the burst of energy and wild commentary is that he is a 74-year-old man with co-morbidities who has been seriously ill with a disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. Since he didn’t even make one of his “proof of life” videos on Tuesday, it’s possible someone else was tweeting for him. But in the end the best guess is that Trump was lying in bed with Fox News on as usual, scrolling through his Twitter feed and incoherently venting his spleen — just as he might do on any other Tuesday night.

Sick or high or just having a normal one, it is perfectly understandable that Trump would be melting down in spectacular fashion. His only concern for the last four years has been getting re-elected for four more years, and that’s not going well at all at the moment. This tumultuous last couple of weeks brought him only one piece of good news: the death of a beloved liberal icon, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The insensitive glee with which Trump and his GOP accomplices greeted that event, and their shameless hypocrisy in insisting on filling the seat just weeks before the election, was a true high point for the Republicans this year. I hope they enjoyed their moment, because everything that’s happened to them since then has amounted to an epic train wreck.

While Republicans were still swilling champagne, the New York Times reported out a major exposé based upon Trump’s long-hidden tax returns. It turns out he didn’t bother to pay federal income taxes in most recent years — apparently that’s for the little people. In normal times that would have been a huge scandal, but Trump managed to distract everyone away from that by acting like a deranged barbarian in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, quickly followed by the news that the White House had become a major COVID cluster, with dozens of people diagnosed with the virus, including the president, the first lady, at least three senators and several of Trump’s top aides and campaign officials.

After all that, I think we’ve all been wondering how the American people would react. From the looks of the polling so far, they’re not pleased. In fact, the vast majority seems to believe that Trump and his administration were asking for trouble and they got it.

According to a CNN/SSRS poll released on Monday, 63% said Trump acted irresponsibly in handling the risk of getting the virus and giving it to others. Only 33% said he had done the right thing, which means even some of his own voters aren’t impressed with his actions. And 69% said they couldn’t trust what the White House was saying about Trump’s health. Considering the Soviet-style propaganda campaign they’ve been running at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that’s no surprise.

Election polling is no better for Trump. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Biden up by 14 points nationally, as does a new FPU/Herald poll. CNN/SSRS has Biden up by 16 points. Nate Silver at 538 says getting COVID has hurt him in more ways than one:

The White House is apparently in total chaos, which isn’t really news, but there does seem to be a certain desperation that isn’t always present. This is likely because of Trump’s atrocious messaging to the public over the past few days, in which he’s pretending he has “beaten” the virus with his strength and virility, and telling people to stop letting the virus “dominate” their lives. But there are those who willingly ride along and amplify his message:

The lack of empathy in that comment even makes a Fox News host do a double take. But the attitude reflected there absolutely reflects the ongoing thinking of the Trump administration and Republican officials, even with a major outbreak amid their own ranks. They clearly don’t care that most people can’t get the kind of medical treatment they have available, much less the full-spectrum VIP care the president receives. Those who die, as Trump would say, are obviously losers. They let that virus dominate them.

So too, apparently, are the millions of people still on unemployment, facing eviction, losing health insurance and unable to feed their families. The long delayed second stimulus seemed to be gathering some steam in the last week or so with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin deep in negotiations with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with a couple of major sticking points (help for state and local governments and a $400 weekly stipend on top of unemployment insurance) yet to be hashed out. It was unclear whether they could finally come to terms but any hope for that was dashed when Trump awakened from one of his COVID fevers and tweeted that he was pulling out of all talks for a stimulus and would only resume them if he wins the election. He instructed McConnell to put all of his focus on getting Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Considering that recent polling suggests that 74% of voters want the government to prioritize COVID relief over confirming Barrett, it was bizarre for Trump to take the blame for the collapse of the talks. But perhaps the sickly president was being manipulated:

It sounds to me as if McConnell has given up and just wants to make sure he gets his justice on the court before the whole house of cards collapses.

Someone must have wised the president up to the fact that he had made a massive blunder, because by late Tuesday night he had reversed field and was issuing edicts about stand-alone bills to rescue the airline industry and send $1,200 checks out immediately. Apparently it dawned on him that trying to blackmail people into voting for him might not be the smart move. Maybe someone was able to explain to him that getting money to people before the election could actually be helpful. But who knows?

The fact is that that we have a president in the grips of a serious virus which is known to have serious neurological effects on many people who contract it. He’s also on some strong drugs that can have unpredictable side effects. Even on a good day, Trump never fully understands the governing aspects of his job, nor does he care about anything except how it affects him personally. The country is in the hands of someone who is clearly unable to carry out his duties and he’s making disastrous decisions that affect the lives of tens of millions of people.

In other words, it’s business as usual in Washington.

5 things to know about a COVID vaccine: It won’t be a “magic wand”

President Donald Trump makes no secret he would like a COVID-19 vaccine to be available before the election. But it’s doubtful that will happen and, even after a vaccine wins FDA approval, there would be a long wait before it’s time to declare victory over the virus.

Dozens of vaccine candidates are in various testing stages around the world, with 11 in the last stage of preapproval clinical trials — including four in the U.S. One or more may prove safe and effective and enter the market in the coming months. What then?

Here are five things to consider in making vaccine dreams come true.

1. A vaccine is vital in fighting the virus, but it won’t be a quick pass back to our old lives.

Vaccines have helped rid the world of scourges like smallpox, but the process takes time and there are no guarantees. Until clinical trials have been completed on this first round of vaccine candidates, no one knows how effective they might prove to be.

