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      in US Politics

      Trump criticizes Covid lockdowns and falsely claims US 'doing very well'

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      Donald Trump

      President says US has done ‘as well as any nation’ as country passes 4.7m cases, more than a quarter of global total
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      Donald Trump defends Dr Deborah Birx after calling her Covid-19 assessment ‘pathetic’ – video

      Donald Trump used his White House coronavirus press conference on Monday to repeat his opposition to lockdowns as a means of bringing the contagion under control, claiming falsely that under his leadership the US has done “as well as any nation”.
      On a day that the US had surpassed 4.7m confirmed cases of infection – more than a quarter of the global total – Trump tried to deflect criticism of his administration’s handling of the pandemic on to other countries.
      He cited Spain, Germany, France, Australia and Japan as countries experiencing “significant flare ups” as the virus surges again. In fact, while Australia and Japan are experiencing renewed surges, their total incidence of disease remains a fraction of the catastrophe now sweeping across the US.
      In Germany, the total number of confirmed cases stands at 212,000, with fewer than 1,000 new cases per day. By comparison, new cases in the US are beginning to plateau but at an extremely high level of about 60,000 a day.
      Focus is now switching to states in the heartlands of the country such as Tennessee, Oklahoma and Missouri, where the virus is spreading fast. Trump tried to assuage fears for those areas, saying: “I think you’ll find they are soon going to be very much under control.”
      There is concern that the virus is also extending its tentacles out of major urban and suburban population centers into the rural parts of America. On Monday, Trump signed a new executive order aimed at providing a lifeline to struggling hospitals and health centers in rural areas, while also extending telehealth services across the country, after virtual visits soared during the coronavirus pandemic.
      Trump, who is counting on votes from backers in rural areas in the 2020 presidential election, said the new order would ensure that telehealth services expanded during the pandemic remained in place even after the public health emergency ended.
      The death rate in the US, which stands at almost 156,000, is still rising in 30 states, according to data compiled by the New York Times.
      Despite these alarming figures, Trump claimed that under his leadership the US was “doing very well”. He dismissed mounting criticism that the federal government has consistently failed to tackle the virus, insisting that lockdowns did not work.
      “It’s important for all Americans to recognize that a permanent lockdown is not a viable path forward and would ultimately inflict more harm than it would prevent. Lockdowns do not prevent infection in the future,” he said.
      The statement was misleading. Lockdowns can prevent future infection if, once they have contained the virus, a system of aggressive testing and contact tracing is put in place to detect any local flare-ups – something that the US government has also notably failed to do.
      Trump attempted to defuse tension between him and his public health expert Dr Deborah Birx. Earlier on Monday, the US president turned his ire on Birx, a previous favorite of his, after she had sounded the alarm publicly over how “extraordinarily widespread” the virus had become.
      “She’s a person I have a lot of respect for,” Trump said at the press conference. He went on to state that with Birx’s help his administration had tested Americans for coronavirus at a rate unsurpassed by any other country.
      In fact, the US continues to lag dramatically behind the testing target it needs to reach if it is to have a hope of containing the virus. Researchers at the Harvard Global Health Institute have found that the US is “nowhere near where we need to be” in terms of the 4m tests a day that they estimate would be needed to get a grip on the contagion.
      The Associated Press contributed to this report

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    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline

