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‘You can’t do that’: Trump argues with reporter over Covid-19 death figures – video
Donald Trump visibly floundered in an interview when pressed on a range of issues, including the number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the US, his claims that mail-in voting is fraudulent, and his inaction over the “Russian bounty” scandal.
The US president also repeatedly cast doubt on the cause of death of Jeffrey Epstein, and said of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who has pleaded not guilty to participating in the sex-trafficking of girls by Epstein, that he wished her well.
In the interview, broadcast on HBO on Monday and conducted by Axios’s national political correspondent, Jonathan Swan, Trump again asserted that his administration was doing an “incredible job” responding to the coronavirus.
Claiming that the pandemic was unique, Trump said: “This has never happened before. Nineteen seventeen, but it was totally different, it was a flu in that case. If you watch the fake news on television, they don’t even talk about it, but there are 188 other countries right now that are suffering. Some, proportionately, far greater than we are.”
Trump has repeatedly referred to the 1917 flu pandemic, whereas the outbreak happened in 1918 and into 1919.
And when asked about the death toll from coronavirus so far in the US, of almost 155,000 killed, Trump appeared irritated and said: “It is what it is”
His opponent in the upcoming presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden, tweeted on Tuesday morning: “Mr President, step up and do your job before even more American families feel the pain of losing a loved one.”
Biden also wrote: “On July 1st, Donald Trump predicted the coronavirus was going to ‘just disappear.’ He was wrong – and more than 25,000 Americans died due to the virus last month.”
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Swan pressed the president on which countries were doing worse. Trump brandished several pieces of paper with graphs and charts on them that he referred to as he attempted to suggest the US figures compared well internationally.
“Right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world. Lower than Europe.”
“In what?” asks Swan. As it becomes apparent that Trump is talking about the number of deaths as a proportion of cases, Swan says said: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than Germany, South Korea.”
Trump then says: “You can’t do that.”
According to figures from Johns Hopkins University, the US has had over 4.7m confirmed Covid-19 cases, with 155,471 deaths. The US accounts for more than a quarter of all global confirmed infections.
In another section of the interview, Trump repeats his false assertion that the reason the US has a significantly higher number of cases is because it tests more than anyone else, saying: “You know, there are those that say you can test too much. You do know that.”
Asked who says that, Trump replies: “Oh, just read the manuals. Read the books.”
Trump also appears, without evidence, to assert that children are receiving positive Covid-19 test results for having a runny nose – which is not generally listed among the symptoms of coronavirus, which include a high temperature and a new continuous cough.
“You test, some kid has even just a little runny nose, it’s a case. And then you report many cases,” Trump says.
The president attempts to shift blame for the outbreaks of coronavirus on to state governors, saying: “We have done a great job. We’ve got the governors everything they needed. They didn’t do their job – many of them didn’t, some of them did.”
The actor and activist Mia Farrow tweeted that: “Every American should watch this, the full, flabbergasting interview.”
Trump was also asked about his previous baseless assertion that due to mail-in voting, the forthcoming US election would be “the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history”.
In the interview, Trump says: “So we have a new phenomena [sic], it’s called mail-in voting.” Swan then clarifies that mail-in voting has existed since the US civil war.
Further attempting to cast doubt on the process, Trump says: “So they’re going to send tens of millions of ballots to California, all over the place. Who’s going to get them? Somebody got a ballot for a dog. Somebody got a ballot for something else. You got millions of ballots going. Nobody even knows where they’re going.”
The interview took place last Tuesday, before the president’s tweet that falsely floated the idea that November’s election could be delayed.
On Maxwell and Epstein, the president appeared to cast doubt on the official account of the cause of Epstein’s death, which has been a repeated source of conspiracy theories.
Of Maxwell, Trump says “Her friend or boyfriend Epstein was either killed or committed suicide in jail. She’s now in jail. Yeah, I wish her well.” Trump goes on twice more to say of Epstein: “Was it suicide or was he killed?”