The minimum requirement by the Food and Drug Administration for any COVID-19 vaccine is that it should at least prove 50% effective when compared with a placebo — that is, a neutral saline solution.

By comparison, the annual influenza vaccine ranges between 40% and 60% effective in preventing the illness, depending on the recipient and the season examined. In contrast, a full course of the measles vaccine is about 97% effective.

“It’s very unlikely that a first-generation vaccine will be something like a measles vaccine,” notes Dr. Amesh Adalja, a physician with expertise in infectious diseases and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

2. After vaccines gain approval, the real-world evaluation ensues.

Vaccines undergo a protracted testing process involving thousands of subjects. They win FDA approval only after they demonstrate safety and meet at least the minimum standard of effectiveness. Monitoring continues after they hit the market; effectiveness and any rare side effects or safety issues become more apparent after millions of doses are given.

Hypothetically, let’s say the first new COVID vaccines prove 70% effective at preventing the disease. That would mean seven of every 10 people who roll up their sleeves will be protected, but three will not.

While that’s good news for those protected, questions remain about who is covered and who is still vulnerable. It’s possible, Adalja said, that the vaccine would reduce the severity of disease in the remaining three people, thereby helping cut hospitalizations and severe side effects.

But it’s also true that regulators are focused on whether a vaccine prevents disease. Some vaccines can keep you from getting sick without preventing infection, in which case you could still spread the virus even without exhibiting symptoms.

Mysteries remain, at least for now. Scientists don’t know how long the protection will last, for instance. Will protection fade, requiring annual shots, as with influenza? Or will it last for years?

Also, the COVID vaccine candidates are being tested only in adults so far. Most vaccine makers have delayed testing among children or pregnant and breastfeeding women, for example. That could mean an initial lag in safety and efficacy data for those groups, complicating vaccination efforts for children or even front-line health care workers, many of whom are women of childbearing age.

For all those reasons — “if you are looking for a magic wand, you won’t find one in vaccines,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. “That said, vaccines will play a substantial role in reducing the epidemic.”

3. After a vaccine is approved, you still may need to wait awhile to get your shot.

Making vaccines is complicated. And so is distributing them. Vaccine makers say they are already producing vaccine in advance of knowing whether they will win approval. But simply having ample vaccine supply doesn’t mean manufacturers will have all the needed glass bottles, syringes or injectors to ship them right away. Indeed, some experts fear that a shortage of both production-line capabilities (special facilities are needed to make vaccines under strict sterile conditions) and limited supplies could hamper distribution of an approved vaccine. Many of the vaccine candidates must be shipped and stored at super-low temperatures, adding to the complexity.

“Even if you have the vaccine, that doesn’t mean you can ship it out. There are multiple, multiple steps, and all of them have to work,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania who has warned of potential shortages.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Academy of Sciences have issued a framework for who should get priority for the initial vaccine. State and local health departments will also have a say in how supplies roll out.

Current recommendations say first in line will be health care workers and people with medical conditions that put them at highest risk if they get the virus. People living in nursing homes and other congregate settings will also be higher on the list. Further down are average healthy adults.

Pay attention, and go when it’s your turn, said Schaffner.

“If they say it’s time for people who are middle-aged and have chronic underlying illness such as diabetes, heart disease and lung disease, you have to know what you have and understand it’s your turn,” he said. “You also have to understand if it’s not your turn yet. Be patient.”

Finally, many of the vaccines under consideration will require two doses spaced a few weeks apart, which would add to the delay. If more than one vaccine is approved, which is likely, people will need the second dose to come from the same manufacturer as the first. That could prove a record-keeping nightmare and lead to more delays — depending on how vaccine supplies hold up.

In testimony before Congress in mid-September, CDC Director Robert Redfield said that tens of millions of doses of vaccine may start to become available by late November or December. But the logistics of vaccine distribution means the country won’t be able to return to “regular life” until “late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” Redfield predicted.

4. So don’t throw out your masks yet.

Because any vaccine is likely to fall short of 100% effectiveness and won’t be in widespread distribution for a while, the use of masks and maintaining social distance will be required well into next year, experts say.

“The vaccine will be a start, but we’ll still need to do the things we’ve been discussing throughout — hand hygiene, wearing masks and continuing to remain specifically distant,” said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an assistant professor of infectious disease at the Medical University of South Carolina. “Those are the arsenal of tools we will need to use.”

5. What if I don’t want to get vaccinated?

Polls show a good percentage of Americans either don’t want a vaccine or want to wait a bit before getting one. Can they be required to get a shot?

Certain employers, such as hospitals or food production plants, could require their workers to be vaccinated, but a federal mandate is highly unlikely and probably would be unconstitutional, said professor Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, an expert on employer and vaccine law at the University of California-Hastings College of Law.

The likely approach of public health authorities is to educate people about the benefits and potential side effects of a vaccine — down to whether one might experience a sore arm.

“That’s what we do for every vaccine,” said Adalja of Johns Hopkins. A requirement of vaccination for the general public would create resistance and “foster conspiracy theories,” he said.

Most regulation of public health falls to state and local governments and health agencies, Reiss said. States would be “more likely to have narrow or specific mandates that could survive judicial review,” she said.

Schools, of course, require students to be vaccinated against a wide range of illnesses. But a school-age COVID vaccine mandate is doubtful, at least in the near term, because the vaccine hasn’t been tested on school-aged children.

Generally speaking, employers, including the federal government, have the power to require vaccinations, especially if they don’t have a unionized workforce with a contract that might limit their power. All employers, however, face limits set by civil rights and disability laws and may have to provide alternatives for people who can’t or won’t get vaccinated, Reiss said.

