The Justice Department may have violated Attorney General Barr’s own policy memo

When the Justice Department recently publicized an ongoing investigation into potentially improperly discarded Trump ballots, critics accused it of violating long-standing agency policy against interfering in an election.

But the unusual decision to publicly detail the Pennsylvania case may also have run afoul of guidelines that Attorney General William Barr himself issued to federal prosecutors this year, according to a memo obtained by ProPublica.

In May, Barr wrote a directive to all Justice Department employees imploring them to be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship” when it comes to election-related crimes.

“Partisan politics,” he wrote, “must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of public statements (attributed or not), investigative steps, criminal charges, or any other action in any matter or case for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

Nevertheless, last month Barr’s Justice Department issued a press release announcing an investigation into whether local elections officials illegally discarded nine mail-in military ballots in Pennsylvania. The announcement of an open investigation was highly unusual. Even more abnormal was that the press release specified that at least seven of those ballots were for President Donald Trump.

While the motivation of the Pennsylvania press release is unclear, Barr had personally briefed Trump on the matter before the announcement, The Washington Post subsequently reported, citing an anonymous source. The president raised it in a media interview and then DOJ’s Pennsylvania office announced the investigation.

Then, the Trump campaign quickly jumped on the Pennsylvania case to bolster those claims.

“BREAKING: FBI finds military mail-in ballots discarded in Pennsylvania. 100% of them were cast for President Trump. Democrats are trying to steal the election,” a campaign official tweeted.

Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division, said the Pennsylvania press release was “flatly inconsistent” with Barr’s memo “and shamefully so.”

“There’s absolutely no legitimate law enforcement reason I know of to mention who the ballots were cast for: They were either dealt with properly or not properly,” he said. “And if there’s no good reason, it leaves only the most likely bad reason: that the identity of the candidate was revealed for partisan political purposes.”

Some experts did not agree . Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Duke Law School, said Barr could argue that “any public announcement about a ballot investigation complies with [the memo] because the language is so broad.”

Barr, he said, could say the “purpose” of the Pennsylvania announcement was not to affect the outcome of the election or support a particular candidate, but some other non-prohibited motivation like “protecting the vote.”

The Barr memo closely mirrored election-year guidance that previous attorneys general sent out under both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Barr himself said at his Senate confirmation hearings last year that the election policies were in place because the incumbent party has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party.”

Asked whether the Pennsylvania announcement ran afoul of the agency’s election policies, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded: “No.” She declined to elaborate.

The U.S. attorney overseeing the case is David Freed, a former Republican nominee for Pennsylvania state attorney general who was nominated for his current role by Trump in 2017. In a publicly released letter, Freed said he was detailing initial findings despite an ongoing investigation “based on the limited amount of time before the general election and the vital public importance of these issues.”

A second memo obtained by ProPublica, issued in August by Corey Amundson, chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, was even more explicit.

In it, Amundson reiterated the Justice Department’s long-standing policy in election fraud cases: “Overt criminal investigative measures should not ordinarily be taken in matters involving alleged fraud in the manner in which votes were cast or counted until the election in question has been concluded.”

The memo was addressed to the Attorney General Advisory Committee, a group of U.S. attorneys that advise the attorney general.

The policy Amundson cites appears to make an exception for extraordinary cases. But it seems unlikely that would apply to the case in Pennsylvania. That involved only nine ballots, which appear to have been discarded by a sole contract employee. The motivation may have been an innocuous attempt to follow Pennsylvania rules barring ballots sent back without the proper envelope.

Current and former Justice Department officials told ProPublica that, even without the memos from top agency officials including Barr, the Pennsylvania press release violated long-standing department policy. They explained that prosecutors not only should not announce that they are investigating, but that they should be slow even to start an election-sensitive investigation during the campaign. Such an investigation is so sensitive, an opposing candidate could use it to smear his or her opponent.

“That’s what they drill into us: the policy of non-interference and never, ever, ever announcing an investigation,” one official said. “That’s why the thing in Pennsylvania is bonkers, completely bonkers.”

A spokeswoman for Freed declined to comment.

Barr has amplified Trump’s attempt to discredit mail-in voting before, claiming falsely that there is widespread fraud.

Do you have information about the Justice Department and the preparations for the election? Reach Robert Faturechi at Robert.Faturechi@propublica.org or via Signal at 213- 271-7217. Reach Justin Elliott at Justin@propublica.org or via Signal at (774) 826-6240.

Science and karma: Late night comedy makes peace with joking about Trump’s COVID diagnosis

America, it’s been a very interesting journey. Over the past week or so, we learned a lot about what comedians should and should not do with regard to Donald Trump’s ongoing battle with COVID-19, which is fast proving to be an extension of his denial regarding the realities of COVID-19.

And we’ve learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the “let’s read the books” school. This is the school of quick takes and rewritten-shortly-before-broadcast monologues.

We get it, we understand it, and it’s a very interesting thing . . . because the conclusion at which all parties relevant to this conversation have arrived is that when it comes to reaping material from Trump’s infection with the novel coronavirus, joke season is now officially open. Frankly, it should have been from the get-go.

Granted, it took a while for late night hosts adjust their targeting. On Peacock, Amber Ruffin shows the way by opening her second show with as straight of a read as possible. “I just want to say, the coronavirus is very serious,” Ruffin says, smash-cutting to a clip of Trump in February describing COVID-19 as “like a flu.” Back to her: “It’s unfair that Trump caught it because he’s always taken the virus seriously.” And again to Trump, in February: “This is the new hoax!”

It went on like that, Ruffin appearing to say what propriety and civility would demand she say while editing Trump’s own footage into her “thoughts and prayers” equivalent. “We just want to take a moment and say how unfair it is that this happened to him – and to the 7.31 million other Americans who caught this virus,” she says, pausing before adding, “and that we hope he gets well soon.”

Trevor Noah released a viral video that essentially expressed a lack of surprise that Trump, a man who flaunts his refusal to wear masks, eventually became infected. “If the President of the United States can get the coronavirus, then what excuse do the rest of us random a**holes have for not wearing a mask?” he asks, later saying “People, coronavirus doesn’t care about your politics.”

Stephen Colbert hosted a special Oct. 2 episode of “The Late Show” to address the diagnosis that Trump tweeted earlier that day. “Say what you will about the president – and I do – this is a serious moment for our nation, and we all wish the president and the first lady of the United States a speedy and full recovery,” Colbert says.

A few gentle comic beats later he continues, “I really think it’s important for all of us to separate the man from the office – and I hope on Nov. 3 we literally do – but for now I find it troubling, moving even, to see the president of the United States being taken to the hospital, and to imagine the responsibility those servicemembers flying that helicopter must feel.”

Colbert recorded this episode on Friday, before Trump’s image-bolstering and Secret Service-endangering joyride to wave at his loyalists cheering him on outside of Walter Reed Medical Center, where he received a cocktail of experimental drugs whose interactions and side effects haven’t entirely been quantified, and where he was on oxygen for some unknown amount of time.

Cut to the title card opening the first segment of Sunday night’s “Desus and Mero” on Showtime: “Thoughts and Prayers for Our Large and Handsome Leader” it reads. Next Desus appears and emits a dismissive, “Here’s what I have to say about that” whoopie cushion pfft as the Kid Mero laughs: “Ha ha ha HA – Trump got that ‘rona!”

In case it isn’t clear, Desus and The Kid Mero came to that conclusion right around the time Colbert and his team were crafting their careful “Late Show” response. Premium cable comics have the luxury to be more freewheeling than their broadcast counterparts. But here was the voice from the big city bodegas, whose communities have been hit far harder by COVID and much earlier than most of the people to whom Trump panders.

Desus and Mero point out that on “Hannity,” Trump blamed “people from the military or from law enforcement” for infecting White House aide Hope Hicks and other White House officials, including him, with the coronavirus. “They come over to you, they want to hug you and they want to kiss you, because we really have done a good job for them, And you get close and things happen,” we hear Trump tell host Sean Hannity in an audio clip of their conversation.”

“Yo, stop, bro,” Mero said. “They’re losers and suckers and now they’re super-spreaders?”

To the news that Trump would receive a round of experimental drug treatments, including Dexamethasone, Desus only laughs harder. “Aw, Trump gonna be a guinea pig? Yeah, bro. Can’t wait to see it!”

Mero then asks, “What are the side effects?”

Funny you should ask, sir! By the time Colbert returned on Monday, the surgical gloves were off. Monday night’s show opened with a wry fake ad for a rideshare service called “Achoober,” whose drivers have “made their peace with God and are willing to sacrifice their lives so that you can wave at some people.”

He went on to slam Dr. Sean Conley’s dissembling the facts concerning the severity of Trump’s symptoms, and riff on the side effects of Dexamethasone, particularly the part about “temporary burning, pain and itching around your anus.” From there the jokes flowed fast and so cheap, they were like water. (Go ahead and insert a flaming diarrhea joke here. Colbert did.)

People like to talk about some version of a “line” in comedy, an invisible force projected by one’s moral core that we decide can’t be crossed. Such a thing, if it exists, is most often personal. Stand-up comics like to get a lot of mileage out of referring to past jokes that made overly sensitive audience members walk out before cranking out punchlines at the expense of said killjoy.

The morals of those stories tend to fall into similar categories about censorship, or calls to relax a little, lighten up, nobody’s taking any of this seriously.

Trump has channeled this language effectively rile up his base and to “troll the libs” in a unique and dangerous fashion. To his supporters he’ll say one thing that they’ll take as gospel until that statement is contradicted by fact, at which point they’ll either continue to believe what he said or shrug it off as not to be taken seriously.

This is precisely why the dramedy Trump is constructing around his diagnosis is dangerous, frustrating and farcical in equal measure. We’ve hit a terrible count of 210,000 Americans dead in this pandemic that has infected nearly 7.5 million, and after Trump received some of the finest medical care in the world including drug treatments only available to a handful of people in the world, his message to Americans was to relax a little, lighten up.

It’s all jokes or – as he told his Democratic opponent Joe Biden during their first presidential debate, when Biden admonished Trump for advising people to shoot up household disinfectant to combat infection – sarcasm. (Sarcasm is the fierce punchline’s less-attractive fraternal twin.) The next day Trump was at a rally in Duluth, Minn., eliciting roars from the crowd at the very mention of “Sleepy Joe,” the jokey-joke name he’s assigned to Biden in the sketch show running inside his head.

Maybe there was a fuzzy suggestion of a line for a while there, and there’s no question that some still acknowledge that border exists, namely politicians and cable news personalities such as Rachel Maddow who were quick to tweet their wishes that Trump and the first lady would get well. But if comedians serve as the voice of the flabbergasted public’s frustration and outrage, this situation is less a matter of schadenfreude than calling a leader’s lack of empathy and efforts to downplay the virus for what it is, which is ludicrous.

If there were a line in situations such as this, Trump obliterated it long ago. Truth be told, he doesn’t get all the credit for its erasure. Right wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones have been fading it out for decades, emboldening attacks on liberals in media, politics and beyond under the guise of “humor” or “performance art.” Vitriol masked as jokes is wingnut’s lingua franca, as is the bloviated “how dare you” response to similar swings when then punchlines are coming from the left.

But with this situation Trump has placed a nitro-boost on the chronology involved in the classic “tragedy plus time equals comedy” equation. If Thursday night or Friday were “too soon,” it only took a few hours for “not soon enough” to become an appropriate response.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for complaints from the right wing about Alec Baldwin’s and Jim Carrey’s respective lampoonery of the first presidential debate on “Saturday Night Live” to circulate. Purely from an impersonation analysis standpoint, however, Biden has more to complain about – Carrey essentially filters Biden through his old “In Living Color” character Fire Marshal Bill.

But the bit that captured the truth of the moment offers Carrey, as Biden, speaking to the audience. “You can trust me because I believe in science and karma,” he says. “Now just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be!”

Carrey turns for a moment to meaningfully look in Baldwin-as-Trump’s direction. “I’m not saying I want it to happen. Just imagine if it did.”

Later on “Weekend Update,” Michael Che is far blunter. “If it was Biden who got sick, Trump would 100% be at a maskless rally tonight getting huge laughs doing an impression of Biden on a ventilator.”

His co-anchor Colin Jost offers, “I gotta say, it’s a bad sign for America that when Trump said he tested positive for a virus, 60% of people were like, ‘Prove it.'”

He’s right about that. It’s a terrible sign that the most powerful leader in the world spent the majority of the year sowing a cavalier attitude towards a deadly pandemic and then, after receiving a level of care 99.9% of Americans could not right now, is more concerned about appearing in Eva Peron-style photo ops on his balcony. This is on top of his dismissing the severity of the virus and cutting off a road to a stimulus package to help Americans who are most adversely impacted by its rolling effects on the economic and their health.

Jost adds a message for the news personalities and politicians traveling the high road. “It’s been very weird to see all these people who clearly hate Trump come out and say, ‘We wish him well.’ I think a lot of them are just feeling guilty that their first wish came true.” There’s more than a little truth in that.

Trump’s diagnosis, hospitalization and recovery is yet another test delivered by this uniquely disastrous presidency, and our satirists can and must ace this – and the whole reason of laughing to keep from crying is only part of it. The media is struggling to parse fact from fiction and feeling from everything else lest they be accused of bias or worse, carelessness and incivility.

That last part is rich for an entire list of reasons, beginning with a roll call of Fox News Channel’s primetime line-up. However, given that Trump made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and leaves no sacred cow unslaughtered when given the opportunity to do damage, our topical comedians are in position to grill up that beef and serve it back to him, sizzling.

Let’s also factor in the right wing double standard of freely dishing out insults and cruelty in the name of “owning the libs,” even when that vicious laughter is in response to someone getting hurt or even dying — some of the reaction over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death is an example of this — only to demand civility when the shoe is on the other foot.

From what I’ve seen of the late night comedians who are the most skilled at handling this presidency – Noah, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Colbert, Desus and Mero and others – in dire situations such as this the key to success is to go after the circumstances Trump’s bungling creates as opposed to Trump himself.

The evolving state of Trump’s illness isn’t funny. Neither are his efforts to pantomime strength, which place those who serve him in danger. The horrific tragedy of millions upon millions infected by a virus whose spread could have been slowed by wearing masks, a fact Trump has consistently dismissed or worse, joked away, is as far from comedy as it gets.

But the blank page signing at the hospital passed off as being hard at work is simply stupid, and his balcony pose is appalling. Despite his steroid-enhanced spin performance over the past 24 hours, many experts fear that his health may worsen over the next week or two. This is still a tragedy unfolding, one we’re still processing as a people and that Trump is still refusing to.