Parker Molloy
(@ParkerMolloy)
Trump again wishes Ghislaine Maxwell well pic.twitter.com/whWhZoO4mC
August 4, 2020
In another part of the interview, he dismissed again as “fake news” intelligence reports that Russia had been offering bounties to the Taliban for attacks on US forces in Afghanistan. Asked specifically by Swan whether he had ever discussed the issue with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Trump confirms he has never mentioned it to him.
When Swan asks Trump about Russia supplying weapons to the Taliban, the president asserts: “I have heard that, but it has never reached my desk.”
Lily Adams, a spokeswoman and adviser for the so-called war room of the Democratic party’s national committee slammed the president as incoherent and rambling through misinformation.
“Trump’s disastrous interview would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. More than 155,000 Americans have died, over 4.7 million have been infected, and we are in the sharpest economic downturn on record … coronavirus cases are skyrocketing and the economy is spiraling because of his failed response,” Adams said.
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This week marks the 30th anniversary of Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Desperate to pay off his nation’s seemingly insurmountable debt, acquired as a result of his invasion of and the futile 8-year war with Iran that had just ended, Saddam Hussein saw oil-rich Kuwait as the solution. Iraq had never recognized Kuwait’s sovereignty, claiming it had been hived off by the British during its occupation of Iraq in the early 20th century. Moreover, as he and many Iraqis asserted, it really was Iraq’s “19th province.”
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Saddam deployed Iraqi troops to the border in July of 1990, prompting concern among neighboring Arab countries and the United States. In a much-reported meeting with then-US Ambassador April Glaspie late in July, he was asked about his intentions. Glaspie took pains to explain that the US had “no opinion” on Arab-Arab disputes, further expressing the US hope that the Iraqi-Kuwait border question might be resolved soon and without the use of force. (Egypt has been trying to mediate the dispute.) Saddam interpreted her response as an American green light to invade, as egregious a misinterpretation of a diplomatic communication as there ever was.
A Multilateral Approach
Within hours of the August 2 invasion, the UN Security Council convened and ordered Iraq’s immediate withdrawal. It was ignored by Saddam, as were multiple subsequent UNSC resolutions. Saddam did not believe that the US or any other nation would take action to defend the small patch of desert at the end of the Persian Gulf, despite its outsize oil wealth and massive reserves.
He was wrong. Under the leadership of President George H. W. Bush and his able secretary of state, James Baker, the US organized a 34-nation coalition, including many Arab states and NATO allies. Armed with a UNSC resolution authorizing “all necessary means” if Saddam did not withdraw his forces by the January 15 deadline, the US and other coalition forces began assembling in Saudi Arabia, which many feared would be the next target of Saddam’s ambitions. Facing more than 650,000 troops and a massive US, British and French air assault, Iraqi forces were driven out of Kuwait. The three-day campaign cost coalition forces some 300 deaths, including 146 Americans. Iraqi casualties were never officially ascertained, but estimates range from 20,000 to 26,000 killed and 75,000 injured. Over 1,000 Kuwaitis also died, mostly civilians.
The Kuwait incursion proved even more humiliating and costly than Iraq’s ill-fated invasion of Iran. Numerous and increasingly costly sanctions (including on critical oil exports), intrusive UN weapons inspectors and expansive no-fly zones in the country’s north and south decisively placed Iraq in pariah-nation status in the world. Ultimately, it set the stage for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and Saddam’s removal in 2003.
Leadership When It Counted
The First Gulf War marked a significant achievement for American diplomacy, one that would be difficult to replicate today. Though Saddam remained unmoved by American warnings and UNSC resolutions and sanctions, the international community proceeded deliberately but measuredly before employing force. The UNSC’s approval of Resolution 678, which authorized the use of force, obtained 12 affirmative votes, including from four of the five permanent members (China abstained) and only two negatives (Cuba and Yemen).