Donald Trump is the greatest show on TV: Critic James Poniewozik on how it all ends

The Age of Trump is a horrible never-ending story. One page is turned, and another appears. “The End” is nowhere in sight. Although Election Day 2020 is less than a month away, the days and weeks ahead feel interminable.

As a story the Age of Trump is simultaneously drama, comedy and tragedy. In terms of genres, it is a spy thriller (Russia’s control and influence over Trump), a crime story (Trump and his taxes, a political mafia family, vast corruption), dystopian speculative fiction (how could so many horrible things all happen at once?), and a political drama and documentary (how fascism came to America). Donald Trump’s story, unfortunately, is also a distasteful softcore farce (considering the sordid details of his known or alleged affairs).

In the season of death caused by the coronavirus and Trump’s negligent and criminal response, life in the Age of Trump is also a horror movie.

At some point last week Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. On Friday he was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center. The Trump regime, of course, distorts, lies, dissembles, circulates disinformation and refuses to tell the whole truth about Trump’s health and related matters — including just how many people in the White House and Trump’s inner circle have contracted COVID, and how and when the infection began.

As a story, Trump’s personal experience with the coronavirus, and the regime’s reporting on it, resembles a North Korean and/or Russian propaganda film. After what Trump has presented as a miraculous recovery — quite likely a temporary steroid high — he was released from the hospital on Monday. For his cult members and other followers, Trump’s saga of infection and “recovery” makes him even more into a type of Christ figure, or an Übermensch blessed with “good” genes.

In a Monday interview on Fox News, Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp had this to say about Trump: “He obviously has stayed in contact not only with the campaign but also talking directly to the American people in saying, ‘We’re going to get through this. We’re going to defeat this virus. We’re not going to surrender to it like Joe Biden would surrender to this virus.'” She suggested that Donald Trump is “the ultimate fighter.”

Such a narrative is another example of Trump’s fascist allure and power and the threat it poses to American democracy. At the Independent, philosopher Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works,” warns: “In this kind of politics the leader is the nation. The leader is supposed to be strong. They’re just trying to represent that he’s strong and it doesn’t affect him and it won’t affect the nation. [President Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil did the same thing.”

On Monday via Twitter, Stanley elaborated further:

In fascist ideology, the enemy is diseased and weak. The fascist leader is masculine and strong. As Bolsonaro said in March, if he gets Covid, because of his history as an athlete, it won’t be an issue. The enemy — minority groups and political opponents — are weak and diseased.

Don’t be afraid of Covid, says our leader, who has soundly defeated it. It only harms the weak. If you are harmed by it, you were already weak.

Donald Trump, a reality TV star and con man — and now a fascist, white supremacist cult leader — is an amazing story that defies almost all explanation, except in a kakistocracy and pathocracy that has amused itself to death.

Ultimately, TrumpWorld is very real. Unfortunately, the American people are trapped in it, with no obvious way to escape. Perhaps even more worrisome, many of them do not want to.

In this story, what type of character is Donald Trump? How does he imagine his role? How did Donald Trump master the new rules of television and the media in the 21st century to gain so much power? As Election Day finally approaches — with an unknown outcome and the real possibility that Trump will use legal and illegal means to steal the election — what would be the perfect ending for Donald Trump the character, and his bizarre epic story?

In an effort to answer these questions I spoke with James Poniewozik. Once a writer for Salon, he is now chief television critic at the New York Times and author of the new book “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.”

You can also listen to my conversation with James Poniewozik on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

Does Donald Trump really exist?

Part of my premise is that Donald Trump is not a person. Donald Trump as we know him and as he matters to us is really more a mediated character and performance. The performance has evolved over time in response to the rewards he has received being a celebrity. If the real Donald Trump does exist, I am not sure that he even knows who he is anymore.

What happens when the person playing the character is lost in their performance?  

There is a danger for someone with power and responsibility over others — in this case a whole country — that once you reach that point a person can lose their core self. A person is just a persona and they know what to do in response to certain expectations and stimulation. Your behavior is dictated by how you have been received by others and the reactions that your behavior engenders in others. Certainly, that performance can be brilliant in show business. In a way, it can be very effective in politics. But governing a country involves making decisions that have to do with much more serious matters than how you are perceived and the impressions you are making on other people.

For better or for worse, Donald Trump was the most entertaining thing on television during the 2016 campaign. In many ways, that remains true even at the end of his first term. Trump is a product of an American culture of spectacle and distraction. That is the foundation of his power.

The metaphor that I like to use for Trump running for president in this media era was like Julius Caesar taking power in Rome. Trump spent his entire career mastering the weapons which are used for combat in the television era. Trump did this as a tabloid figure. He’s done it as a reality TV figure. He has done it across various arenas, and so much of it was directly translatable to politics. Trump’s skill in the arena of this media age goes beyond his message to any particular segment of the electorate.

How do you assess Trump as a performer?

He’s not a good actor in the sense that a film actor is. There’s an essential difference between what a film actor does and what a reality TV performer does. When you play yourself as a character in reality TV what you are doing is being yourself but louder, presenting an exaggerated version of yourself. As far as acting — a skill that requires empathy and basically imagining that other people are real — you can see Trump’s shortcomings whenever he has to visit the site of a tragedy or read off a teleprompter.

What Donald Trump does works pretty well for his particular style of political performance. For him, much of his message is about life as a zero-sum competition, conflict, winning and the idea that for you to get something, somebody else has to lose something. Trump’s brand is based on those values.