“A lot of people on both sides are saying there’s nothing funny about Trump being hospitalized with coronavirus even though he mocked the safety precautions for the coronavirus,” Che says on “Weekend Update.” “And those people are obviously wrong. There’s a lot funny about this. Maybe not from a moral standpoint, but mathematically, if you were constructing the joke, this is all the ingredients you need. The problem is, it’s almost too funny. It’s so on the nose. It would be like if I were making fun of people who wear belts and my pants just immediately fell down.”

(This is also a fine spot for a joke about Dexamethasone’s anus-related side effects. Why not? Remember: the line is gone.)

Eventually he went on to wish Trump “a lengthy recovery” – not just for the jokes we presume, but to meet the demands of science and karma.

Eric Trump claims that his father “literally saved Christianity”

President Donald Trump can add to his resume that he apparently “saved Christianity,” according to his son Eric Trump, the KFile posted on Twitter.

The moment came as part of a North Dakota radio interview. The middle Trump son rattled off a list of his dad’s accomplishments, saying of his father, “he literally saved Christianity.”

He didn’t give examples of how Trump managed to save the 2.4 billion people practicing the faith, or even what the president saved Christianity from. However, he did say that there was some kind of war going on between Democrats and Christians. Most of the elected Democrats in office are Christians. He didn’t provide any evidence, Christians aren’t being shot in the streets or thrown in jail. However, the first lady did complain she “doesn’t give a f*ck about Christmas decorations.”

Around the time the comments were made, allegations were surfacing that Trump openly mocked his Christian supporters as “full of sh*t.”

“They’re all hustlers,” Trump said, according to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

“His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them stay at my hotels—they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,'” a former campaign adviser to Trump said.

You can hear the video of Eric Trump in the tweet from the KFile below:

Here's the audio of Eric Trump listing "he literally saved Christianity" as one of his father's accomplishments in office. pic.twitter.com/uJG6YUPAbq

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) October 6, 2020

A fourth White House press aide has tested positive for COVID-19

The White House communications department is quickly falling as the coronavirus spreads through the team.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reported Tuesday afternoon that just hours after a third White House press aide tested positive for COVID-19, a fourth press staffer did.

And now there's a fourth, an administration official says.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 6, 2020

It adds to the 21 other people in the Trump orbit who have contracted the virus, according to the ongoing count. Two of those people have been hospitalized, Trump himself and former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ).

Trump came home from the hospital prematurely on Monday night after it was revealed that he had spread COVID-19 to at least two housekeepers. It was announced Tuesday morning that a military valet also tested positive. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are also in quarantine.

The disaster of the virus spreading through the building has been dubbed The White House COVID Outbreak. It all began with communications adviser Hope Hicks.

Confirming @maggieNYT, a fourth press aide has also tested positive. So now it's four press aides and the press secretary.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 6, 2020

Trump still faces COVID-19 health risk, may not be “out of the woods” till next week, doctors say

Despite being diagnosed with COVID-19 just last week, President Donald Trump was discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday after a long weekend stay. Yet medical experts who spoke with Salon agreed on two things: He isn’t out of the woods yet, health-wise, and by working while ill, he is putting the people around him at risk for contracting coronavirus.

To understand why, one only need to look at the timeline for coronavirus infections. (A note on nomenclature: while one gets infected with the novel coronavirus, the disease that the virus can cause is known as COVID-19.) A study by the World Health Organization found that a common order of symptoms for COVID-19 sufferers goes like this: first, a fever, then coughing and muscle pain, then nausea or vomiting, and then diarrhea. Trump is reported to have exhibited symptoms including coughing, congestion, fever and fatigue.

“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. “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.”

That timeline implies that Trump would still be quite infectious at this point.

Medford added that, because Trump is an elderly and overweight male, he is in a higher risk category than many other patients who get sick with COVID-19.

“For somebody like the president in his risk category, we’re looking at eight to 12 days of observation in which symptoms may progress in a waxing and waning pattern,” Medford explained. “Waxing and waning means a characteristic of the disease is, you tend to do better, and then the next day you can do worse, depending on the individual and the risk factors going forward. So I’d say somewhere around eight to 12 days from the onset of symptoms is where you’ll see progression.”

Medford speculated that observers would be able to better gauge whether the president is “probably out of the woods” early next week.

As Tim O’Brien, a columnist who wrote a biography of Trump, noted on Twitter, former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain tested positive for COVID-19 on July 2 and — despite repeatedly claiming that he was getting better — died four weeks later.

Yet regardless of whether Trump winds up recovering, he is unquestionably putting other people in danger, from the Secret Service who follow him when he is in public to the staffers who are discouraged from wearing masks around him.

“He’s potentially infectious to the people around him. It is no different than a patient in the hospital,” Dr. Carlos del Rio, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, told Salon. “I sit in a room in isolation, but when I have to go in to see a patient, I wear my mask and my goggles and my gown and my gloves so I don’t get infected.”

“The people around him need to protect themselves,” Del Rio added.

Del Rio emphasized that Trump himself is not in unusual danger, despite leaving the hospital.

“This guy is in the White House with doctors, with nurses, with people continuously watching him,” Del Rio told Salon. “He might as well be in the hospital. The White House, I’m sure, has full medical staff on top of him, so he’s in no danger. And if they see him getting a little worse, he’s got a pretty good helicopter to take him right back to the hospital.” Del Rio’s point, however, was that the people around him need to take precautions “so they don’t get infected. It’s irresponsible of him not to be in isolation. It’s selfish of him to have to wear a mask and not to be in isolation. It shows little respect for other people.”

He added, “Then again, that’s him.”

Kellyanne Conway curses out daughter in TikTok video: “You’ve lied about your own f*cking mother”

Former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway this week was shown on video cursing out her 15-year-old daughter, Claudia Conway, after she blamed the former Trump official for getting their family infected with COVID-19.

In a video that Claudia Conway posted on her TikTok account, Kellyanne can be seen berating her daughter over her past TikTok videos in which she denounced President Donald Trump for being reckless about the disease.

“You’ve caused so much disruption,” Conway tells her daughter. “You’ve lied about your own f*cking mother, about COVID!”

“No, mom, it’s how I interpreted it,” she said.

“Interpreted it?” Conway asked, before she then noticed that her daughter was filming her, at which point she grabbed her phone.

In a tweet shortly after the video posted, Conway chided reporters on Twitter for covering her daughter’s TikTok videos.

“My daughter, Claudia, is beautiful & brilliant,” Conway wrote. “She has access to top doctors and health care and lives comfortably. Like all of you, she speculates on social media. Yet she’s 15. You are adults. We have COVID, but it’s clear who’s really sick.”

Trump abruptly halts stimulus negotiations; Pelosi says “the White House is in complete disarray”

One day after returning to the White House after being treated in the hospital for COVID-19, President Donald Trump ordered negotiators to halt discussions over a new stimulus package to alleviate the pandemic-related economic crash. The announcement comes after a lengthy bipartisan struggle between the Democrats and Republicans to reach a deal to provide more relief as millions of Americans continue to struggle with the economic downfall of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump made the announcement on Twitter.

“I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business,” Trump wrote on Tuesday afternoon, casting blame on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“Our Economy is doing very well,” Trump continued on Twitter, as the market fell. “The Stock Market is at record levels, JOBS and unemployment also coming back in record numbers. We are leading the World in Economic Recovery, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

The decision to halt negotiations and fail to compromise is a major hit to Americans who are still struggling from the pandemic. Initially, a $2.2 trillion dollar stimulus package was passed by Congress in the spring. A small amount of that package went to direct payments to Americans who made under a specific income limit, who received a one-time check in the mail from the Treasury Department or a direct deposit.

In a statement, Pelosi slammed Trump’s announcement.

“Clearly, the White House is in complete disarray,” Pelosi said. “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.”

Pelosi added: “Trump is wedded to his $150 billion tax cut for the wealthiest people in America from the CARES Act, while he refuses to give real help to poor children, the unemployed, and America’s hard-working families,” Ms. Pelosi said.

According to the New York Times, on a private caucus call before the announcement, Pelosi said Democrats were “waiting for them to approve our language to crush the virus and how we put money in the pockets of the American people.”

Earlier today, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called on policymakers for an aggressive fiscal stimulus for an easier economic recovery, which he said still has “a long way to go.”

“By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller,” Powell said. “Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed, they will not go to waste. The recovery will be stronger and move faster if monetary policy and fiscal policy continue to work side by side to provide support to the economy until it is clearly out of the woods.”

Powell said forgetting about a stimulus now would “lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses.”

After Trump’s announcement, the Dow fell more than 600 points and closed at 27,773, or 376 points down for the day.

Dexamethasone, the COVID-19 drug Trump is taking, can cause delirium and hallucinations

In order to help treat COVID-19, President Donald Trump is taking a steroid that can cause mood swings, confusion, depression, delirium and nervousness.

Trump was prescribed the drug, known as dexamethasone, after being diagnosed with COVID-19 and staying at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C. for four days. Despite being released on Monday, there is no indication that Trump will stop taking dexamethasone, which can cause a number of psychological side effects. The more common psychological side effects include mood swings, nervousness and insomnia, according to WebMD. Less common side effects include hallucinations, delirium, confusion, depression and paranoia. The medical website also says that the mood swings are the only common psychological side effect that can express itself severely.

Though rare, WebMD reports that paranoia, delirium and hallucinations “tend to have a Severe expression” when exhibited by dexamethasone users.

Scrutiny over Trump’s drug regimen increased yesterday after the president returned to the White House after being treated for COVID-19 in Walter Reed Medical Center. After returning to the White House, the president said he felt “better than (I) did 20 years ago.” Earlier on Monday between and 6:47 AM and 7:14 AM Eastern Time, when he was still in the hospital, the president issued 16 tweet missives in all capital letters of varying degrees of comprehensibility.

SPACE FORCE. VOTE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

MASSIVE REGULATION CUTS. VOTE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

401(K). VOTE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

The International Myeloma Foundation says that dexamethasone can lead to difficulty thinking and personality changes, according to Reuters. An infectious disease expert who spoke to the wire service, Dr. Edward Jones-Lopez of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said that “steroids are always very dangerous medications to use. That is why it (dexamethasone) is used in severe to critical patients… There can be neuropsychiatric side effects. These are medications that we use very, very carefully.”

In addition to the potential psychological complications, there are also serious potential physical complications from using dexamethasone. Although the drug has reduced death rates by roughly one third among people with severe cases of COVID-19, it can also harm people who are not as sick by artificially suppressing their natural immune responses. Common physical side effects include infection, water retention and weight gain.

“Dexamethasone is only approved for patients with very severe disease mechanically ventilated in the hospital, so the President does not fit the criteria for dexamethasone by the statements coming from his doctors, and this drug can cause harm in more mild disease,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told Salon by email on Monday.

Gandhi also told Salon that there was a contradiction between the White House’s rosy statements on Trump’s health and the cocktail of medications he has received so far, which also include remdesivir and an experimental drug called REGN-COV2 from the biotechnology company Regeneron. Dexamethasone, for example, is prescribed for COVID-19 cases when doctors are concerned about severely lowered oxygen levels and need to stop a patient’s immune system from fatally overreacting to the disease. Remdesivir is prescribed to patients to help them recover at a faster rate and REGN-COV2 is prescribed, according to Regeneron, “in patients who had not mounted their own effective immune response prior to treatment.”

“The drugs the President got are not given to ordinary Americans, especially the antibody cocktail which has not been approved and is still under study,” Gandhi wrote to Salon. “Similarly, a patient of his description would not be given medications for severe disease (Remdesivir, dexamethasone) since the steroids can be harmful and the anti-viral is of uncertain efficacy in that situation.”

Because of Trump’s age, weight and sex, he is at an advanced risk of terminal complications from COVID-19. One recent compilation of COVID-19 studies reported in Nature noted that among patients in their mid-seventies and older who tested positive for COVID-19, roughly 116 out of 1,000 (meaning 11.6%) wound up dying.

A new Electoral College nightmare: We may face a constitutional crisis if either candidate dies

Both of the two major parties’ presidential candidates are septuagenarians; one of them, former Vice President Joe Biden, was recently in close proximity to a group of coronavirus-positive people, while the other, President Donald Trump, has contracted COVID-19 and is currently in the most crucial phase of infection. The two men’s age, and their proximity to a disease that kills about 12% of those in their mid-70s and older, has prompted many outside observers and legal experts to be forced to confront the unthinkable: if President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden dies before Election Day — or after the election but before the Electoral College convenes — will America enter a constitutional crisis?

As such a horrific scenario has suddenly entered the realm of possibility, Salon posed the question to several experts. The answer, as it turns out, is startling.

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, when asked what might happen if Donald Trump were to pass before Election Day, warned that things could get messy. “The likeliest outcome of the death you’re imagining is that the Republican National Committee would convene in an emergency session,” and, utilizing the best legal advice available to them, would “decide how best to accommodate their respective deadlines for qualifying candidates, or more precisely the electoral slates committed to particular candidates, for the presidential election to be held this November 3,” Tribe said over email.

This process would be complicated, of course, by the fact that millions of Americans have already voted by mail — and their ballots cannot be retroactively changed. To accommodate this, and since it would be “lunacy” to ask people to resubmit their ballots, “my hope would be that the state chapters of the RNC would all agree simply to revise the instructions given to the electors committed at that time to the Trump/Pence slate in each of those States so as to conform those instructions to whatever new ticket the RNC were to choose – say, [Vice President] Mike Pence and [former United Nations Ambassador] Nikki Haley.”

Yet according to Tribe, that might not be the end of the matter. He noted that some electors could declare that they are only legally bound to support a Trump-Pence ticket and, if they do not want Pence to be president, resign rather than be compelled to cast their ballot for him.

He cited the July Supreme Court case of Chiafalo v. Washington, in which the unanimous ruling was that states can legally force electors to back the candidates they had previously pledged to support. That case came about because a group of Democratic electors known as the Hamilton Electors attempted to convince enough Republicans to abandon Trump after he won the 2016 election, so that he would not receive an Electoral College majority of 270 votes. That, in turn, would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives, where each state would have one vote to cast among the top three candidates. The Hamilton Electors had tried to convince Republican electors to back a member of their party who isn’t Trump, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich or former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Robert Alexander, a political scientist at Ohio Northern University, told Salon by email that the attorney who represented the Hamilton Electors at the Supreme Court had anticipated a scenario similar to the one that would unfold if Trump or Biden dies between now and the start of the new presidential term.