Deft diplomacy on the part of Bush and Baker attracted 33 other nations to the coalition that expelled Saddam’s forces. Secretary of Baker met on several occasions with Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to resolve the crisis. This was a marked contrast to George W. Bush’s approach to, and eventual invasion of, Iraq in 2003, which failed to secure UNSC approval and incurred considerable worldwide condemnation.
Importantly, despite a virtually open road to Baghdad and against the urgings of some in the US at the time, in 1991 President Bush withdrew all US forces from Iraq and did not seek to remove Saddam. This proved to be critical in maintaining the unprecedented coalition he had organized to address a Middle East crisis. Bush Sr. was able to capitalize on that achievement by assembling world leaders in Spain later that fall for the Madrid Conference, which brought together many of the same Arab countries from the coalition, plus Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and co-sponsor the Soviet Union to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. The conference became a stepping stone for increased action on the part of many Arab countries, the Palestinians and Israel, and the progress that followed.
The Era of Great Power Rivalry
The First Gulf War itself and what followed demonstrated what principled, deft and concerted diplomacy on the part of the US can achieve. Clearly, the task remains significantly short of its ultimate goal. But the hope of that seems all the more distant as the US under President Donald Trump eschews the Bush/Baker approach to multilateral diplomacy in favor of narrow, one-sided bilateral diplomacy. The latter has proven to be a contributing factor in the region’s — and perhaps the world’s — decided move toward “great power” competition.
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Nations as diverse as Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others now vie for increased influence and even dominance in the Middle East and elsewhere. Never a partisan in great power competition, the US now stands strangely quiet on the sidelines as these nations attempt to carve out spheres of influence, from the Crimea and Ukraine, to South and Central Asia, the Far East and the Middle East. For some of the peoples of the Middle East — Syria, Yemen and Libya — this has meant misery and devastation, and for the rest of the region, instability, uncertainty and fear. US-led multilateralism at a time when it stood unparalleled in military, political and economic power in the world helped address a genuine Middle East crisis 30 years ago. In that sense, America’s and the world’s actions in Iraq may very well have been the mythical “good” war in the Middle East, as much an oxymoron as that may sound.
In an era of great-power maneuvering, it would be inconceivable to imagine now a similar response in the event of another crisis between nations of the region, say Iran and Saudi Arabia. With rival major powers choosing sides, one could more easily envision competing alliances being drawn up, culminating in the sort of conflict the world saw in Europe in World War I.
Great-power competition seldom, if ever, leads to stability or peace. World War I amply proved that. The example of the First Gulf War, however, proved that multilateralism, especially when led by a powerful but principled nation, can diffuse escalating tensions, avert greater disaster and provide at least the prospect and a framework for peace and stability.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
They call him the “ghetto president”, and his ambition is to bring the dreams and the sounds of the streets to the corridors of power.Bobi Wine, a popular reggae star and prominent opposition MP in Uganda, will release a new album next month that addresses what he calls “the real issues people are facing – the injustices, corruption, high taxation, misrule, abuse of human rights, dictatorship.”“Rise up, African musicians, and we can accomplish the task,” Wine said in an interview. “We can’t be defeated. The more they oppress us, the stronger we become. No dictator in history has ever defeated the artists and no one will ever.” More
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Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is “living through an unrivalled drop in carbon output.” According to the International Energy Agency, global use of energy will drop 6% in 2020, an amount that equals India’s total energy demand. Worldwide demand for electricity has already fallen 5%, which is the largest amount since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The dramatic decline in pollution resulting from economic lockdowns was apparently visible and recorded by numerous satellites. However, it will take a decade of this kind of economic lockdown to make a significant impact on global warming and truly curb carbon emissions.
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Environmental pollutants are indifferent to national boundaries. Addressing climate change requires long-term international cooperation. All countries must make serious and collective efforts to stop irreversible damage caused by climate change.