Trump also has a great off-the-cuff, pugilistic sense of verbal combat. He is very good at throwing up a lot of dust and keeping people off balance. That has worked very well with the kind of persona that Trump was presenting as candidate and then as president. It is not necessarily a kind of performance that might have worked well for another person or a politician with a different message.

What is beguiling or compelling about Trump as a character for his supporters? I find him to be a repugnant human being, but he is infinitely watchable. I also believe he is a more sophisticated performer than people give him credit for.

For those who love him as president, he is someone who fights. That goes beyond policy. Trump seeks to inflame conflict rather than smooth it over. In a political debate there are always at least two messages going on: One is the text of what you’re saying and one is this meta-narrative of, “In the way that I debate, here’s how I’m going to champion you as president.”

Among people who hate Donald Trump — and obviously there are myriad political reasons that people hate him — I think part of the heart of it is that he is a culture warrior instinctually. Beyond the strategic embrace of certain public policy issues, he has a sense for locating exposed nerves and jabbing at them, inciting conflict in a way in which it will leave the most bad feelings after it’s finished.

What happens to truth and people’s understanding of reality when they have to confront a person such as Trump, who is so skilled in terms of being a performer and a professional liar?

All the places where Trump has thrived have been fields where there is a thin boundary between fact and fiction. This is true of the New York tabloids, professional wrestling, reality TV and now being president of the United States. Trump has created a type of permission structure which dispenses with the idea of verifiable, objective reality and just takes cues from the people that you have loyalty to. Authoritarian leaders like Trump cultivate a following by nurturing the idea that everyone is lying and the truth is always fuzzy.  

What fantasies does Trump represent for the viewer, his public?

The fantasy of Trump has evolved from the 1980s to Trump as a presidential candidate.

The proto-Trump of the Reagan era was the fantasy of the lottery winner. He was somebody who intuited very early on that it was more important to look like a very successful businessman than to actually be the most successful businessman. Trump understood how to leverage appearance, which in turn allowed him to build a brand. The easiest way to accomplish that is with cartoon symbolism, a tower with your name on it in three-foot tall golden letters or a helicopter with your name on the side.

It’s a combination of that cartoonish fantasy of prosperity combined with the notion that — this is where the lottery-winner aspect enters in — that you don’t need to change to be this way. This is part of what allows him to cultivate the blue-collar billionaire notion, and for Sean Hannity to push it later. Because this lottery-winner performance also allows people to imagine themselves as a rich person, not beholden to the proprieties of gatekeepers, not having to change yourself or your tastes or your likes. 

Every iteration of Trump as a pop-culture character involves a notion of fighting and conflict and grievance. Those two elements were the form of Trump that ran for president and won.

How would you explain or track Donald Trump’s career, relative to broader changes in the terrain of the American news media?

My book is basically a parallel story about the character of Donald Trump over the decades and the media that he evolved in sync with. The journey of the American media from when Trump was beginning his public career, basically around 1980, until he ran for president is also the journey from the mass media of the mid-20th century to the fragmented media of the 21st century.

When Trump started, if you put something on television it had to appeal to tens of millions of people. There was a big-tent strategy of programming. You had to tailor things to a broader audience. As cable developed, as the internet developed, the outcome was more outlets and more targeted programming. There were increasing rewards for more polarizing programming, whether it’s entertainment or news, fiction or nonfiction. And that produces all sorts of things, be it provocative sensationalistic reality TV or be it Fox News and political talk radio.

This is a story of the media becoming a space where somebody as belligerent and pugnacious and outrageous as Donald Trump can successfully build a career and then become a political leader and run for president and win.

Would Donald Trump even be president if there had been a Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow who successfully confronted him during his first campaign? A public figure in the news media who was viewed with respect and trusted by the American public?

I do not believe so. It’s not just that we no longer have a Murrow, it is that we no longer have Murrow’s audience. There is no collective audience in America that is willing to accept that there are agreed-on facts and arbiters of truth. I do not believe that one could have someone go directly from hosting a TV program, like Trump did, to then becoming president of the United States until you had a media environment where politics was basically a form of entertainment combat that was carried out through the media.

Somebody like Trump, with his sense of showmanship and flimflam and exaggeration, could have had a successful business career in another era. P.T. Barnum existed long before television. But something significant had to change in media, and therefore in American political culture, before somebody like Donald Trump has got a serious shot at the presidency.

The Age of Trump is a perpetual cliffhanger. There is never any closure to the story, just one scandal and crisis after another. There is no emotional release and closure. The story never ends. What does that do to the American people?

It is exhausting. People are frazzled. It is not just all the horrible things that are happening, but that everything keeps accelerating without any release. There is nothing but a buildup of tension. This moment with Trump as president is like the difference between watching a blockbuster movie and watching a trailer for a movie. Trailers are not necessarily narrative — they just need to communicate that if you go to this movie you will be excited all the time.

Living in a movie trailer constantly, for the length of a movie, is really exhausting for most people. That may not be true for Donald Trump, however, which may be one reason that he is so well-suited for this era. I honestly believe that there is something about Donald Trump where he feels that conflict and agitation are the best and most productive state of mankind.

What genre is the Age of Trump? Is it comedy, tragedy, drama or something else?

A kind of thriller where horror is combined with farce.

How would you write the end of the Age of Trump? If you were crafting the story, what would the resolution to the story and the main character be?