“Larry Lessig pointed out the potential problems associated with binding electors to vote for the popular vote winner in their state if indeed such a situation were to arise,” Alexander explained. “The Court didn’t appear to be moved by his concern over potential unanticipated consequences of a ruling removing elector freedom. They indicated that states could handle such a situation if it were to arise. However, I’m not convinced that all states that bind electors have attended to the problem convincingly.”

With the Hamilton Electors, however, the so-called “faithless electors” were trying to stop the election of a man they considered unfit to be president. In this theoretical scenario, they’d be trying to figure out what to do after being pledged to vote for a literal dead man.

“Predictably, many of the States will not have been sufficiently far-sighted to have enacted any legislative provisions on point, an eventuality that would trigger litigation,” Tribe explained to Salon. “Hopefully …. before November 3, the highest judicial tribunal of each such State would decide what to do on the basis of the background principles of that State’s laws, including its constitution.” He argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling to settle the controversial 2000 election, Bush v. Gore, could arise as precedent. As Tribe notes, there is “at least one possible reading requiring that disputes over the process of choosing electors be resolved strictly in terms of the directives laid down by the State Legislature, without resort to the State Constitution to change outcomes.” This would lead to a “legal morass,” Tribe explained, “but not necessarily a ‘constitutional crisis.'”

Rick Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, wrote to Salon about the possible outcomes if a candidate wins the presidential election but then died before the Electoral College can convene. Pildes thought that because of the nature of the electoral college, it might not be as much of a crisis as one might fear.

“The electors from that state would be able to vote for a different candidate for President,” Pildes told Salon. “There is the slight complexity that in around 16 states, state laws require the electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote; those laws impose sanctions for failing to do that, but most of those sanctions are minimal fines. So if this happened with President Trump, the Republican electors from states he won would vote for another candidate. If the RNC [Republican National Committee] – which is a 168 member body — voted to anoint another figure, the electors might well coalesce and vote for that figure.”

That scenario could be complicated, however, if the Republican Party cannot coalesce behind Vice President Mike Pence or some other alternative. If that resulted in no candidate receiving 270 electoral votes then, once again, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives.

“The House votes one vote, one delegation, and a candidate needs a majority of the delegations to become elected,” Pildes told Salon.

There have only been two presidential elections that were thrown into the House of Representatives: the 1800 contest that elected Thomas Jefferson, and the 1824 contest that elected John Quincy Adams. Yet neither of those anomalies occurred because of a candidates’ death or incapacitation.

However, America has come close to that situation on one occasion. During the 1872 election, President Ulysses S. Grant ran for reelection on the Republican ticket against newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who had the support of both the Democratic Party and a splinter faction of the Republicans. Greeley died after Election Day but before the Electoral College could meet.

That could have resulted in a constitutional crisis had Greeley won. Fortuitously, Grant won in a landslide, so there was no constitutional crisis and no test of the presidential voting system. Ultimately, Greeley only won 66 electoral votes to Grant’s 286 electoral votes, and 63 of Greeley’s 66 electors decided to support one of several other Democrats when casting their vote.

“When Congress met, they decided not to count those votes since he was dead and thusly ineligible to serve,” Alexander explained. “It would seem to me that a precedent was set. If electors are forced to vote for the candidate who won the vote in their state and that candidate dies before they meet, then I’m not sure the states with binding laws have adequately dealt with such a possibility.”

He added, though, that “fourteen states have laws that remove an elector for not voting as anticipated. Among these, only Utah’s statute permits an elector to break their pledge in case of a death of a nominee. Arizona, Colorado and Maine require electors to vote for the popular vote winner in their respective states (or districts). This would seem to force them to potentially vote for a deceased candidate if they were to die after the election and before they met.”

Because electors could argue that they are actually bound to vote for their party’s nominees, they might be able to sidestep accusations of being faithless electors if their party chose a different nominee.

Even so, Alexander explained, “no doubt, legal challenges would ensue as a result.”

If there is one thing we can say for certain, it is that any scenario in which Trump or Biden dies before the Electoral College casts its votes would be hell on the electors themselves.

“This helps justify me putting aside my life for a year to try to fight for this country,” Hamilton Elector alumnus Chiafalo told Salon about his battle to allow electors the autonomy to vote their conscience. “It’s almost been completely proven that we were right to fear exactly what we thought was coming. As for electors this year, I feel horrible for them because if they make the wrong decision — based on the far-right of this country — their lives will probably be forfeit.”

He added, “They’re going to get more death threats than I did, and I got hundreds. So if I was one of the electors. I’d be terrified. I’d be buying guns and a bulletproof vest.”

Eddie Van Halen dies at 65

Eddie Van Halen, whose innovative and explosive guitar playing kept the hard rock band that bore his family name cemented to the top of the album charts for two decades, died on Tuesday morning after a long battle with cancer, a rep confirmed to Variety. He was 65.

Born in the Netherlands and raised in Pasadena, he founded Van Halen with his older brother, drummer Alex; the siblings were joined by vocalist David Lee Roth and bassist Michael Anthony in the first recording lineup of the group, which exploded after star-making gigs at such West Hollywood clubs as Gazzarri’s and the Starwood.

It was instantly apparent from “Eruption,” the solo showcase on Van Halen’s self-titled 1978 debut album for Warner Bros., that Eddie Van Halen was an instrumentalist to be reckoned with. In a mere one minute and 42 seconds, the axe man detonated a dazzling display of fretboard tapping, ringing harmonics, lightning-fast licks and smeared, dive-bombing effects.

Writing about that recording in Rolling Stone’s 2015 poll of the 100 greatest guitarists – in which Van Halen placed eighth, between Duane Allman and Chuck
Berry – Mike McCready of Pearl Jam wrote, “It sounded like it came from another planet…[I]t was glorious, like hearing Mozart for the first time.”

Acting as the band’s musical director and co-authoring the band’s tough-riffing songs, which straddled the boundary between hard rock and heavy metal, Eddie Van Halen found immediate success, and formulated a style that would be emulated by hordes of long-haired rockers.

The group’s first LP “Van Halen,” though it climbed no higher than No. 19 in the U.S., would ultimately be certified for sales of 10 million copies. Its next five multi- platinum albums all reached the top 10; “1984,” released in its titular year, contained the band’s first and only No. 1 single, the synthesizer-driven “Jump,” and sifted another 10 million units.

Ongoing conflict between the guitarist and the antic front man Roth – who reportedly took exception to Van Halen’s extracurricular work, which included jaw-dropping lead guitar chores on Michael Jackson’s ubiquitous 1983 single “Beat It” — led the singer to split with the act after its elaborate and wildly successful 1984 tour.

Such a defection would likely have split a less popular band, but Van Halenfound even greater sales after ex-Montrose vocalist Sammy Hagar replaced Roth. Between 1986 and 1995, the group released four consecutive No. 1 albums.

However, Hagar ankled Van Halen after a tiff about the group’s planned greatest hits package. Eddie Van Halen brokered a truce with former singer Roth long enough to complete a pair of new tracks with the vocalist for the 1996 collection, but after another wrangle, a planned reunion with the singer broke down, and Gary Cherone, vocalist for the Boston pop-metal unit Extreme, signed on for a single album, “Van Halen III” (1998), which tallied comparatively meager sales.

Eddie Van Halen was dogged by personal and health issues that would intermittently interfere with his work in music over the course of the next decade. A chronic joint problem, exacerbated by his reckless onstage style, forced him to undergo hip replacement surgery in 1999. The onset of cancer – likely the result of heavy smoking – led to the surgical removal of part of his tongue in 2000.

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The recording of three songs with Hagar for the two-disc compilation “The Best of Both Worlds” led to a lucrative 2004 reunion tour with Van Halen’s second lead singer. However, the alliance proved to be temporary, and it marked the end of both Hagar’s and bassist Anthony’s association with the group (though they would serve as representatives at the band’s 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, which the Van Halens and Roth declined to attend).

After years of false starts, Van Halen reconvened in 2007 with Roth as the front man and Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie’s 16-year-old son, replacing Anthony on bass. Though a tour grossed more than $90 million, it was plagued by rumors of inter-band strife.

Eddie Van Halen’s escalating drug abuse and alcoholism hastened his 2007 divorce from TV actress Valerie Bertinelli, his wife of 16 years, after a protracted separation. He entered rehab in 2007, and was reportedly sober from 2008.

“I was an alcoholic, and I needed alcohol to function,” he said in a 2015 interview with Chuck Klosterman. “I didn’t drink to party. Alcohol and cocaine were private things to me. I would use them for work. The blow keeps you awake and the alcohol lowers your inhibitions. I’m sure there were musical things I would not have attempted were I not in that mental state.”

A second tour fronted by Roth was launched on a more even keel in 2012, supporting an all-new album on Interscope, “A Different Kind of Truth,” which vaulted to No. 2. However, Eddie’s surgery for diverticulitis forced postponement of shows in Japan, which were among the first international dates since 1984.

Read more from Variety: “Teenage Bounty Hunters” canceled after one season at Netflix

Though whispers of further shows would swirl thereafter, Roth opined that “I think Van Halen’s finished” in a September 2019 radio interview in Detroit, just weeks before news of Eddie Van Halen’s treatment for throat cancer surfaced in the press.

Edward Lodewijk Van Halen was born Jan. 26, 1955, in Amsterdam. His father played the clarinet, saxophone, and piano, and both he and his brother Alex were schooled on the latter instrument from the age of six. They continued their studies after the family moved to Pasadena in 1962.

Though Eddie – who never mastered sight reading — would perform at classical piano recitals, he sought something contemporary and took up the drums, while Alex began playing guitar. The two teenage musicians would ultimately switch off their instruments; Eddie claimed Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, the respective guitar stars of Cream and Led Zeppelin, as his principal inspirations.

After high school years spent in local party bands, the brothers founded a new quartet – which they unwittingly named Genesis, ignorant of the English group’s existence – in 1972 with singer Roth, whose PA system they were renting for gigs, and bassist Mark Stone, who was replaced by Michael Anthony.

An attention-grabbing date at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip by the rechristened Van Halen led to a demo session with Gene Simmons of KISS, who in the end opted out on working further with the band. However, as bassist Anthony recalled at the group’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, the act was signed after Warner Bros. chief executive Mo Ostin and producer Ted Templeman caught the band at a 1977 show at the Starwood.

Produced by Templeman, the band enjoyed a hit run of six albums with Roth as front man. Both “Van Halen II” (1979) and “Women and Children First” (1980) reached No. 6 nationally, while “Fair Warning” (1981) and “Diver Down” (1982) hit No. 5 and No. 3 respectively.

In the wake of the extroverted Roth’s exit and Hagar’s arrival, some anticipated a downturn in Van Halen’s popularity, but the new vocalist’s flair for power balladry and Eddie Van Halen’s still-puissant guitar attack thrust four albums to the sales pinnacle: “5150” (1986), “OU812” (1988), “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (1991) and “Balance” (1995).

However, the band never found similar chemistry with Cherone, and Van Halen only witnessed renewed life when it regrouped with Hagar and Roth in the new millennium.

Eddie Van Halen is survived by his second wife, the band’s former publicist Janie Liszewski, whom he married in 2009, and his son.

“Sociopathy”: Psychiatrist says Trump’s behavior “meets criteria for a locked psychiatric facility”

President Donald Trump’s maskless return to the White House on Monday following a weekend at Walter Reed Medical Center shows that he wants his supporters to “prove their loyalty to him with their lives,” psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee said in an interview with Salon.

Trump, who is still infected with the novel coronavirus, took off his mask on the Truman balcony and saluted Marine One before entering the White House and possibly exposing a photographer and others around him. Trump suggested in a video that he may now be “immune” from the virus, even as his doctor warned that the president was “not be entirely out of the woods yet.”

“One thing that’s for certain: Don’t let it dominate you,” Trump said of the virus. “Don’t be afraid of it.”

President Trump has returned to the White House after spending three nights at Walter Reed Medical Center for coronavirus treatment.

After exiting Marine One, Trump walked up a set of stairs, took off his mask and posed for photographs on a balcony. https://t.co/P3BAaWUCWL pic.twitter.com/Ibc3BHGlRX

— CNN (@CNN) October 5, 2020

Lee told Salon after the viral photo-op that it “would not be an exaggeration” to say that Trump “delights in putting people in danger.”

“Sociopathy is dangerous, in part because out of envy of other human beings for having human characteristics, it actively desires people to suffer and die,” she said.

Lee, a psychiatrist who has taught at Yale and authored the textbook “Violence”, has worked on public health approaches to violence prevention for decades. She also edited the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” and serves as president of the World Mental Health Coalition, which plans to release a video statement by “100 mental health experts” arguing that Trump should be removed from office and the 2020 ballot, because he is dangerous and unfit. Lee also plans to publish a “Profile of the Nation” on her website, which aims to provide a “full psychological profile of Donald Trump in the context of his followers and the nation.”

Trump’s behavior is not unlike the thousands of people Lee has treated in her career, she told Salon.

“Mental health professionals look at patterns, as human behavior is not random. This is why society charges us with preventing dangers to self and others before they happen, unlike law enforcement, which must wait until after things happen,” she said. “We are far more familiar with these situations, too. In my 20-year career of working with prisoners and violent offenders to help contain their behavior or to prevent their becoming violent in the first place, I probably treated a thousand individuals with [Trump’s] exact characteristics. So far, he has not deviated even the slightest from how I expected he would behave in a position of greater power than he can handle.”

Lee spoke to Salon about Trump’s maskless antics, the president’s many enablers and how his followers may respond to the events of the past week:

Salon: What was your reaction to Trump’s returning to the White House maskless and putting staffers in danger after receiving numerous treatments with varying side effects?

Lee: Sociopathy is dangerous, in part because out of envy of other human beings for having human characteristics, it actively desires people to suffer and die. I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump delights in putting people in danger for multiple reasons. When he forces his followers into crowded indoor rallies without masks, for example, he is demanding they prove their loyalty to him with their lives. This is why I once compared his commands to those made to gang members and child soldiers — the circumstances are different, but the psychology is the same.

Were you surprised by how Trump’s medical doctors dodged and obfuscated, as well as made false claims about the president’s health amid his hospitalization?

Not at all, and I am still not ruling out malingering, or feigning illness. When deciphering these things, we look for medical inconsistencies, secondary gain and psychological disposition. There are already too many inconsistencies in the medical picture, and look at the enormous secondary gain. We know that he needed something to reset his campaign, with everything going badly for him and his debate performance being unable to reverse the polls — and he was instantly able to stifle most criticism. We also know that he would manipulate any situation, and that we are vulnerable.