The Environment-Security Nexus
The United Arab Emirates is among the world’s biggest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases. In fact, the World Wide Fund for Nature has ranked the UAE as having the world’s highest per capita environmental footprint, which largely has to do with the unsustainable megaprojects that began in the Emirates amid the oil boom of the 1970s.
Other factors such as the desert country’s climatic conditions are in the picture too. There are also the popular modes of transportation within the Emirates: According to a survey conducted by the Department of Transport in 2014, “60 per cent of Abu Dhabi and Dubai residents who owned a car said they never used public transport. Only two to three percent use public transport frequently.” This is in part due to the long-standing car culture in the Emirates and relatively cheap fuel as well as car prices, but also because of connectivity problems to certain destinations.
As outlined by Jon Barnett in his 2013 essay “Environmental Security,” environmental problems pose threats to the national well-being as well as the quality of life of the inhabitants of any state. Analysts and scholars refer to environmental security when discussing the threats and dangers emanating from the environment. The principal source that threatens ecological security is human activity. The environment is one of the seven sectors outlined in the United Nations Development Program’s early definition of human security, and environmental change has long been identified as a human security issue.
The Emiratis have been struggling with a number of environmental threats for decades. Today, numerous environmental issues — including pollution, waste, land degradation, desertification, biodiversity loss, etc. — all impact the UAE. Waste and air pollution constitute major challenges, in particular outdoor air pollution. The UAE ranks in the bottom fourth globally in exposure to particulate matter — tiny particles of sand, dust or chemicals registered at elevated levels that are highly dangerous and associated with risks of numerous diseases such as cancer, as well as respiratory and heart diseases. In 2017, the Environment Agency of Abu Dhabi considered poor air quality to be a “primary environmental threat to public health.”
In terms of water, the UAE continues to have highly unsustainable groundwater extraction rates. Being largely a desert country, the contamination of its fresh groundwater reserves and seawater endangers the UAE’s future. Some experts have warned of the imminent depletion of groundwater sources by 2030.
In the area of biodiversity conservation, the UAE boasts a number of protected areas both on land and in the sea. But its fish stocks are in a critical state. Overfishing and heavy commercial maritime shipping across the Persian Gulf have also contributed to a potentially irreversible decline in the health of fragile coral reefs off the coast. Silt from shoreline construction has had a negative impact on coral.
“Greening” the Emirati Economy
The UAE has long acknowledged climate change as a serious threat multiplier to the country and is ahead of the curve when compared to other countries that are still debating the seriousness of the issue or even outright denying its reality. Recognizing these environmental threats, the UAE has been in the process of “greening” its economy by developing a solar energy sector along with a nuclear energy sector and managing its scarce water resources with an emphasis on conservation and efficiency. It has been at the forefront of the renewables revolution with its solar farms while very slowly transforming its thermal desalination plants into reverse osmosis desalination facilities that produce far fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
The UAE Vision 2021 document contains as one of its wide-reaching goals a “well-preserved natural environment” and seeks to address various environmental threats to the country. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has put in place its Environment Vision 2030 strategy, which lists five priority areas, namely climate change impacts, air and noise pollution, water resources, biodiversity and waste. The UAE government has set up various institutions and initiatives to address environmental issues in the previous decades such as the Environment Agency — Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative and the Arab Water Academy, and has signed and ratified numerous international and regional environmental conventions. The government has launched a variety of awareness campaigns pertaining to environmental issues in order to educate different sectors of society.
According to Dr. Taoufik Ksiksi, a plant biologist and climate change researcher at the United Arab Emirates University at Al Ain, these awareness campaigns were not quite sufficient: “More needs to be done to raise the awareness levels, especially at the lower levels, in schools with young people, and there have to be substantial changes to the curriculum to incorporate courses on environmental sciences, native ecology and conservation in general,” he said in a phone interview. In addition, Ksiksi suggests that “more robust climate modeling approaches that focus primarily on the region need to be developed with increased processing power that take into account regional circumstances and are not geared towards climate conditions prevalent in Europe.”