I feel like the truest story for the character Donald Trump is for him never to be defeated in his mind. That is Trump’s narrative. As a character in the story, he will never acknowledge getting his comeuppance, disgrace, failure or punishment. He is not capable of acknowledging it. The end of the story that is the Age of Trump, whether it is Donald Trump actually victorious or Donald Trump utterly disgraced and a disparaged figure in history, is him with his arms raised in victory — because that is the way he sees himself.

I keep thinking about “The Sopranos,” and Tony Soprano tripping on peyote during the final season. Tony has killed his nephew, Christopher, and he is saying, “I get it! I get it!” In Tony’s mind he is at one with the universe and doing the right thing. Tony Soprano, like Donald Trump, is not capable of seeing himself otherwise.

Will the end of the Age of Trump be as subjective as the end of “The Sopranos”?

I do not think the screen will cut to black. There is not going to be a question of what ultimately happens with Donald Trump. But no matter what, there is not going to be consensus on whether Trump was victorious or defeated, whether he got his just deserts or whether he was robbed, whether he was a hero or a villain. No amount of evidence is going to create consensus on anything about Donald Trump. With “The Sopranos,” people are still arguing about what happened to Tony at the end of the series. It doesn’t matter what the definitive explanation is. For Donald Trump and Tony Soprano, there is going to be an argument no matter what happens at the end.

Can Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis change his anti-science attitude?

Well, it happened. After months of downplaying COVID-19 (“It’s like a miracle, it will disappear!”) and repeatedly refusing to wear masks at public events, President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have tested positive for the coronavirus.

The implications of this news include more than a mere “I told you so.” Trump has fallen ill with a potentially deadly virus just weeks before Election Day, and in the midst of a global pandemic, record-breaking wildfire and hurricane seasons, and a growing national reckoning with racial violence.

The president’s diagnosis has also laid bare a rift in his persistent anti-science strategy of deny, deny, deny: It’s a lot harder to ignore a crisis — be it the severity of COVID-19 or the catastrophic dangers of climate change — when reality slaps you in the face.

We asked three Grist reporters whether they think Trump might start taking these science-backed threats more seriously after personally experiencing one of them firsthand.

Denial hits home

It’s hard to imagine a version of Trump that doesn’t lean so heavily on denial. He’s repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and compared COVID-19 to a “bad flu season.” He denies institutional and political norms, indicating he might refuse to accept the outcome of the November election, and he’s baselessly sown doubt over the voting process.

But denying something doesn’t mean it can’t come back and bite you. After years of ignoring climate change, Trump suddenly found himself forced to answer questions about the overheating planet during Tuesday’s Democratic debate; he was unable to deflect or rely on his usual talking points, making it one of the sanest moments in an otherwise hellish evening.

When I first heard about Trump’s positive test, I wondered if the illness would change the president’s response to the coronavirus crisis. After all, Boris Johnson — the conservative prime minister of Britain who has drawn frequent comparisons to Trump — contracted COVID-19 in March and spent three nights in the ICU. After he was released, Johnson’s approach to COVID-19 changed; he adopted a more sober tone when addressing the country and maintained strict lockdowns across the U.K. Then again, when Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, developed COVID-19 in July, his relatively mild case only entrenched his stance that the virus was nothing to worry about.

Personal experience can change minds. We’ve seen this with climate change: As the country is bombarded by wildfires, hurricanes, and record-breaking heat waves, more and more Americans have come to believe that global warming is happening. Last month, when the West was on fire and the skies had turned orange, I talked to several Americans who felt they were witnessing climate change happening in real time.

But worldviews are sticky; it can take more than a bout of illness or even a catastrophic wildfire to make someone give up a deeply held belief. Trump has indicated over and over that he would prefer to minimize the devastating death tolls from COVID-19 and the damage wreaked by climate change. If his case of COVID-19 is mild, he may very well return to his old, flippant attitude. For the millions of Americans who have already lost friends and family members to the disease — and the millions more who will suffer if global warming continues unabated — that’s no comfort at all.

— Shannon Osaka

The luxury of denial

President Trump has promoted both climate and COVID-19 denial. He organized rallies for his reelection campaign at indoor venues with few masks in sight. On Thursday, he held a fundraiser at his golf club in New Jersey despite knowing that Hope Hicks, a senior advisor, had recently tested positive for the virus.

Trump’s past behavior — and now, his high-quality treatment options — speaks to the enormous amount of privilege he possesses. Unlike the Black and Latino Americans who have disproportionately been hospitalized and have disproportionately died from COVID-19 this year, the president has access to the nation’s best doctors and expensive treatments. He was transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday afternoon, and he’s already received an experimental antibody treatment called Regeneron. Trump has had the resources to bankroll his reckless choices, with access to regular testing, multiple properties tailor-made for social distancing, and high-quality healthcare.

The lines of people wearing masks waiting for treatment outside of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York, which was for a time the worst-hit borough in the worst-hit city in the world, made headlines earlier this year. Black and brown New Yorkers from neighborhoods with higher rates of air pollution were more likely to die from the virus. Unlike the President, these New Yorkers didn’t have access to regular testing. And many of them were essential workers who didn’t have the option to hunker down and work from home during lockdowns.

Puerto Rico, the island colony Trump considered “selling” after Hurricane Maria destroyed it, has experienced almost 50,000 cases and more than 670 deaths from COVID-19. With its infrastructure still fragile after the devastating 2017 hurricane season, Puerto Rico has faced a series of earthquakes, water shortages and rationing (thanks to climate change–induced droughts), and a record-breaking hurricane season this year. For the more than 40 percent of Puerto Ricans living in poverty, it’s not possible to leave when there’s no running water or when COVID-19 cases spike nearby.