I had doubts about Dr. Sean Conley ever since he announced in February 2019 that the president was in “very good health” after an examination by “11 different board-certified specialists.” Why would you need so many specialists for a simple annual exam, and what about the obvious need for a psychiatrist? There is no health without mental health. Hence, when he came out of Walter Reed with an army of physicians, it appeared to me as overcompensation for a lack elsewhere.

The question of greatest relevance to the public is whether or not the president is fit to serve, which White House-employed doctors who are military subordinates to the commander-in-chief are not eligible to answer. A team of independent, peer-reviewed mental health experts needs to examine him for mental fitness, which is not difficult to do. We, ourselves, were able to do it in a very rigorous and standardized way, within a few days of having the information in the special counsel’s report.

Dr. Conley himself said he was adhering to HIPAA guidelines, and thus made clear he is treating the president as a private patient. But even HIPAA laws are supposed to be broken where the safety of self or others is concerned, and a doctor could be held legally liable for not placing safety first.

We already have the travesty of Dr. Ronny Jackson using a 10-minute cognitive screen, which research studies showed even full-blown Alzheimer patients score 30 out of 30 on, to declare the president mentally “fit,” as he did at a press conference in early 2018. All was show, since he had no independence and no mental health training to be able to do so. The public should demand better than this level of deception.

What does it tell you about the White House that it is refusing to contact trace its Supreme Court event, even though Trump’s own aides, advisers and allies are the ones who were exposed?

This is all in line with the bigger picture. Above all, the president needs to receive proper care, and from his behavior alone, he meets criteria for a locked psychiatric facility. Past violence often leads to future violence, and we now have a person who has committed mass killings, recklessly endangering life, if not engaging in negligent homicide. [Editor’s note: Lee was referring to Trump’s negligence related to the coronavirus, which has killed more than 200,000 people in the U.S.].

Rhetoric and demonstrations of behavior coming out of a powerful figure, furthermore, translate into widespread imitation and deadly results for the population. Dangerousness assessments do not require a personal examination, and all physicians and mental health professionals are supposed to err on the side of safety. There is no “OLC memo” or exemption in mental health law for a president, even if that is how the American Psychiatric Association tried to misapply “the Goldwater rule.” We are bound by our professional responsibility to society by the Geneva Declaration and the core tenets of medical ethics, which are part of the law.

How do you see this playing out in the near future? Trump is already claiming he beat the virus and might be “immune.”

It fits with his entire plan to show that the virus is no big deal, and we can ignore it — basically to have us adopt his fantasy world view. In real life, this will make the pandemic grow even more uncontrollable and kill many more people, but this is the side effect of his inability to fight the virus and his need to fight reality instead. This is how pathology is different from rational thinking — and how it combines with a criminal mind to make it even more destructive.

A pathological drive may seem expedient in the political realm, but I have compared it to a car without brakes. Such a car may be able to get ahead in ways in which no other fully functioning car can, and perhaps even more so with an evil driver in it. But at the bottom of the hill, it always crashes. This is why it is important to stop the malfunctioning car as early as possible, through whatever means, even now. We do not have to crash.

Do you think watching the president impacted by the virus he spent months trying to downplay will change his supporters’ views of him — or the virus itself?

Yes, but not in any productive way. His emerging from it so quickly — never mind that he gets daily tests and the best possible, proactive treatment — spectacularly solidifies the view that the severe public health measures, which he himself made necessary, were overblown. For those who experienced great loss form the virus, he will appear superhuman.

What people need to understand about many of his followers is that in their need for a parental figure who will take care of them, his position alone justifies whatever he does, and any exposure of his fraudulence and criminality will be experienced as an existential threat to them, which is why it only activates defensive denial, disavowal and protection of their “protector.”

Violence, paranoia and delusions are also particularly contagious, and so having someone with these symptoms in an influential position is almost a setup for propagation of these traits — what I have been calling “shared psychosis” but which others have also called “folie à millions,” or madness by the millions. This contagion of symptoms dissipates when exposure to the primary person is reduced. We already saw this happen when he was temporarily unable to hold rallies at the onset of the pandemic.

This is one of the psychological reasons why Donald Trump cannot leave the presidency — quite apart from the possibility of prosecution. It is also why we have said that his removal from the presidency and candidacy is of critical importance, as we have outlined since last March in our “Prescription for Survival.” Even if this were not achievable, taking steps in that direction will greatly diminish his psychological influence. One of the purposes of my writing a “Profile of the Nation” was to nudge our country out of its compartmentalized, either-or thinking, which is preventing us from seeing the full picture and from coordinating to remove this unfit presidency and candidacy.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

IRS probing National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre for possible criminal tax fraud: report

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is investigating National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre for potential criminal tax fraud in the wake of a referral from New York’s attorney general, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The reported probe comes after LaPierre, who collected $11.2 million in income from the NRA between 2014 and 2018, was accused of funneling millions in personal expenses through the nonprofit and its vendors in a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, which seeks to dissolve the organization.

James, whose lawsuit aims to remove LaPierre from his position as the group’s CEO and recoup millions in lost assets, said when she announced the move in August that she would refer her investigation’s findings to the IRS. The lawsuit also named several other NRA executives, alleging that had they contributed to the group’s $64 million loss over three years by awarding contracts to relatives and close associates and failing to comply with tax laws.

“Altogether, there are 18 causes of action, and these actions violated multiple laws, including the laws governing the NRA’s charitable status, false reporting on annual filings with my office and the IRS, improper expense documentation, improper wage reporting, improper income tax withholding, failure to make required excise tax reporting and payments; payments in excess of reasonable compensation to disqualified persons; and waste of NRA assets amongst other offenses,” she said at the time.

James said the investigation did not “come to a conclusion on whether or not [LaPierre] violated the Internal Revenue Code,” but that she would refer her findings to the IRS.

Kent Correll, an attorney for LaPierre, told The Journal that he was “not aware of any inquiry.”

“The NRA is not aware of any IRS inquiry, but of course, will fully cooperate with any appropriate requests for assistance,” William Brewer III, an outside attorney for the NRA, told the outlet, adding that the group’s tax filings are audited.

The IRS investigation is related to LaPierre’s personal taxes, according to the report.

James alleged that LaPierre had received undisclosed compensation through the NRA and its vendors in the form of lavish trips and expensive suits, among other benefits. The lawsuit claimed that the NRA did not include the compensation in LaPierre’s W-2 forms, which “permitted him to file false personal tax returns with the IRS.”

The report noted that underreported income would likely trigger a civil audit, but a criminal probe would require the IRS to “demonstrate that a taxpayer willfully underreported income, typically over multiple years.”

If it is a criminal case, “the IRS would be looking for evidence of concealment,” Mark Matthews, the former head of the agency’s Criminal Investigation unit, told The Journal.

Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., who also called on the IRS to investigate LaPierre, predicted that the investigation would “likely reveal a pervasive corrupt climate at the NRA, requiring direct action by the IRS and the Justice Department.”

The lawsuit alleged that LaPierre and his family flew on private jets to the Bahamas at least eight times over several years, costing the group more than $500,000. LaPierre allegedly stayed at a hotel paid for by a Hollywood producer, who was a major NRA vendor in the Bahamas, or on the producer’s 108-foot yacht, which was not disclosed.

LaPierre told James’ office that he had not disclosed the trips for security reasons. He argued they were work-related, because they included discussions about the NRA Women’s Leadership Forum, with which his wife and niece are involved.

“Any time I get the two of them together anywhere, there is a benefit for the NRA,” LaPierre told investigators, according to the lawsuit. “Yeah, they got together in the Bahamas . . . It could have been in Washington.”

He also said he relied on private jets for security reasons, and he was not aware there were limits on how much he could spend for private air travel.

The NRA also faces a separate lawsuit from D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, which accused the group of diverting funds from its charitable arm for “wasteful spending” by its executives. The lawsuit alleges that the NRA sought to “exploit” its charitable foundation with “risky multi-million-dollar loans” and charged the foundation “millions of dollars in fees without documentation of the work the NRA was performing.”

“Charitable organizations function as public trusts,” Racine said, “and District law requires them to use their funds to benefit the public — not to support political campaigns, lobbying or private interests.”

Gun control advocacy groups sent LaPierre their “thoughts and prayers” after the latest report, a knock on the NRA’s frequent refrain after school shootings.

“Wayne LaPierre’s decades of alleged self-dealing are finally catching up with him,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, “but the true cost of his reckless leadership of the NRA should be measured in lives lost, not dollars stolen.”

Rudy Giuliani can’t stop coughing while attacking Biden on Fox News for urging people to wear masks

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani repeatedly coughed throughout a Monday interview with Fox News as he attacked Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for urging Americans to listen to scientific experts and wear masks amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Giuliani told Fox News host Martha MacCallum that he was awaiting his test results after working in close contact with Trump and other advisers on the president’s debate preparation team, who have since tested positive for COVID-19.

“I actually got one about two hours ago,” Giuliani said, adding that his first test was negative. “I haven’t gotten the results yet. I went to NYU. I got one of those all the way in the back of the nose tests.”

He then went on to criticize Biden for telling Americans to follow the advice of scientific experts on the coronavirus.

“I would say to Joe that you don’t really understand what scientists are,” Giuliani said. “First of all, listen to your doctors. They know your personal history. Doctors really aren’t scientists. Scientists almost always have competing opinions. That’s what science is about.”

Giuliani, who coughed throughout the interview, went on to slam Biden’s mask advocacy.

“It isn’t science to be wearing that mask, Joe, when you are giving a speech, and people are 30-40 feet away from you,” he said. “The only thing you can infect is the teleprompter that’s near you, so I see through you. That’s a political statement to scare people — wearing that mask. You do not need that mask when you are standing at a podium.”

MacCallum noted that Biden had not gotten sick, while Trump just spent a weekend at the hospital with COVID-19.

Giuliani said he had not gotten sick, even though he “doesn’t wear masks as much” as he probably should.

"He's not asking people to take risks that he doesn't take," Rudy Giuliani claims of a president who has had access to the best testing and medical care in the world pic.twitter.com/qZ8gD0JM50

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2020

After the interview, MacCallum expressed concern about the former New York mayor’s cough.

“I hope that cough is not anything bad while you are waiting for your test to come back,” she said. “We hope you will be healthy and well.”

“I hope so, too,” Giuliani exclaimed.

Giuliani told Salon’s Roger Sollenberger after the interview that his test on Monday came back negative, and he had “no symptoms.”

Rudy was part of Trump's debate prep team and says he's awaiting the results of a coronavirus test pic.twitter.com/UZI9TN67w6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 6, 2020

Giuliani was part of Trump’s debate prep team, which included top aide Hope Hicks, former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and former Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., all of whom have since tested positive.

Giuliani said in another interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” that there was “no reason to delay” next week’s town hall debate in spite of Trump’s illness.

“The doctors assume that by a certain time, he’s going to be in condition. I assume he’s going to be in condition by then to do it. Can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t,” Giuliani said. “There’s only two more left. They’re enormously valuable to the American people, and I think he’ll make every effort to make it. I’m certain he will.”

The next debate is scheduled for Oct. 15. Biden told reporters on Monday that he would be willing to participate, but added that “we should be very cautious.”

“If scientists say that it’s safe . . . then I think that’s fine,” he said. “I’ll do whatever the experts say is appropriate for me to do.”

Biden’s campaign announced on Sunday that he had tested negative for the third time since facing Trump at last week’s debate.

This week’s vice presidential campaign between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is expected to feature a plexiglass barrier between the candidates.

Giuliani scoffed at any rule changes for the upcoming debates, particularly a reported change which would allow moderators to cut off candidates’ microphones after Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden and moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News last week.

“I would not put in new rules for — you know, in the middle of the campaign,” Giuliani said. “I would through us, or if they want to do it directly — I think maybe just remind both candidates, ‘Stay within your two minutes. Don’t interrupt.’ I think they both understand what happened last time.”

He claimed that the interrupting was part of Trump’s “strategy” for the debate.

“It was his strategy to stay on top of [Biden],” he said. “I think we told the president, ‘We don’t want the story coming out that he dominated you.’ And the president sure didn’t let that story come out.”

But polls found that voters in swing states did not view Trump’s incessant interruptions as a win. About two-in-three voters in Florida and Pennsylvania said they disapproved of Trump’s conduct at the debate, according to a New York Times/Siena poll, which found the race moving from a virtual tie to a solid Biden lead in the key swing states.

A CNN poll released on Tuesday following the debate and Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis showed Biden leading nationally by 16 points, with 63% of voters saying Trump had handled the risk of infection irresponsibly.

Trump’s Chernobyl moment: Phony patriotism can’t defeat this virus

There are so many scenes in Craig Mazin’s brilliant HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” that remind me of what’s happened here and now, in the United States, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Obviously, there are myriad similarities between the Soviet Union’s deceptive response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the White House’s deceptive response to COVID-19 — principally, Donald Trump’s intrinsic compulsion to lie about literally everything, even when it harms him politically.

The scenes that keep circulating in my head are the ones in which Soviet emergency workers exposed themselves to the immense geyser of nuclear radiation erupting from the exploded reactor No. 4. Dozens of men exposed themselves to innumerable cesium-137 and strontium-90 isotopes, every particle rampaging through their DNA, irreparably mutating it.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about the three workers who slosh through the facility’s underground tunnels in total darkness, up to their waists in irradiated water. Same goes for the Soviet soldiers ordered onto the roof of the building to dispose of the contaminated graphite from the explosion. Watching humans knowingly expose themselves to invisible yet catastrophically toxic conditions can be both unnerving and, yeah, a little inspiring given the selflessness of such actions. In retrospect, the same can be said for 9/11 rescue personnel at Ground Zero.

The Chernobyl workers did all that, knowing they were taking deadly risks. But the crisis had to be mitigated before the core melted down, killing untold millions.

Now, whenever I watch the video of the Rose Garden ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination, I think about Chernobyl.

The White House staffers and other government officials who attended what we now know was a super-spreader event, were the furthest thing from being heroes — worlds away from those emergency workers at Chernobyl. It was yet another painful reminder that the executive branch of our federal government is being run by irredeemable nincompoops who behave more like the Three Stooges trying to fix the plumbing than competent leaders facing an unprecedented national crisis.

It turns out that the president and his guests were, themselves, the exploded Chernobyl reactor.

It’s both haunting and confounding to watch that video, showing everyone from Trump himself to Barrett and her family to Kellyanne Conway and Bill Barr, back-slapping and close-talking through an invisible haze of coronavirus germs, each maskless imbecile falsely believing they were somehow immune to the pathogen. Some attendees were the spreaders while some were the recipients of the COVID germs. They were all acting recklessly, endangering themselves and everyone they know, while further manifesting both a pandemic and a national security nightmare.