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      Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie is a sustained attack, both jeremiad and confession, on the Republican party he served for 40 years. His is the hand at Belshazzar’s political feast: “All of these immutable truths turned out to be marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market.”Stevens, a consultant, is refreshingly frank about his role and responsibility. “Blame me,” he writes, adding: “I had been lying to myself for decades.” He seeks a new leaf on a “crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility”.Unsurprisingly, he starts with race, “the original Republican sin … the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played.” Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans have had difficulty appealing to African American voters. Stevens is not surprised.“What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating non-white voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters.” How, for instance, does a black person hear an “avowed hatred of government”?The policy effects are shocking; the electoral effects only recently came into focus as demographics change. Yet the strategy “was so obvious that even the Russians adopted it, attempting to instigate tensions among black voters to help Trump win”.You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try itStuart StevensThis self-deception extends to other areas, notably foreign policy, in which “the Republican party has gone from ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ to a Republican president who responds to Vladimir Putin like a stray dog, eager to follow him home”. All without much protest from those who know better.Stevens believes Donald Trump “just removes the necessity of pretending” Republicans care about social issues. Instead, it’s all about “attacking and defining Democrats”. The idea that “character counts”, so prominent in earlier decades, is forgotten.In short, stripped “of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy”. The first casualty is the truth. “Large elements of the Republican party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth” and that a cause or simple access to power is more important.Rather than saying the sky is green, the new strategy is “to build a world in which the sky is in fact green. Then everyone who says it is blue is clearly a liar.” Sadly, it has worked. Stevens notes that once “there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy.”He rightly calls this fear and cowardice: “To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward.” People know better – including Republican members of Congress – but will not speak. Yet Stevens recalls that the “story of Faust is not just that Mephistopheles takes your soul, he also doesn’t deliver on what he promised.”The remedy is simple. “You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it”.What was Trump’s role in all this? Both enabler and someone who took a shaky foundation and crushed it. Trump “brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible”. For Stevens, the GOP “rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power.”Stevens has high praise for two former clients, George W Bush and Mitt Romney, “decent men who tried to live their lives by a set of values that represented the best of our society”. Yet neither could win today. He quotes George HW Bush’s impassioned resignation letter from the National Rifle Association after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and realizes few would do so now.Stevens is deeply concerned about the future of American democracy, comparing some tests in the study How Democracies Die with actions under the Trump administration.With one party having failed its “circuit-breaker” role, he cites the “urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy” as Democrats drift left. Though moderate Republican governors remain popular, he is distinctly pessimistic today’s Republicans can be that party, as they have “legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a political party in a country with a unique role in the world”.Stevens has little hope the GOP will save itself from Trump or rise to the challenge of adapting to an increasingly non-white America. Losing, badly, is his only hope for concentrating Republican minds to the new reality of American demographics. Absent that, his prescription is definitive: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”The former may happen. The latter is less predictable. More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump claims Anthony Fauci ‘wrong’ about cause of Covid-19 surge

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      President again contradicts his own health expert after doctor highlights troubled US response to virusDonald Trump launched an extraordinary attack on his own top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, arguing against the doctor’s claim that high rates of infection in the US stem from a less aggressive reaction to the virus in terms of economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders.“Wrong!” countered the president as he retweeted a video of Fauci making the point in recent congressional testimony. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      TikTok: Trump reportedly to order parent company to sell Chinese-owned app

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      Microsoft is reported to be looking into buying the TikTok’s US operations as the app’s data privacy practices have come under fireDonald Trump will reportedly order the parent company of TikTok to sell the popular video sharing platform because of national-security concerns.Trump on Friday again suggested the US may take action against the Chinese-owned social media platform. Continue reading… More

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      in Elections

      Will Trump actually pull federal agents from Portland? – video explainer

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      Federal agents accused of behaving like an ‘occupying army’ are said to be pulling out of Portland, Oregon, in an embarrassing climbdown by the White House, but many protesters are sceptical over whether the agents will actually withdraw from the city.
      The force, which have been dubbed by some as ‘Donald Trump’s troops’, were sent in by the president a month ago to end what he called ‘anarchy’ during Black Lives Matter protests sparked after the police killing of George Floyd.
      The Guardian’s Chris McGreal looks at what Trump was hoping to gain by sending paramilitaries into the city, if and how they will leave, and how their presence has fuelled anger among most residents
      Federal agents show stronger force at Portland protests despite order to withdraw

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      Trump’s Covid-19 testing tsar Brett Giroir faces monumental challenge

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      Jesuit high school, an all-boys Catholic school in New Orleans, is proud of its alumni. In 1978, its website records, student debaters Moises Arriaga and Brett Giroir “had a legendary season, winning the City Championship, District Championship, State Championship and the NFL National Championship”.Forty-two years later, Giroir’s debating skills are facing their ultimate test. As Donald Trump’s coronavirus testing tsar, he is repeatedly grilled by America’s top political news hosts about what is seen as an epic disaster. And despite his gilded career at school, Giroir’s qualifications and track record have come under increasing scrutiny as the US pandemic death toll tops 150,000.“What he does over and over again in his public statements is always put the most positive spin he can on what is clearly just an abysmal failure in terms of the US testing strategy,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the government response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017.Now 59 years old, Giroir spent his childhood in a small town outside New Orleans, the son of an oilfield worker and police officer. “Growing up, I had significant hearing problems and hearing loss, and there was no ENT physician in my small hometown; we had to drive 30 miles to the city to see a specialist,” he told Texas Medical Center News online in 2014.“It just so happened that clinic was near the Jesuit high school, one of the best high schools in the region. It looked like an interesting place to be, so I set my goal, which was astronomical at that time, to be admitted in the Jesuit high school. Luckily, I got in, and that was the academic launching point for me.”Success on the debate team meant touring universities, including Harvard, where he won a place to study biology before gaining a medical doctorate from the University of Texas Southwestern medical center. Giroir began his career as a pediatrician in Texas and became the head of Children’s medical center Dallas. More