Puerto Rico and “inner city” neighborhoods in New York City did not have the option to pretend that COVID-19 wasn’t a real threat, just as they don’t have the option to pretend that climate change and pollution aren’t real threats. The virus just showed up, and now there will be empty seats at kitchen tables, empty spaces on the front stoop, and empty pews in our places of worship.

— Angely Mercado

There’s no denying change

When you think about how every mundane activity — getting to work, eating breakfast, taking a shower, charging your cell phone — contributes to the warming of the atmosphere and the slow demise of a habitable planet, it quickly becomes preferable to avoid thinking about it ever again. How can you live when every action you take might inflict harm?

Living with COVID-19 requires accepting a similarly unthinkable truth: Every interaction with another human has the potential to kill you or them. Of course that’s hard to stomach! It changes your daily life, your relationships, your connection with the world!

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are both massive collective problems that require you to change how you consider the world. You can’t just think about yourself anymore; you have to think about the wellbeing of immunocompromised people or future generations or the elderly or people living in Bangladesh or the person serving your coffee who would very much like you to pull your mask over your nose. You are asked to sacrifice comfort for the greater good.

I think you will find some heavy overlap between the people who flaunt their 8-mile-per-gallon trucks while the entire West burns and the people who gallop through the aisles of Target, screaming at other customers to take off their masks, while some family somewhere observes the 200,000th COVID-19 funeral. They’re in denial that the way of life that brings them comfort has consequences for others, and furthermore, that it’s approaching extinction.

Donald Trump has made his entire presidential career, such that it is, on promising that no one will ever have to change. He celebrates an outdated, irrelevant, thoroughly solipsistic worldview that is appealing to enough people that it might secure him another four years in office. He has made a career of celebrating selfishness, and now he has COVID-19.

— Eve Andrews

The stars may be aligned for Trump to be prosecuted

To say that the US doesn’t have a great record of holding its elites accountable would be a gross understatement. So while former prosecutors and other legal experts have argued that Donald Trump faces significant criminal liability once he’s out of office, those analyses have been greeted with quite a bit of skepticism. People with Trump’s connections and resources are hardly ever punished so it’s understandable, especially given Joe Biden’s consistent promise to try to “heal” a fractured nation.

But Trump isn’t a typical member of America’s ruling class, and while a 75-year-old former president with the means to afford a team of high-power lawyers may not ever actually face the inside of a prison cell, there’s a better chance that he will be convicted after he leaves office than some people believe.

Ideally, if Biden wins the presidency, he would appoint a Special Counsel staffed entirely with Republicans to investigate crimes Trump is alleged to have committed in office. Biden’s administration would emphasize that holding Trump accountable is something Republicans need to do for the good of their party as well as the country and promise that they would have full autonomy from the White House and the DOJ to pursue the facts wherever they may lead.

But there’s good reason to think that’s unlikely, given that Democrats tend to be wary of “criminalizing” politics and would see going after a polarizing former president as setting a dangerous precedent. So Trump will probably never face federal charges for obstructing justice, coordinating with foreign powers to undermine the 2016 election, violating campaign finance laws or other offences related to his presidency. If history is any guide, he certainly won’t be held accountable for any human rights violations committed on his watch either at home or abroad.

State-level prosecutions for financial crimes are another matter entirely. The Manhattan DA, Cy Vance, filed a motion recently which implied that his office was pursuing charges that may include tax evasion and banking and insurance fraud. Meanwhile, on Monday, after dodging a subpoena for weeks, Eric Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment rights rather than testify in a separate probe of Trump’s businesses by New York State AG Tish James. There may be similar investigations underway in other states where The Trump Organization does business.

The crimes Trump is suspected of committing are easy-to-explain acts of fraud. He allegedly manipulated the values of his properties to defraud the IRS, banks and insurance companies. Those very crimes helped make the Trump family’s fortunes; as The New York Times reported in 2018, Donald Trump was earning $200,000 per year from his father’s tax fraud scheme as a 3-year-old and was a tax fraud millionaire by age 8.

Experts say that these kinds of offenses tend to be red-flags for money laundering, and there are a lot of questions about why Trump, who had previously done business with other people’s money, suddenly went on a buying spree acquiring money-losing properties with cash several years back.

When powerful people do face consequences for violating the law, these are exactly the kind of tawdry financial crimes that often bring them down.

More importantly, state and local prosecutors in blue states would have powerful incentives to prosecute Trump. There are two reasons why our political elites often enjoy impunity. First, prosecutors guard their winning percentage, and people who can afford to drop millions on their defenses are more likely to be acquitted. Second, they tend to be well-connected. In many cases, they are reliable political donors.

But we should be as cynical about prosecutorial decisions as we are about the impunity that American elites typically enjoy. After four years of attacking blue states, Trump doesn’t have a lot of friends in high places in states like New York or California. Prosecuting a historically unpopular authoritarian like Trump would be a career-making move in those states. It would make a prosecutor into an overnight star among their constituents and put their name on the national map. Professional ambition is probably the best reason to think that Trump may end up being the rare powerful political figure who pays a price for tax evasion and fraud.

While this isn’t a prediction, the stars may align for the Trump Crime Family to see some “law and order” up close, from the other side of the system.

 

Progressives rage at “megalomaniac dime store dictator” Trump for ditching COVID relief talks

While still battling COVID-19 himself, President Trump on Tuesday provoked fierce condemnation by announcing that the White House will no longer negotiate with Democratic congressional leaders on another coronavirus relief package — even though millions of Americans remain jobless, hungry and at risk of eviction.