Now that we know what transpired there, it’s like watching a group of blindfolded children armed with loaded machine guns wandering around a backyard birthday party.

It’s not just that we can see precisely when many of the attendees absorbed the coronavirus into their bodies, which is shocking and creepy to witness. It’s the hubris with which they handled themselves, refusing to wear masks and refusing to distance, as if the pandemic had never happened, or as if they’re too hoity-toity to mess up their hair and makeup. These are supposed to be the no-nonsense generals on the battlefield, facing off against this virus, and instead of doing the bare minimum to keep themselves (and everyone they know) safe, they simply ignored the risks, basking in a Pyrrhic victory against the libs. Screw the hoax, we just secured a sixth right-winger on the Supreme Court! [Cough cough gasp!]

Perhaps even the president and first lady, who both contracted COVID, were infected that day. We don’t know for sure since Trump’s suspiciously evasive doctors and White House staffers have refused to reveal when the president’s last negative test was administered.

The behavior of White House staff, including Barrett’s entourage, was a shameful example of a broader dynamic we’ve been witnessing here since the beginning of all this. Trump and his political cult, the Red Hats, have chosen to face the pandemic with a laughable if not tragic gambit. Instead of doing what’s proven to be effective against contagious diseases — masks, distancing and so on — they instead chose to fall back on the old American standby: intimidating the “invisible enemy” as if it will eventually retreat in the face of American patriotism and resolve.

Sorry, Red Hats. The virus isn’t al-Qaida. It can’t be browbeaten into slinking back to a spider hole in Afghanistan. Your patriotic defiance is useless.

Hubris didn’t protect Trump, and it won’t protect his Red Hat cult.

If you behave stupidly, no matter how many flags you wave and no matter how tough you talk, you will get sick. Likewise, deliberately exposing yourself will only worsen the thing. It’s not a badge of honor to needlessly risk infection. Many of Trump’s cultists seem to believe it’s like getting cancer — it will only affect you personally. It’s not. It affects everyone you know, putting them all at risk, while worsening the crisis for our entire society, sparking all kinds of negative ramifications.

Trump and his White House approached COVID as if they could defy the virus or outsmart it, while refusing to do the bare minimum to protect themselves and their families. Knowing this, it was only a matter of time before the Trump administration and the Republican Party outpaced the weekly infection rate in entire nations.

Even now, after being hospitalized for it, Trump continues to behave recklessly, insisting upon a drive-by to wave at his (maskless) supporters outside Walter Reed Medical Center, and, on Monday, insisting that he be released from the hospital and returned to the White House, where he is likely to infect more members of his West Wing staff, his Secret Service detail and the residence staff. After arriving at the White House on Monday evening, Trump removed his mask before entering the building, potentially infecting everyone in his immediate surroundings. No humility. No common sense. He. Will. Not. Learn.

Anyone who thought he’d go through an Ebenezer Scrooge moment, suddenly realizing the seriousness of all this, once again got suckered by a professional con-man. I wouldn’t be shocked if he went back to staging super-spreader campaign rallies by next week. Maybe sooner. I fully expect his Red Hats will follow his lead. They’ll refuse to wear masks, they’ll refuse to distance — after all, COVID didn’t kill their cult leader so it’s no biggie, right? The idiocratic hubris will grow even more reckless and even more insufferable in the coming weeks, all because Trump thinks he’s invincible now — a side effect of his unstable personality enhanced by a heavy course of dexamethasone.

If you thought Trump was an impetuous dingbat before having this disease, wait until you see him after he survives it. The nonsense, the lies, the propaganda and the ineffectual defiance will continue, perhaps turned up to 11. People will die due to his continued hubris, and he won’t care. To date, the president hasn’t attended a single memorial service or called for a moment of silence for any of the 210,000 Americans who’ve succumbed to this. I don’t expect he ever will.

Normal people learn from their mistakes, but Trump isn’t normal people. The carelessness will worsen rather than improve. The bad example will spread to his cult members, who will endanger even more of us. It’s already started. One thing’s for sure, though: It’s given a lot of Americans yet another reason to vote against Trump and his entire regime of nincompoops.

Meanwhile, as a result of his actions, Trump is as politically radioactive as he is a COVID vector. The brutal lessons of Chernobyl will continue to be ignored and the death toll from the “Rose Garden Massacre” remains to be seen. But there will be a death toll — either directly or by way of the president’s foolishly hubristic leadership.

Gavin Newsom and Big Oil: It’s complicated

It was early November 2018, and the boosters of Kern County were nervous. Gavin Newsom had been elected governor of California a few days before, and he had promised all campaign long to get tough on California’s oil industry. At the county’s annual Energy Summit, Lorelei Oviatt, director of the county’s planning and natural resources department, let it be known in a freewheeling speech that California’s oil industry was not going down without a fight.

She reserved the bulk of her ire for the climate activists who rode herd on then-Gov. Jerry Brown that year and now had their sights set on Newsom: the “Keep It in the Ground folks who believe in the idea that we should Just. Stop. Producing. Oil. Like, right now.”

A bit later, B. Joe Ashley of the California Resources Corporation, an oil and natural gas producer, elaborated: “We as Californians still import oil at the rate of about 350 million barrels per year” at the cost of roughly $26.6 billion that year, when oil sold for around $74 a barrel.

If you had tuned in to now-Governor Newsom’s climate-week talk with Van Jones on Thursday, September 24, you would have heard some of those same arguments—from Newsom. “We’ve been importing [oil] from Colombia, Ecuador and Saudi Arabia,” the governor said, implying that California can’t stop drilling for oil until it stops overconsuming. “And trust me—they don’t care much about labor standards or environmental standards.”

If Newsom had looked too good to be true in his first months in office, the Keep It in the Ground folks would soon learn how little time it would take both the governor and the legislature to edge in the opposite direction of environmental advocacy — scuttling a proposed “setback” law, Assembly Bill 345, which would have directed regulators to consider mandating space between drilling operations and “schools, playgrounds, and public facilities where children are present,” and killing outright a bill that would tax producers for the resources extracted from California’s ground—an instrument known as a “severance tax,” which every other oil-producing state imposes, from Alaska to Wyoming to Texas.

Despite Newsom’s early speeches, it was Oviatt’s battle cry that continued to echo the loudest in Sacramento.

In the first six months of his administration, the governor approved twice as many “fracking” permits as his predecessor did during the same time period the year before. Subsequent fracking permit approvals that went to Aera Energy, an ExxonMobil-Shell partnership and one of the major oil companies in the state, happened with the help of lobbyists with connections to the governor, as Steve Horn reported for Capital & Main in June.

During those same six months, FracTracker Alliance and Consumer Watchdog found that permits for new oil and gas production wells overall have shot up nearly 190 percent. According to Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, “Those permits hang over us like a sword of Damocles.” When oil prices go up again, if they ever do, producers can frack away at their already-permitted wells.

Newsom spoke to Jones the day after he had issued an ambitious executive order, setting a goal of ending sales of gas-powered passenger vehicles in the state starting in 2035, building out electric-vehicle charging infrastructure and extending the zero-emissions mandate to “medium- and heavy-duty vehicles” by 2045.

The Environmental Defense Fund hailed the move as “a bold plan for a clean future”; The Mercury News labeled it “historic,” as it unarguably is. But to a host of organizations that have long been calling for an end to California oil production the executive order was a letdown.

“Setting a timeline to eliminate petroleum vehicles is a big step,” Siegel wrote in an email following the announcement. But it was “rhetoric rather than real action on the other critical half of the climate problem—California’s dirty oil production.”

Liza Tucker of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group, had a similar reaction: Banning sales of new gas-powered cars addresses only the demand side of the climate equation. And that’s all good, she said, “but if you don’t accompany it with a transition off the actual production of fossil fuels, you’re clapping with one hand.”

* * *

Newsom’s first moves in office looked auspicious for the cause of reducing the state’s carbon emissions. His first budget proposal included $1.5 million to study what a “managed decline” of the petroleum business would look like. And in October of 2019 he signed legislation changing the name of the Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, commonly known as DOGGR, to the Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), and emphasized the division’s mandate to protect public health and safety.

When, in July of 2019, Newsom fired the state’s top oil and gas regulator after Consumer Watchdog and FracTracker Alliance found that several of his staff held investments in oil companies under their watch, it appeared Newsom had put the state on a clear path to shaking off oil’s influence once and for all, verifying California’s status as a leader on climate solutions. “The steps he’s taken so far are very encouraging,” Sierra Club California director Kathryn Phillips told me at the time. “I’m anticipating we’ll be seeing more.”

The setback law, authored by State Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat whose district includes PBF Energy’s Torrance, California, refinery, was not supported by Newsom, despite his promises to prioritize public health in regard to the fossil-fuel industry. “He said that in November of 2019,” Siegel recalled. “He said, ‘We’re going to protect public health.'” He directed CalGEM to consider setback rules in its new health and safety regulations. “And over 300 days later, they’re telling us they might finish this health rulemaking by the third quarter of 2022. But people are sick now. The state is on fire now.”

The new executive order at least sets a deadline for a draft rule by the end of 2020. “But under California law, an agency can take up to 12 months to finalize a proposed rule,” Siegel said. “So, still way too slow.”

Siegel noted that the California Council on Science and Technology in 2015 recommended establishing “science-based setbacks” for oil and gas operations in populated areas, where human health can be compromised by toxic emissions. “After that study, [California regulators] said that decisions on oil and gas in California would be made on science. And that promise has been broken over and over and over again.”

The people who live near oil-and-gas operations—14 percent of California’s population, bysome estimates—know all too well what it means to be studied. Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in an online forum after the climate-week conference, “It means that you’re going to ignore us until it’s no longer convenient for you. And hopefully you can ignore us until you’re out of office, and then you never have to address us.”

To Liza Tucker, the time for studies is over. “Every time you hear, ‘We need another study,’ you know that’s a stalling tactic,” she said.

* * *

No one disputes that California, and both governors Brown and now Newsom, have done more to reduce greenhouse gases than any other state leader. On Thursday, the governor announced more initiatives to join the global community in assessing the risk of impending climate-fueled catastrophe, and move state pension fund investments to low-carbon indexes. Nor is Newsom wrong about California’s demand for oil. The state has tens of millions of internal-combustion engines to feed, making it, in 2018—the last year for which data is available—the second-largest U.S. state source of carbon-dioxide emissions related to energy consumption, and the second-largest consumer of petroleum. (Texas ranks first in both categories.)

Climate experts insist there are, nevertheless, reasons for phasing out California’s oil industry, regardless of how much the state uses. The supply that comes out of California’s ground amounts to little more than 4 percent of the nation’s petroleum production, and it has already declined by nearly 60 percent since the mid-1980s. But it is an intensely dirty, climate-damaging kind of oil that keeps the state’s refineries in the business of processing the world’s most carbon-intensive oil.

Hydrocarbons are, as the name suggests, a mix of hydrogen and carbon; refining balances the ratio to send products to market. Light oil that comes from North Dakota’s Bakken Formation tilts so far toward the hydrogen side of the equation that some producers say you can put it straight into your tank. California’s oil, on the other hand, is so heavy it can only be processed at the state’s own refineries.

“The refining infrastructure in California is all geared toward that difficult oil,” Deborah Gordon, a noted international oil expert at Brown University, told me in 2018. California’s refineries are so specialized toward heavy oil, in fact, that they’re also where Canadian oil producers send their Athabasca oil-sands crude—which, according to the Carnegie Oil-Climate Index, which Gordon pioneered, is the only oil that rivals California’s in carbon content. And the more carbon that has to be refined out of oil, the worse for the climate that oil is.

California crude is also complicated by the amount of energy it takes to extract it. In the state’s aging fields, where oil is viscous and stuck in rocks, as much as 40 percent of California’s oil production requires the injection of high-pressure steam to melt the oil to a suitable consistency for extraction. “It’s like turning peanut butter into honey,” Gordon explained. That steam is usually produced with a natural-gas plant, further burdening the climate with carbon emissions and leaks of methane—the primary component of natural gas and an intense, short-term climate pollutant.

Steam injection was the culprit behind last year’s dramatic spill of more than 1 billion gallons of oil from a Chevron-operated facility in Kern County. It also infamously led to the 2011 death of Chevron engineer Robert David Taylor, who was burned alive in a hot and toxic sinkhole where the ground surface had been weakened by rampant steam injection. Newsom in November 2019 declared a moratorium on new wells that use the technique, which is still in effect. At already-permitted wells, however, operators are free to steam—and spill.

Though “surface expressions” of oil are technically illegal, oil companies rarely, if ever, face prosecution, reported Janet Wilson of The Desert Sun and Lylla Younes of ProPublica last week. They are also free to “scoop up any oil that cracks the surface,” Wilson and Younes wrote, and sell the spilled oil for profit.

Newsom’s new executive order does call for a ban on new permits for hydrofracturing, the controversial practice of injecting a high-pressure, chemical-laced slurry of sand and water into the ground to break up oil-bearing rock, but it does nothing new to curtail steam injection. “I call it ‘steam-fracking,'” said Consumer Watchdog’s Liza Tucker.

With COVID-19–related stay-at-home orders and a falling economy driving oil prices to rock bottom, “we don’t know how many of those permits are actually being used,” Tucker said. “We are demanding that they tell us how many of them have been used.” The permits are officially valid for a year, but drillers almost always apply for a one-year extension, which is hardly ever denied. “They say it’s two years, because they’re assuming no one will ever call them out,” Tucker said.

The oil industry has clearly not given up hope on California. The Western States Petroleum Association, the industry’s main trade group and always one of its most profligate spenders among the Sacramento lobbying set, has spent $11 million persuading lawmakers and regulators from January 1, 2019, through June 30 of this year—only $4 million less than the previous legislative session with six months of reporting yet to go. But environmentalists haven’t given up, either, said Siegel.

“This is a make-or-break moment for Newsom,” she said. “The eyes of the world are on him right now because of the fires and the urgency of the situation. So I am still hopeful he’ll be the leader we need.” But so far, she said, “it’s been one disappointment after another.”

String of fatal poisonings from ingestion of toxic hand sanitizer highlights limits of FDA powers

A 44-year-old man in the Southwest, seeking medical treatment after his vision suddenly deteriorated in late spring, admitted that he had been drinking hand sanitizer for a few days. Blood tests revealed he had been poisoned by methanol, an extremely toxic form of alcohol that is never supposed to be used in consumer products like hand sanitizer. Despite treatment, he was left permanently blind.