In a series of tweets, Trump accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — whose chamber passed one relief measure in May and another last week that were both rejected by Senate Republicans and the White House — of “not negotiating in good faith.” Trump also claimed he will win the November election against Democratic nominee Joe Biden and then “immediately” work to pass a “major” stimulus bill.

Despite polling that shows three-quarters of Americans want lawmakers to prioritize pandemic relief, Trump also directed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to focus on confirming Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s controversial right-wing nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was among those who responded to Trump on Twitter, asserting that the president and GOP are pursuing an “anti-everybody agenda” while attempting to push through a Supreme Court nominee whose positions could jeopardize health care for millions of people nationwide:

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also took to Twitter to call out Trump and the Republicans. Tying the move to the general election — for which early voting has already begun — she said, “The only logical response to this fuckery, is to vote them out.”

Princeton University professor, writer and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor declared: “We need more than an election; we need a revolution.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned that insufficient stimulus action from the federal government “would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses.”

Pelosi, who noted Powell’s remarks in her statement responding to the news, said that “today, once again, President Trump showed his true colors: putting himself first at the expense of the country, with the full complicity of the GOP Members of Congress.”

In walking away, Pelosi said, “he shows his contempt for science, his disdain for our heroes — in healthcare, first responders, sanitation, transportation, food workers, teachers, teachers, teachers and others — and he refuses to put money in workers’ pockets, unless his name is printed on the check.”

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., the top House member on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, warned in a statement responding to Trump on Tuesday that the president’s decision imperils economic recovery from the crisis.

“President Trump’s stunning reversal on stimulus negotiations could not have come at a worse time,” Beyer said. “His tweets justifying this erratic about-face misstated Democrats’ compromise position, formalized in recently passed legislation, by hundreds of billions of dollars, showing he is either unaware of what is happening with negotiations or deliberately trying to mislead the country.”

“The U.S. economy needs this deal, and last month’s alarming jobs report shows how urgent that need is. Tens of millions of unemployed workers, millions of public sector jobs, and vast numbers of small businesses are on the edge of disaster,” he added. “Walking away from talks means walking away from protecting schools, walking away from a strong pandemic response, and walking away from American families that need help now. It is hard to comprehend such an irrational, reckless, and destructive act.”

Main Street Alliance executive director Amanda Ballantyne said that “for Trump to stop negotiations on urgently needed relief, stating he will only resume negotiations after he ‘wins’ the election shows callous disregard for millions of Americans suffering extreme financial hardship. The president appears willing to take the economy down with him if he fails, at this point.

“Small businesses have waited far too long for needed relief, and the consequences of delay have meant hundreds of thousands of closures impacting the labor market and economy,” she continued, urging lawmakers to defy Trump. “This is no time for political brinksmanship. Senate Republicans must come to the table and take action.”

Washington Post White House economics reporter Jeff Stein detailed some of the anticipated consequences of the Senate GOP obeying Trump in a pair of tweets:

According to Stein, White House economic adviser Stephen Moore said of Trump’s decision to ditch relief talks: “From a political and a policy standpoint, this was a shrewd move. … A deal on the Pelosi plan would have completely divided the Republican Party on the eve of the election.”

Noting the mounting U.S. death toll from the pandemic, Greenpeace USA program director Lindsey Allen accused the president of “playing games with the health and safety of millions of Americans” and said “his decision to postpone a stimulus that would help working families across the country will no doubt lead to more suffering.”

“It is unconscionable to do anything other than fast-track the HEROES Act, which would provide critical relief but has been stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate for months,” Allen said of the House-approved measure. “Trump knows he is losing support as Election Day draws near, so he’s doing everything in his power to threaten our confidence in democracy through deception and disruption.”

“His lies about election fraud and chaos are designed to discourage voting and encourage right-wing violence,” she added. “But the people elect the president and if the people vote Trump out, he will go. We must count every vote — no matter how long it takes — because every vote counts.”

Trump’s tweets are now making people question his mental health — here’s what seems to be going on

As President Donald Trump continues the struggle to recover from his case of COVID-19, he sent entirely mixed messages on Tuesday that left some questioning whether he retained full control of his faculties.

First, as I reported earlier, Trump torpedoed negotiations with congressional Democrats over a potential stimulus bill on Tuesday afternoon, saying that he would wait until after the election until trying again. This was, as I argued, a major blow to his own hopes for re-election, but the move itself could be coherently explained on ideological or tactical grounds, even if they’re not compelling or persuasive.

But just a few hours later, he seemed to completely reverse himself in a one-word tweet:

Here’s the big problem with this tweet: Trump had just rejected Congress’s efforts to provide help to the economy that Fed Chair Jerome Powell is advocating in the tweet that he is calling “True!” Not only that, he’s rejecting the congressional help for precisely the reasons Powell said — in that very tweet — that we shouldn’t be concerned with. Trump blasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for asking for too much money. But that’s exactly what Powell says shouldn’t matter — “there’s a low risk of ‘overdoing it,'” as the tweet said.

People responded to the one-word Trump tweet with bafflement and dismay about the president’s mental condition.

It’s easy to make jokes about, but it’s actually not funny at all and is genuinely concerning. The president is still battling COVID-19, a brutal infection that can take a serious toll on the mind and body. This along has led to some to suggest he cede power to Vice President Mike Pence until he is out of the woods. On top of that, the president is taking a group of drugs to treat his disease, including a steroid that has potential effects mood. Again, we don’t want to be glib about this. It’s very serious, and the president shouldn’t be accused of mental instability easily or out of pure partisan sniping. But it was hard to make sense of the president’s incongruous opinions on the highly significant matter before him: potentially trillions of dollars of economic recovery funds.