The case was part of a disturbing trend that toxicologists in New Mexico and Arizona caught wind of beginning in May. Dr. Steven Seifert, medical director of the New Mexico Poison and Drug Information Center, noticed that two adults had been hospitalized after drinking hand sanitizer made with methanol. In June, the center treated three more adults who had been poisoned by methanol, making it “absolutely clear that there was something circulating in our state,” said Seifert, who notified New Mexico’s Department of Public Health.

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered a huge spike in demand for hand sanitizer, and with it, a shortage of ethanol, which is typically used as the active ingredient in hand sanitizers. That may be leading to the use of a highly toxic substitute — methanol, or wood alcohol — in products that have been rushed onto store shelves in the United States. The FDA has counted 17 deaths from exposure to methanol-tainted sanitizer this year, and spokesman Jeremy Kahn says the agency has received an additional 2,000 reports of exposure or injuries.

It’s a vivid example of the Food and Drug Administration’s lack of authority to crack down on dangerous over-the-counter drugs, a category that includes hand sanitizers. The FDA has responded by issuing numerous alerts about the dangers of ingesting methanol-containing sanitizers and asking manufacturers to issue recalls. But the agency lacks authority to force recalls, and some manufacturers have delayed taking action, according to warnings issued by the FDA and a FairWarning review of the agency’s database of hand sanitizers to avoid.

Despite the FDA’s warnings, methanol-tainted hand sanitizer ended up at retail outlets across the U.S., including at Dollar Tree, where it was sold as the store brand, according to the FDA. The retail chain stopped selling it after the manufacturer recalled it and said in an email, “We continue to be committed to our customers’ safety.”

In another case, on July 1, the FDA told a Mexican company, Soluciones Cosméticas, that samples of its Bersih brand sanitizer seized at the border by customs agents were found to be contaminated with methanol. But it took another two weeks before the company agreed to pull the product from store shelves in the U.S., according to a warning letterthat the FDA sent. The agency also asked the company to recall two other brands of hand sanitizer it manufactured and sold for U.S. consumers, but if it’s done so, it hasn’t yet notified the FDA. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Another Mexican producer, Eskbiochem, made nine different methanol-tainted sanitizers sold in the U.S., the FDA said. While some distributors have agreed to pull products made at the company’s factory, Eskbiochem has not yet agreed to issue a recall across its production chain, or at least hasn’t notified FDA that it plans to do so, according to another FDA warning letter. The FDA says it will continue having Eskbiochem’s products seized at the border if the company does not comply. A person who answered the phone at company headquarters declined to respond to questions.

“I think consumers would be shocked to learn that the FDA doesn’t have authority to pull those products,” said Dr. Michael Carome, director of the Health Research Group at the advocacy organization Public Citizen, which has arguedfor giving the FDA the power to force recalls of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. (Hand sanitizer is classified as an over-the-counter drug.)

FDA officials declined comment on whether the agency should have recall authority over drugs. But in a written statement, they said patient safety is its “top priority. The FDA continues to warn consumers and health care professionals not to use the nearly 200 entries currently on the agency’s hand sanitizer list.” According to the statement, “The agency has taken additional action to help prevent certain hand sanitizers from entering the United States by placing them on an import alert. “

The FDA has long had the power to order recalls of defective medical devices. It gained authority to force recalls of contaminated food under the Food Safety Modernization Act signed into law in 2011. A year later, the agency used the power for the first time to shut down a peanut butter factory linked to salmonella poisoning that sickened 41 people.

But an attempt by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., to give the agency similar authority over drug manufacturers was opposed by the industry and failed in 2017.

Toxicologists say methanol should never be used in hand sanitizer, because it could poison people who drink it as a substitute for other forms of alcohol.

Despite the perils of its potent alcohol content, hand sanitizer has “always been kind of popular,” said Dr. William Banner, the medical director for the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information and past president of the American Association of Poison Control Centers. “But the fact that now it’s contaminated is what the difference is.”

Hand sanitizer typically contains about 60 percent ethanol, the same form of alcohol used in beer, wine and spirits, at a fraction of the cost. “It’s usually the product of desperation, like you can’t get access to it, I don’t have money, I don’t have transportation,” said Tony Pizon, the chief of medical toxicology at the Pittsburgh Poison Center.

The FDA has also been issuing warnings about hand sanitizers with other problem ingredients, such as 1-propanol, another extremely toxic form of alcohol.

Most producers of methanol-containing sanitizers have agreed to recall their products after the FDA flagged them, according to a review of the FDA’s database, but more brands continue to be added to the FDA’s warning list, which included nearly 200 products as of Sept. 17. The agency does not have a breakdown of how many problem hand sanitizers are still for sale in the U.S. compared to how many have been voluntarily recalled.

Data from poison control centers suggests that Americans are still accessing methanol-contaminated sanitizers, though the numbers have fallen following the FDA’s warnings. During the first half of September, the American Association of Poison Control Centers said it received 27 case reports about methanol-containing products, after getting 1,280 reports in July and 384 in August.

In most cases, people reported using the product on their skin or inhaling vapors and did not suffer observable injuries, but called poison control centers after finding out the substance was toxic. Though it’s never a good idea to rub a toxic substance on your skin, toxicologists say that the risk of getting methanol poisoning from using hand sanitizer as intended is minimal. Children and toddlers have been treated at poison control centers after ingesting sanitizer, but most of the people ingesting hand sanitizer have been adults, toxicologists say.

“The poison centers get calls about hand sanitizer ingestions every year, but this year there is an increase,” said Dr. Anne-Michelle Ruha, a medical toxicologist at the Banner Poison and Drug Information Center in Phoenix.

Last year, from May through late August, the Phoenix center treated 81 patients who had ingested hand sanitizer. This year that figure reached 205 in the same period. And in 25 of those cases, toxicologists suspected or confirmed that the patients had ingested methanol. Some of the cases were from the Navajo reservation, Ruha said.

The reservation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, has long banned alcohol sales to curb substance abuse, though people can easily buy alcohol in neighboring towns, and some people seek out hand sanitizer instead because it’s more affordable, Shardai Pioche, a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, previously told NBC News.

Typically adults who drink ethanol sanitizers don’t seek medical treatment unless they have misjudged their intake. Methanol, on the other hand, can cause vision and brain damage when consumed in small amounts. “Talk about drinking and pickling your brain, that takes years,” said Banner, the Oklahoma poison center medical director. “With methanol, one time will do it.”

Ethanol and methanol smell and look the same. The toxic effects of methanol don’t become apparent until it is metabolized. Early signs of methanol poisoning are rapid breathing and an upset stomach. Victims then typically experience fuzzy tunnel vision that seems like being in a snowstorm. “And then pretty soon, it’s a whiteout,” Banner said.

The toxic effects can be reversed with medication if treated in time. The toxicologists in New Mexico and Arizona who noticed a spike in methanol poisonings published a report in August. Together, they had treated 15 adults in May and June. Four died and three suffered vision loss. All were adults ages 21 to 65 and “had a history of swallowing alcohol-based hand sanitizer products,” the report says.

Toxicologists advise consumers to use sanitizer only as intended. “You can’t sanitize your child,” Banner said. “You can’t rub it all over them, head to toe [and] think you’re helping them out, because you’re not.”

But deterring people from drinking sanitizer is more complicated. According to Seifert, of the New Mexico poison center, “when people do have difficulty getting access to their usual source of ethanol, they may start looking for alternative sources, and that may be a factor that drove this particular epidemic.”

Inside the flawed White House testing scheme that failed to protect Trump

President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis is raising fresh questions about the White House’s strategy for testing and containing the virus for a president whose cavalier attitude about the coronavirus has persisted since it landed on American shores.

The president has said others are tested before getting close to him, appearing to hold it as an iron shield of safety. He has largely eschewed mask-wearing and social distancing in meetings, travel and public events, while holding rallies for thousands of often maskless supporters.

The Trump administration has increasingly pinned its coronavirus testing strategy for the nation on antigen tests, which do not need a traditional lab for processing and quickly return results to patients. But the results are less accurate than those of the slower PCR tests.

An early Abbott test used by the White House was plagued with problems, with multiple researchers finding that it was less accurate than rival companies’ tests in picking up positive cases. But the new antigen test the White House is using has not been independently evaluated for accuracy and reliability. Moreover, the Trump administration recently shipped antigen tests from Abbott and other manufacturers to thousands of nursing homes to test residents and staff.

Testing “isn’t a ‘get out of jail free card,'” said Dr. Alan Wells, medical director of clinical labs at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and creator of its test for the novel coronavirus. In general, antigen tests can miss up to half the cases that are detected by polymerase chain reaction tests, depending on the population of patients tested, he said.

The White House said the president’s diagnosis was confirmed with a PCR test but declined to say which test delivered his initial result. The White House has been using a new antigen test from Abbott Laboratories to screen its staff for COVID-19, according to two administration officials.

The test, known as BinaxNOW, received an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in August. It produces results in 15 minutes. Yet little is independently known about how effective it is. According to the company, the test is 97% accurate in detecting positives and 98.5% accurate in identifying those without disease. Abbott’s stated performance of its antigen test was based on examining people within seven days of COVID symptoms appearing.

The president and first lady have both had symptoms, according to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the first lady’s Twitter account. The president was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday evening “out of an abundance of caution,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement.

Vice President Mike Pence is also tested daily for the virus and tested negative, spokesperson Devin O’Malley said Friday, but he did not respond to a follow-up question about which test was used.

Trump heavily promoted another Abbott rapid testing device, the ID NOW, earlier this year. That PCR test for months was used on White House staff, visitors and reporters. But it relies on different technology than the newer Abbott antigen test – even though both are meant to diagnose whether someone is infected.

“I have not seen any independent evaluation of the Binax assay in the literature or in the blogs,” Wells said. “It is an unknown.”

The Department of Health and Human Services announced in August that it had signed a $760 million contract with Abbott for 150 million BinaxNOW antigen tests, which are now being distributed to nursing homes and historically black colleges and universities, as well as to governors to help inform decisions about opening and closing schools. The Big Ten football conference has also pinned playing hopes on the deployment of antigen tests following Trump’s political pressure.

However, even senior federal officials concede that a test alone isn’t likely to stop the spread of a virus that has sickened more than 7 million Americans.

“Testing does not substitute for avoiding crowded indoor spaces, washing hands, or wearing a mask when you can’t physically distance; further, a negative test today does not mean that you won’t be positive tomorrow,” Adm. Brett Giroir, the senior HHS official helming the administration’s testing effort, said in a statement at the time.

Trump could be part of a “super-spreading event,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Given the timing of Trump’s positive test — which he announced on Twitter early Friday — his infection “likely happened five or more days ago,” Osterholm said. “If so, then he was widely infectious as early as Tuesday,” the day of the first presidential debate in Cleveland.

At least seven people who attended a Rose Garden announcement last Saturday, when Trump announced his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, have since tested positive for the coronavirus. They include Trump’s former adviser Kellyanne Conway, Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, and the president of the University of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins.

“Having that many infected people there all at one time, we’re still going to see transmission coming off that event for a couple days,” Osterholm said.

Osterholm notes that about 20% of infected people lead to 80% of COVID-19 cases, because “super spreaders” can infect so many people at once.

He notes that participants and audience members at Tuesday’s debate were separated by at least six feet. But six feet isn’t always enough to prevent infection, he said.

While many COVID-19 infections appear to be spread by respiratory droplets, which usually fall to the ground within six feet, people who are singing or speaking loudly can project virus much further. Evidence also suggests that the novel coronavirus can spread through aerosols, floating in the air like a speck of dust.

“I wonder how much virus was floating in that room that night,” Osterholm said.

Other experts say it’s too soon to say whether Trump was infected in a super-spreader event. “The president and his wife have had many exposures to many people in enclosed venues without protection,” so they could have been infected at any number of places, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Although Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden tested negative for the virus with a PCR test Friday, experts note that false-negative results are common in the first few days after infection. Test results over the next several days will yield more useful information.

It can take more than a week for the virus to reproduce enough to be detected, Wells said: “You are probably not detectable for three, five, seven, even 10 days after you’re exposed.”

In Minnesota, where Trump held an outdoor campaign rally in Duluth with hundreds of attendees Wednesday, health officials warned that a 14-day quarantine is necessary, regardless of test results.

“Anyone who was a direct contact of President Trump or known COVID-19 cases needs to quarantine and should get tested,” the Minnesota Department of Health said.

Ongoing lapses in test result reporting could hamper efforts to track and isolate sick people. As of Sept. 10, 21 states and the District of Columbia were not reporting all antigen test results, according to a KHN investigation, a lapse in reporting that officials say leaves them blind to disease spread. Since then, public health departments in Arizona, North Carolina and South Dakota all have announced plans to add antigen testing to their case reporting.

Requests for comment to the D.C. Department of Health were referred to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office, which did not respond. District health officials told KHN in early September that the White House does not report antigen test results to them — a potential violation of federal law under the CARES Act, which says any institution performing tests to diagnose COVID-19 must report all results to local or state public health departments.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said it’s not surprising that Trump tested positive, given that so many of his close associates — including his national security adviser and Secret Service officers — have also been infected by the virus.

“When you look at the number of social contacts and travel schedules, it’s not surprising,” Adalja said.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

What is the White House hiding? That’s where reporters need to push

Amid all the essential questions that the White House refuses to answer about Donald Trump’s COVID-19 infection, journalists should pay particular attention to the ones it is refusing to answer most aggressively.

Possibly chief among those is: When was Trump’s last negative test? Reporters have repeatedly asked and the Trump team steadfastly refuses to say, even though there ought to be nothing remotely controversial about it.

“I don’t want to go backwards,” was the latest smiling brushoff, this one from White House physician Sean Conley on Monday afternoon. “Everyone wants that,” he chuckled after he was asked again, and again refused to say.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who has since tested positive herself, was asked on Sunday whether Trump had been tested before he went to the debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland last Tuesday. McEnany bristled: “Yeah, I’m not going to give you a detailed readout with timestamps every time the president’s tested.”

Trump's doctors and aides won't say when his last negative test was done, so it seems fair to assume that the answer is embarrassing. He was required to be tested before last Tuesday's debate — if he actually was tested, wouldn't they just say so?

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 5, 2020

What this strongly suggests, of course, is that Trump’s last negative test was not recent and, in particular, that he either wasn’t tested — or perhaps even tested positive – before Tuesday night’s debate.

WH refusal to give date of Trump’s last negative test indicates 1 of 2 things:

1. they’ve been lying about the frequency of his testing, including whether he was tested before debating Biden

2. he tested positive earlier than they’ve acknowledged, which was 2 days after debate

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 5, 2020

That positive-test scenario isn’t inconceivable if you consider that the White House seems to consider results from its problematic rapid-response tests dispositive only when they are negative.

When the White House gets negatives on this test, they treat it as gospel. When they get positives, they question whether it's a false positive. https://t.co/S5Gt5hruRx

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 5, 2020

We need to find out when Trump’s last negative test was. We need to find out how often Trump was tested. And of course we need to find out if he had a positive test before the ones on Thursday.

According to the current White House timeline, Trump tested positive on a rapid-response test Thursday evening — then basically lied to Fox News’ Sean Hannity by saying he didn’t have results yet — before it was “confirmed” with a more reliable test later that night, making it official.

But did he test positive on a rapid-response test before that? Or — here’s another possibility — did he stop taking regular tests precisely because he had reason to believe he was infected?

As Reuters reporter Jeff Mason told Democracy Now on Monday: “The one thing they have been saying repeatedly throughout the last several weeks and months of this pandemic is that he is tested very regularly. I think many people assume that that would mean that he is tested on a daily basis, which would have included that Tuesday of that debate.”

Everybody besides Trump and his entourage was tested independently, but Trump arrived too late. Debate moderator and Fox News host Chris Wallace said that Trump was on the “honor system.”

If Trump can be shown to have known or suspected that he was infected on Tuesday, or earlier, then the world will know he chose to endanger Biden and everyone else at the debate rather than do the responsible thing and bow out.

And as we can never forget, Trump was even more irritable and sweaty than usual that night. Similarly, on Wednesday, Trump traveled to Minnesota for a rally but inexplicably cut it short.

Of course, Trump putting his own interests ahead of everyone else’s would hardly be out of character. It’s already public knowledge that he went to a fundraiser in New Jersey on Thursday after knowing — at the very least! — that he had been exposed to COVID via his adviser Hope Hicks.

According to rules that most of the rest of us follow, he should have quarantined right then and there, at the very latest.

Why block contact tracing?

Another hugely important topic that Trump’s team has been cagey about is contact tracing. Assuming that the Sept. 26 Rose Garden party for Amy Coney Barrett was a super-spreader event, which it certainly appears to have been, you’d think they’d want to find out what happened and try to stop the spread going forward.

But, oddly, they don’t.

In fact, they seem to be preventing it.

This despite the fact that, as Apoorva Mandavilli and Tracey Tully wrote in the New York Times on Monday:

Any of the closely packed guests and staff members at the Rose Garden ceremony could have gone on to transmit the virus to many others, so the White House’s decision not to investigate the cluster of infections, and pinpoint the source, has potentially devastating consequences for hundreds of people, several experts warned.

The obvious question then is: What are they hiding?

It’s an enormous outbreak, so everything about it is embarrassing, but the brazenness of the response suggest White House officials are worried about something specific coming out about how the super-spreader was allowed into the festivities.

And when you think about it, the most likely reasons for that are either that the White House testing system coughed up a critical false negative — or that someone who should have been tested wasn’t.

As with most other White House visitors allowed in proximity to the president, attendees were tested using the Abbott Laboratories ID Now rapid test. But as Sarah Toy and Daniela Hernandez reported for the Wall Street Journal on Sunday: “Some studies have shown that the Abbott Now ID test, which can produce a result in minutes, has around a 91% sensitivity — meaning 9% of tests can produce false negatives.”

They quoted Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, as saying: “A metal detector that misses 10% of weapons — you’d never, ever say that’s our only layer of protection for the president.”

So that’s possibility No. 1: The White House’s vaunted protection mechanism against outsiders carrying the virus is ineffective, and did not remotely justify the violations of mask-wearing and social-distancing rules that have been amply chronicled at the event.

But possibility No. 2 is that the super-spreading was an inside job — that White House staffers attending the event had either been poorly tested or not tested at all.

Rachana Pradhan, Lauren Weber and Liz Szabo reported for Kaiser Health News on Friday that the White House has been using a new, different test — an antigen test, also from Abbott Laboratories — to screen its own staff:

The test, known as BinaxNOW, received an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in August. It produces results in 15 minutes. Yet little is independently known about how effective it is. According to the company, the test is 97% accurate in detecting positives and 98.5% accurate in identifying those without disease. Abbott’s stated performance of its antigen test was based on examining people within seven days of COVID symptoms appearing.

So maybe that test failed spectacularly.

But it could also be that White House staff isn’t being tested as diligently as we thought. That would be consistent with the White House’s refusal to say when Trump himself last tested negative.

And it would be in character. Doesn’t it seem likely that Trump’s family and other favorites weren’t being tested often, if at all — and that one of them brought the virus to the party?

That would be a secret worth fighting to protect.

The cocktail question

Here’s another question the White House is energetically obfuscating: When exactly did Trump get his IV with the super-experimental Regeneron cocktail?

That cocktail is considered most likely to be effective before the infection really sets in, so it’s safe to assume he took it fairly soon after his medical team realized he was infected.

At the Saturday press conference, medical-team member Brian Garibaldi said Trump had received the cocktail 48 hours earlier — which would have been Thursday morning.

In a memo ostensibly “correcting” that statement — as well as Conley’s own statement that indicated an initial diagnosis on Wednesday morning — Conley wrote that Trump “had received” the cocktail on Friday. That leaves open the possibility that he got it earlier.

A related key question: When did the White House reach out to Regeneron to get a dose? It would have required special permission and delivery from Regeneron, as well as clearance from the FDA.

The big picture

There are of course many important questions about Trump’s medical condition that remain unanswered. For instance, Conley unsubtly dodged questions on Monday afternoon about whether Trump had pneumonia or any other kind of lung problems. We actually know very little, factually, about his current condition.

But the unanswered questions regarding his past conduct have something important in common: They address whether Trump considered the moral as well as personal consequences of his actions.

And although most of us know the answer to that already — because it’s always the same answer — members of Trump’s team are fighting to obscure these specific facts, presumably because they would depict Trump’s astonishing lack of personal responsibility with even more resonance than usual.

So whenever the un-cover-up finally happens, it could be brutal.

Trump campaign discussing plans to appoint its own state electors, no matter the results: report

Trump campaign officials and legal advisers are reportedly preparing to appoint their own state electors as a way to secure victory in a contested election, a move that would precipitate an unprecedented constitutional crisis.

The country will in all likelihood not know the outcome of the presidential election on Election Day. It is likely, given a raft of threatening public statements from President Trump, that he will reject unfavorable results.

The president is not directly elected by the people — the official votes are cast by electors on behalf of the voters in their states. Though states have historically chosen their electors by popular vote, the Constitution does not mandate that, saying only that a state shall appoint its electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

Every state has allowed its voters to make the call in every election since the late 1800s. But in 2000, the Supreme Court held in Bush v. Gore that the states “can take back the power to appoint electors.”

According to a Sept. 23 article in The Atlantic, campaign advisers to Trump, in conjunction with Republican state leaders, are preparing to test this theory. Sources in the Republican Party, at both state and national levels, say that the campaign is considering a plan to “bypass” the popular vote results and install its own electors in key battleground states where the legislatures are controlled by Republicans.

Republicans control both legislative bodies in the six closest battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of those six, both Arizona and Florida have Republican governors.

After the national election, the plan goes, the Trump campaign would cry foul about rampant fraud and demand that state legislators ignore the ballot tabulations and choose their electors directly. If the campaign can sustain doubt or confusion about the ballot count, legislators will feel more and more pressure to take up the responsibility before the Dec. 8 deadline when electors’ names are sent to Congress for verification.

The Atlantic reported that a Trump campaign legal adviser said this effort would be framed as protecting the will of the people.

“The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the legal adviser told the outlet. The adviser said that by extending long windows for mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day, Democrats have exposed the tabulation process to allegations of inaccuracy and fraud.

“If you have this notion that ballots can come in for I don’t know how many days — in some states a week, 10 days — then that onslaught of ballots just gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back,” he said. “So pick your poison. Is it worse to have electors named by legislators or to have votes received by Election Day?”

When The Atlantic asked the Trump campaign about plans to circumvent the vote and appoint loyal electors, and about other strategies discussed in the article, the deputy national press secretary did not directly address the questions. “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” Thea McDonald said in an email. “The mainstream media are giving the Democrats a free pass for their attempts to completely uproot the system and throw our election into chaos.” Trump is fighting for a trustworthy election, she wrote, “and any argument otherwise is a conspiracy theory intended to muddy the waters.”

Three Pennsylvania Republican leaders told The Atlantic that they had already talked about appointing electors directly, and one of them — the chair of the state’s Republican Party — said he had discussed the possibility with the Trump campaign.

“I’ve mentioned it to them, and I hope they’re thinking about it too,” Lawrence Tabas said. “I just don’t think this is the right time for me to be discussing those strategies and approaches, but [direct appointment of electors] is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” He said that if the voting process “has significant flaws,” then people could “lose faith and confidence” in the system.

Jake Corman, the majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said that if the count draws on for too long, the legislature will have to choose electors. “We don’t want to go down that road, but we understand where the law takes us, and we’ll follow the law,” he said.

That road could lead to a scenario where six battleground states have competing sets of electors, each authorized by different branches of the state — one by the Republican legislature, one by the Democratic governor. Even in Arizona and Florida, where Republicans fully control the government, an independent set of Democratic electors could try to certify their own votes for Democratic nominee Joe Biden in an effort to kick the final call up to Congress.

This almost happened during the 2000 Florida recount: Republican Gov. Jeb Bush certified electors for his brother, George W. Bush, before the recount had been settled. The Gore campaign was ready to assemble its own group of Democratic electors to cast rival ballots, but after the Supreme Court ruled against Gore, he conceded — just days before the Electoral College convened.

Given this plan, The Atlantic reports, it’s possible that mirror-image state electors could turn in competing sets of votes, submitted “to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate” — who, by the way, is Vice President Mike Pence.

The contest at that point gets very complicated, but plays out in one of three ways: If Democrats take the Senate back and hold onto the House, then Biden wins; if Republicans hold the Senate and flip the House, a less likely scenario, then Trump wins; but if Congress remains divided after the election, the Constitution does not offer a solution.

As Constitutional scholar Norm Ornstein told The Atlantic, “Then we get thrown into a world where anything could happen.”

We’re seeing an “unprecedented loss of small businesses” — and economists fear a major crash looms

As all eyes were fixated on the story of Trump’s COVID-19 infection, a number of big economic news stories passed by the public eye. That is unfortunate particularly because those stories, when viewed together, paint a devastating picture of the near-future of the American economy.

First, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released a jobs report that documented just how economically destructive Trump’s COVID denial strategy has been. On Oct. 2, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the country’s recovery momentum had slowed last month, with the nation’s employers adding only 661,000 jobs — much lower than the 800,000 that Wall Street analysts had expected.

The BLS data also indicated the loss of over 200,000 government jobs, primarily in state and local education — jobs which, in pre-pandemic times, would be ramping up as primary and secondary schools begin their semesters. The September jobs profile also ironically included 34,000 temporary U.S. Census workers, who are about to be terminated as the Census wraps up.

The report tried to spin September’s jobs news in a positive light, noting “notable job gains….in leisure and hospitality, in retail trade, in health care and social assistance, and in professional and business services.”

There are still tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans on the sidelines as the country appears to be losing the battle with COVID-19. New infections are trending up, meaning further economic fallout is inevitable. The New York Time’s daily tracking graph reports there are now 25 states where “new cases are higher and staying high.” That’s up from 18 states last week.

For James Parrott, an economist with the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, the top line job numbers obscured more troubling indicators. “We saw the Labor Force Participation rate drop to 61.4 percent,” Mr. Parrott said in a phone interview. “Over the past year the non-institutional working age population increased by a million, but four million left the work force.”

Unlike the unemployment statistics, which are subject to all sorts of complicated political massaging, the labor force participation rate is simple to calculate: you are either working, looking for work, or not in the labor market.

The labor force participation rate was 63.2 percent in January 2019. During Trump’s COVID-19 economic collapse it nosedived to 60.2 percent in April, then headed back up to a still-anemic 61.7 percent in August, before dropping again last month to 61.4 percent.

Meanwhile, right-wing stinginess over unemployment assistance will have a further economic ripple effect. Trump and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to extent the supplemental $600 a week pandemic unemployment payments past July 31. Economists say the effects of that decision won’t be fully felt until Christmas.

“We also see that personal income data showed a decline in household income in August because of the loss of the $600 pandemic supplemental unemployment, which will result in a decline in consumer spending that should hit leading up into the holidays,” Parrott noted.

The New School economist expressed concerns the national statistics were failing to capture the “unprecedented loss of small businesses” that “we don’t see in a normal recession.”

A divergent economic situation is now accelerating U.S. wealth concentration on a scale not seen since the eve of the last Great Depression. As CNN reported, America’s billionaires have seen their cumulative fortunes rise by $845 billion since the pandemic began.

Joseph Wilson, a labor historian and union consultant, observed that “the American pandemic recovery model is speeding down the wrong track: the Treasury Department’s vault is wide open to the tune of trillions for the largest corporations, bond holders and hedge funds, while the $600 dollar per week Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation funds have vanished.”

Wilson continues: “This will inevitably result in an even more bifurcated economy, with a full recovery for those on top, and pain, suffering, unemployment and increased poverty for the working class. Public service and front-line workers will get shafted, and the top one percent will get yachts and caviar. That’s why the European recovery model, in which workers wages are maintained by governmental subsidies, will lead to a more comprehensive, sustainable and socially equitable recovery. The political economies of Europe and the United States stand in sharp contrast.”

As Trump was holed up in the hospital over the weekend, negotiations continued between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over Pelosi’s last and final attempt to get some barebones economic relief to cities, counties and state governments.

But Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, predicts these measures will come up short because their architects failed to appreciate just how much damage has already been done.

“The ‘stimulus’ plans being discussed between Pelosi and Mnuchin strikes me more installments of the ‘too little too late’ sort,” Wolff wrote in an email. “We are living through a staggering depression unmatched for the speed and depth and extent of economic collapse, microeconomic as well as macroeconomic. Investments are being abandoned or postponed because of demand constraints, and that will slow productivity growth and, in turn, competitiveness of US corporations.”

Wolff continues: “Vast sectors of the economy are not being paid and will soon enter into litigations taking years to resolve. Educations are being downgraded, to say the least, with long-run consequences that are negative on multiple levels. And all of these dimensions of the current depression argue for not only massive fiscal stimuli far larger than anything Pelosi and Mnuchin debate, but also structural transformations neither major party dares to imagine let alone discuss.”