Hayes Brown of BuzzFeed suggested that Trump’s point could make sense if you “remember that Trump was always pushing the GOP to spend more. It wasn’t about the bill being too big, it was that he didn’t want money spent anywhere that it might help Democrats, like in big cities or blue states.” And that interpretation was bolstered by a subsequent tweet, sent about forty minutes later:

Even so, the explanation still doesn’t make much sense. Even on this reading, Trump clearly didn’t get Powell’s point, which is that we should be willing to spend a lot of money to support the economy and that the costs of delay or insufficient spending are worse than the possibility of waste. And this interpretation doesn’t completely erase concerns about his mental condition, because he genuinely seems unable or unwilling to grasp Powell’s point. But this may just reflect Trump’s more typical, if still deeply concerning, way of processing and conveying information.

Brandon Wall, also of BuzzFeed news, agreed with Brown’s reading, saying: “Yes, I reckon this is the answer to everyone’s confusion. I’m not saying it makes sense to so publicly nuke stimulus talks right before an election, but this is the thought process, erratic as it may be.”

Another possibility, suggested by Chris Hayes, is that Trump may not be sending these tweets. Or perhaps he sent the “True!” tweet but not the other. That may be possible, and may explain the apparently disordered thinking, but it raises yet another terrifying possibility: Why are conflicting messages coming from the president’s tweets? Foreign leaders read these tweets, and sometime the president issues military commands from Twitter. There should be no ambiguity about who is speaking from his account.

Trump’s COVID: Empathy for the world’s least empathetic person?

For about a minute today I found myself feeling sorry for Donald Trump. The poor man is now “battling” Covid-19 (the pugilistic verb is showing up all over the news). He’s in the hospital. He’s out-of-shape. He’s 74-years old. His chief of staff calls his symptoms “very concerning.”

Joe Biden is praying for him. Kamala Harris sends him heartfelt wishes. President Obama reminds us we’re all in this together and we want to make sure everyone is healthy.

But hold on: Why should we feel empathy for one of the world’s least empathetic people?

Out of respect. He’s a human being. And he’s our president.

Yet there’s an asymmetry here. While the Biden campaign has taken down all negative television advertising, the Trump campaign’s negative ads continue non-stop. 

And at almost the same time that Biden, Harris, and Obama offered prayers and consoling words, the Trump campaign blasted “Lyin’ Obama and Phony Kamala Harris” and charged that “Sleepy Joe isn’t fit to be YOUR President.”

Can you imagine if Biden had contracted Covid rather than Trump? Trump would be all over him. He’d attack Biden as weak, feeble, and old. He’d mock Biden’s mask-wearing – “See, masks don’t work!” – and lampoon his unwillingness to hold live rallies: “Guess he got Covid in his basement!”

How can we even be sure Trump has the disease? He’s lied about everything else. Maybe he’ll reappear in a day or two, refreshed and relaxed, saying “Covid is no big deal.” He’ll claim he took hydroxychloroquine, and it cured him. He’ll boast that he won the “battle” with Covid because he’s strong and powerful.

Meanwhile, his “battle” has distracted the nation from revelations that he’s a tax cheat who paid only $750 in taxes his first year in office, and barely anything for fifteen years before that; and that he’s a failed businessman who’s still losing money.

And from his vicious, cringeworthy debate performance last week, in which he didn’t want to condemn white supremacists.

It even takes our mind off the major reason Covid is out of control in America: because Trump blew it. 

He downplayed it, pushed responsibility onto governors, and then demanded they allow businesses to reopen – too early – in order to make the economy look good before the election. 

He has muzzled and disputed experts at the CDC, promoted crank cures, held maskless campaign events, and encouraged followers not to wear masks. All of this has contributed to tens of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.

Trump’s “battle” with Covid also diverts attention from his and Mitch McConnell’s perversions of American democracy.

This is where the asymmetry runs deeper. McConnell is now moving to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, after having prevented Obama’s nominee from getting a Senate vote for almost a year on the basis of a concocted “rule” that the next president should decide.

Yet Biden won’t talk about increasing the size of the court in order to balance it, and Democratic leaders have shot down the idea.

Nor do Biden and top Democrats want to suggest making Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico into states – a step that would remedy the bizarre inequities in the Senate where a bare majority of Republicans representing 11 million fewer Americans than their Democratic counterparts are able to confirm a Supreme Court justice. 

It would also help rebalance the Electoral College, which made Trump president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by more than 3 million.

Democrats worry this would strike the public as unfair. 

Unfair, when Trump won’t even commit to a peaceful transition of power and refuses to be bound by the results? 

When he’s already claiming the election is rigged against him and will be fraudulent unless he wins? 

When he’s now readying slates of Trump electors to be certified in states he’ll allege he lost because of fraud? When he’s urging his followers to intimidate Biden voters at the polls?

Whether responding to Trump’s hospitalization this weekend or to Trump’s larger political maneuvers, Democrats want to act decently and fairly. They want to protect democratic norms, values, and institutions. 

This is admirable. It’s also what Democrats say they stand for.

But the other side isn’t playing the same game. Trump and his enablers will do anything to retain and enlarge their power.

It’s possible to be sympathetic toward Trump during his “battle” with Covid-19 while acknowledging that he is subjecting America to a profound moral test in the weeks and perhaps months ahead.

What kind of society do we want: one based on decency and democracy, or on viciousness and raw power?