In short, neither Trump nor the Democrats seem prepared to acknowledge let alone address the depth of our economic morass.

“Chief among these are the problem of a private capitalist sector that rests on financial life-support provided by the Federal Reserve as well as the US Treasury, and the problem of a private sector governed by profit-driven employers making all enterprise decisions,” reasoned Wolff.

Odds have improved that the convergence of the Trump’s hospitalization, the looming election and the rising infection rate will produce a bipartisan deal to stave off economic disaster. Oct. 1 also marked the end of the federal program that paid the nation’s airline industry to maintain their payrolls while passenger traffic dropped by 95 percent.

The airlines are now in the process of laying off tens of thousands, with the justification that air travel is still just 30 percent of what it was were before the pandemic hit.

John Samuelsen, president of the International Transportation Workers Union, which represents tens of thousands of airline and mass transit workers said Washington had “no choice” but to quickly pass Pelosi’s slimmed-down HEROES Act.

“It is a simple equation,” Mr. Samuelsen said. “The Republicans have successfully dragged their feet, hemmed and hawed and refused to bail out the American workers, small businesses, the economy, public transit systems, industries—essentially everything. They have left the American people at the mercy of the pandemic.”

Samuelsen continued: “If this doesn’t happen in the next several days there will be directly tens of thousands of layoffs, and that will ultimately get to hundreds of thousands of jobs when you factor in the impact on the workers in the businesses dependent on all the airports around the country. And the way the airline industry will do this is by cutting seating capacity, just like what we will see with mass transit when they will cut service” if there is not any aid from Washington.

“The nation is crying out for it and the economy is crying out for it. We have seen the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, but if they fail to extend the CARES Act it won’t be long before this decline crashes into every aspect of daily life,” Samuelsen said.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump is infected

That Donald and Melania Trump should test positive for what was described as relatively mild COVID-19 seems both sad and avoidable, the inevitable and ironic result of snubbing mask-wearing and physical distancing.

It is what it is, after all.

That the White House and the Trump campaign were not forthright about learning that close adviser Hope Hicks had been found infected and went ahead with fund-raisers and lots of contacts without taking precautions is reprehensible.

Amid calls for recovery were notes of open disbelief over whether the news as announced was true, questions about the First Couple’s medical status and a chaotic race to reach scores of people with whom Trump and Hicks had contact over the previous four days. Worry mounted about exactly how the government is functioning, as a result, to say nothing of the effects on elections.

The White House never acknowledged the Hicks contagion for at least a full day after learning of it. A bevy of others were exposed to the illness. People need to hold someone responsible.

Opponent Joe Biden tested negative after contact with Trump at the Tuesday debate, but three senators, the Trump campaign manager and head of the Republican National Committee, White House staffers and guests and three journalists at White House events are ill.

Through the day, as Trump was moved to Walter Reed Hospital, it sounded as if Trump was sicker than acknowledged. But then again, it was hard to tell: The White House is controlling closely the information.

Public health enforcement

I could not help but compare these circumstances with the earlier days of HIV/AIDS, when some with that illness who continued to practice unprotected sex ended up facing criminal charges of homicide or attempted homicide and assault. Criminal transmission of HIV is better known as HIV non-disclosure.

What exactly is different here?

There are 37 states with laws that criminalize HIV exposure in cases where those testing positive intentionally infect others – or simply fail to notify contacts. Some states even extend criminality to undisclosed status in blood donation or amp up prostitution charges.

In other words, when it came to HIV/AIDS, our Law and Order administrations took it seriously.

By contrast, in the case of COVID-19, a global pandemic, the Trump administration occasionally talks about masks. Then it goes out of its way to avoid mask-wearing or physical distancing in its campaign rallies, in White House gatherings, in meetings. Trump steps on his own medical advisers when they contradict him and promote mask-wearing.

Obviously, Team Trump has resisted actively public health enforcement by either the federal government or states and localities, arguing anything that slows down the economy will be worse for Americans. Trump and allies have made clear – and made political – the idea that church-going outscores any acknowledgment of contagion and that mask-less campaign rallies are more important than public safety.

Somehow, Team Trump succeeded in turning mask-wearing into more a political statement about standing with him and about a weird sense of independent masculinity than about public health. Hey, I recognize that there are posted speed limits on the freeway, but I may want to drive 90 mph anyway.

In lieu of a fully organized government effort to control the pandemic, we have an anemic, spotty, state-by-state approach that has resulted in more than 200,000 American deaths. That the virus would find its way even inside the White House, where Trump has presented himself as uniquely resistant to any hint of disease, was inevitable.

Now what?

This is the same Donald Trump who:

Orders his people to lean on the Centers for Disease Control to water down warnings about contagion to schoolchildren and families
Allows cruise ships – with their long history of contagious respiratory disease – to go back to full operations
Puts his faith and trust in political operators over scientists
Preaches the discredited use of hydroxychloroquine or openly speculates about injecting household disinfectants as coronavirus treatments
Insists drug companies produce an effective vaccine in time for Election Day
Knows in January we are facing a deadly pandemic and keeps that news to himself – and then delays rolling out a full anti-disease effort
blames Democratic governors and mayors for spiraling disease numbers
thinks we have too much coronavirus testing

Are we surprised that he should contract the illness? Frankly, no, however sorry it makes us feel for him.

But the news also angers, because these results were avoidable completely.

Our narcissistic president, who has declared himself the only person possible to fix what ails us, could have lived as many of us have without intentionally infecting others.

When Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, went through COVID-19, he came out of it with a renewed respect for public health and mask-wearing. We can only hope Trump can do so as well.

Kayleigh McEnany’s claims about the Trump ballots found in a ditch completely fall apart

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany earlier this weekclaimed that several absentee ballots in Wisconsin had been found abandoned in a ditch as proof that President Donald Trump was right to question the integrity of mail-in ballots.

However, that story has now completely fallen apart.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Meagan Wolfe, director of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said during a news conference this week that “no Wisconsin absentee ballots were found” in a mail bag that was discovered last week in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin, although she said she didn’t know if any out-of-state ballots were caught up in the mail bag.

McEnany sparred with Fox News Radio reporter Jon Decker on Thursday when he asked her about Trump claiming that his voters’ ballots were being thrown into an unspecified river, and she responded by saying that the president actually meant the ditch in Greenville.

“In this particular statement, who is ‘they’ who found those ballots and where is this river?” he during a White House press briefing.

“The local authorities and it was a ditch in Wisconsin!” she snapped back, before accusing him of “missing the forest through the trees” by asking her to verify the president’s claims.

“I like to report accurately in the news,” Decker shot back. “When the president says ‘they found a lot of ballots in a river,’ I simply want to know where the river is.”

My students war-gamed a “Trump gets COVID” scenario — in March. It didn’t end well

I wasn’t trying to make a prediction, but seven months ago I presented my students with a hypothetical that just might come to pass. Imagine this, I asked:

President Trump ends up in Walter Reed Medical Center, incapacitated by coronavirus. His cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment, thereby transferring all powers and duties of the presidency to the vice president. What should the new Acting President Mike Pence do?

I asked this back in March, shortly after my university closed and pushed all classes online. I adjusted to this reality while sick with COVID-like symptoms myself. Like most Americans last spring, I couldn’t get tested — the few available tests went to the very ill or the very wealthy. It was hard to breathe, tough to stay awake and challenging to think clearly. I’m sorry President Trump is now suffering too.

My wife thought I was delirious from fever. While sick in bed, I deleted two months of lesson plans and announced my class would now spend the rest of the semester studying the pandemic. I recorded a video for my students encouraging them to be strong. This was an historic moment, I said, so let’s try to learn from it.

I presented students with a “war game”-type scenario. Students would act as members of the National Security Council, responding to a request from Acting President Pence for a thorough reassessment of the country’s pandemic response. Should he follow the path carved out by Trump, or should he change course? Can we learn anything by looking at how other countries are approaching the pandemic? What lessons lie abroad?

My students jumped on the challenge. They researched responses to the coronavirus around the globe, collectively reading hundreds of news reports.

They were shocked by what they found. With a few exceptions, much of the world was way ahead of the United States in addressing the disease. And this was in March, mind you.

By then, South Korea and Singapore had deployed advanced technologies for contact tracing. The Czech Republic required masks in public, with fines for non-compliance. Denmark kept people employed by subsidizing the wages of those who couldn’t report to work. Germany had implemented strict social gathering rules. Liberia, Senegal and Uganda released pop songs to promote hand washing. China launched a national online learning platform so students could continue schooling at home.

President Trump was saying in March that no one could have foreseen the coronavirus, but my students identified one country after another that did. While he was playing it down, the rest of the world confronted it head on. Many were already flattening the curve.

As early as January, Taiwan began implementing 124 action items, including requisitioning PPEs and regulating the sale of masks. Australia was already conducting COVID-19 testing and Canada wasn’t far behind. In February, Iceland was conducting random tests to track asymptomatic carriers. By early March — when sick Americans like me couldn’t get tested — South Korea had already opened 600 testing clinics.

My students expressed frustration that the U.S. wasn’t learning from these examples. “Unfortunately it feels as though the President’s ‘America First’ ideology has also proven to be ‘America Only’ offering no room for learning from other nations,” a freshman in my Global Studies class wrote.

This sounds like liberal-college-student stuff, except that I teach at a science and engineering university in Colorado, and my students lean conservative. They’re also data-driven and believe that most problems have solutions. Their recommendations differed, but a clear pattern emerged.

If my students briefed a President Pence, they’d likely say the following:

First, change course. They recognized already in March, when fewer than 4,000 Americans had died from the coronavirus, that a new approach was needed to stop its spread. Learn from countries that are doing it right.

Second, adopt a consistent message that amplifies public health expertise. Some students pointed out that in places like New Zealand, where medical professionals and political leaders spoke with one voice, there was better compliance with safety protocols, and fewer COVID casualties. My students’ advice to the president: Don’t contradict or confuse, just tell people how to be safe.

Third, no more talking in either/or terms. We’re not faced with a choice of either opening the economy or protecting public health. Managing this crisis requires balancing both. Help us figure out how to do so.

Fourth, develop a unified national strategy. Our state-by-state patchwork approach has too many vulnerabilities. We’re only as strong as our weakest link. After all, one of my students pointed out, Floridians aren’t just staying in Florida.

Finally, revive international cooperation. We can’t stop the disease from crossing borders, so our own security is enhanced by working cooperatively with the international community. Utilize multilateral institutions like the UN and WHO to develop a coordinated response to deploy vaccines, resolve supply chain disruptions, and track and quarantine the sick.

Of course none of this is rocket science. But many months ago there was plenty of real-world evidence to back it up, and a bunch of students two years out of high school could see it. Had Trump followed this advice last spring, much suffering might have been avoided — including his own. The virus remains a threat, and there’s still an urgent need to change course.

Now that we’re at 210,000 dead and counting, some of my students are taking it personally. As one wrote me recently, while he himself was “studying the facts and working hard” to identify solutions for an imaginary president, the actual president “knowingly ignored the severity of the situation.” Let’s all hope that changes — either when President Trump returns from the hospital or when someone else takes his place.

Secret Service agents “frustrated” by virus exposure risk from Trump’s hospital drive-by stunt

On President Trump’s third day in the hospital where he was being treated for COVID-19, the president left the hospital in a motorcade to drive around the block waving at well-wishers before returning. The publicity stunt, which disregarded federal safety guidelines for close contact between infected persons and others, has alarmed doctors, public health experts and Secret Service agents.

According to the Centers for Disease and Control (CDC), a person who contracts COVID-19 can safely be around others again only when they’ve met three specific criteria: First, when it has been ten days since symptoms first appeared for the infected person. Second, when 24 hours has elapsed with no fever (without the use of fever-reducing medications). And third, when other symptoms are improving.

Considering the public information issued to the public by White House physician Sean Conley, Trump doesn’t meet any of the aforementioned criteria. Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Thursday, according to his spokespeople.

Likewise, some doctors were horrified at the prospect that Trump would expose his security detail to coronavirus, a risk made higher by the physical properties of the presidential vehicle fleet. James Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed, tweeted, “That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.”

Phillips added on Twitter: “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential “drive-by” just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”

During the drive-by, Trump sat in the back of the vehicle wearing a black cloth mask. There were at least two Secret Service agents in the vehicle. Both seemed to be wearing N95 masks, which can be an effective barrier against the coronavirus, but they aren’t an absolute guarantee — especially in close quarters with an infected person.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said in an email to the New York Times that “appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the President and all those supporting it, including PPE [personal protective equipment].”

Deere said the drive-by was “cleared” by the medical team. However, after the parade, CNN reported that there were escalating concerns in the Secret Service. As they reported:

“That should never have happened,” one current Secret Service agent who works on the presidential and first family detail said after Trump’s drive-by, adding that those agents who went along for the ride would now be required to quarantine.

‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to be around them,’ the agent said, expressing a view that multiple people at the Secret Service also voiced in the wake of Sunday’s appearance. ‘The frustration with how we’re treated when it comes to decisions on this illness goes back before this though. We’re not disposable.’

Another veteran Secret Service agent also expressed deep dismay at the Walter Reed ride, though was sympathetic for those around the President given the difficulty in pushing back on the commander-in-chief.

“You can’t say no,” the agent said.

A third agent told CNN that Trump’s stunt was “reckless.”

On Monday, Trump criticized the media on Twitter for reporting on the backlash to his motorcade.

“It is reported that the Media is upset because I got into a secure vehicle to say thank you to the many fans and supporters who were standing outside of the hospital for many hours, and even days, to pay their respect to their President,” Trump tweeted. “If I didn’t do it, Media would say RUDE!!!”

After the tweet, Trump announced he will be discharged from the hospital on Monday. In his message, he continued to downplay the virus that has killed over 200,000 Americans.

“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” Trump wrote. “Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”

However, as doctors explained to Salon, the treatment Trump received in the hospital is not what all Americans would receive if they tested positive for COVID-19.

“The therapies that President Trump is getting are available to many patients with COVID-19, [but] there are two issues,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Salon by email. “The first is VIP medicine where there is the risk of over-treatment or under-treatment because of who he is and not his clinical condition. We don’t know the extent of this either way because they have not been as transparent with his clinical status.”

“The second issue is the fact that he has universal access to all the care he needs from the military health care system, which in fact has all the attributes of a single payer health system: a form of health care funding and delivery he has politically opposed,” Benjamin added. “Most Americans do not have access to that kind of care at one of the best hospitals in the world. Access to any test he needs, and any medication, without a concern for costs.”