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Dr. Ksiksi thinks that UAE’s advantage is that it enjoys “the benefit of resources than can fund technology and new initiatives.” Yet the lack of synergy in terms of regional cooperation in the area of green economy building in the Arabian Peninsula somewhat hampers such efforts.
The UAE has for some time now incorporated narratives of sustainable development into the country’s national policy aims. Masdar City, described as a city of the future, is perhaps the best known and most ambitious example of an avowedly green megaproject. Other projects such as Sustainable City and Desert Rose City are additional examples of green cities that emphasize technological innovation in Masdar City’s manner.
The greening of the Emirates takes on a central aspect of the modernization narrative. The main gist is that the existing ecological challenges can be measured, and existing institutions and policies find solutions to the problems. According to Dr. Gökçe Günel, the UAE is making a serious effort to maintain its status quo while offering up “technical adjustments” to environmental challenges. Sustainable development juxtaposes intense economic development along with high consumerism coexisting with an environmentally friendly and responsible society. This reveals a paradox in the greening process currently in place.
These projects are small in scale and only take on a tiny space in the overall urbanity of the country. They take place in a bounded environment and constitute living laboratories that pioneer green technology. But they cannot be replicated on a larger scale or implemented and applied across the whole territory.
Inevitably, rapid urban growth and transnational migration flows have massively enlarged the ecological footprints of countries such as the UAE. It will be very difficult to achieve sustainable development while Arab Gulf states subsidize massive energy consumption, continue to expand urban sprawl and expansion, and allow for traffic congestion while remaining careless about water and electricity consumption.
*[Gulf State Analytics is a partner organization of Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Despite more than 3,000 years of Chinese history, many of the world’s countries had little to no direct experience with China or Chinese investment prior to the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). There was a presumption on the part of many governments that international best practices were well established and that China would be in compliance with those standards as it rolled out the initiative. As they now know, that often turned out not to be the case, but the fact that the Chinese business model is a mix of public and private sector participation, rules and regulations that are not necessarily logical or coherent and are often misunderstood has complicated matters.
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For all concerned, the BRI has in many ways been a leap in the dark, since such an ambitious undertaking had never before been attempted. The Chinese government, and many of the nation’s companies active in the initiative, were, and remain, on a learning curve. The enforceability of Chinese regulations on private sector Chinese companies operating overseas can be inconsistent, and Chinese-built infrastructure has, at times, been found to be substandard. Regulations governing the practices of Chinese firms are frequently revised, leaving many organizations scrambling to keep up in the public and private sectors. It then takes a while for new guidelines to translate into practice abroad.
BRI Financing
BRI financing is highly dependent on loans from the China Development Bank, China Export-Import Bank and other state-owned commercial banks. China’s foreign exchange reserves are important sources of capital for these institutions. Although Beijing maintains the world’s largest aggregation of foreign currency, its foreign reserves have declined in recent years, which, when combined with its dramatically slowing economy, raises questions about the sustainability of BRI financing in the medium term.
Under the presumption that foreign capital and support from multilateral financial institutions will be required to sustain BRI projects in the future, China’s Ministry of Finance established the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Financing with eight multilateral development banks and financial institutions. The center is expected to enhance the project financing process through a combination of better information sharing, improved project preparation and capacity building. The ministry has also developed the Debt Sustainability Framework for Participating Countries (DSF) of the BRI, collaborating with its counterparts from 28 partner countries. China’s DSF is virtually identical to the World Bank-International Monetary Fund DSF, which governs lending operations for the multilateral institutions and many bilateral lenders. That should increase its prospects for success.
China’s effort is a significant step forward in guarding against the debt challenges associated with the BRI. Debt sustainability can only grow in importance for Beijing. As the BRI progresses, China will have no choice but to take steps to improve reporting transparency vis-à-vis financing, transaction structures and debt repayment. As for host governments that have become saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt as a result of debt-trap diplomacy, their concerns have been widely shared with Beijing. Many of these nations have already become more discriminating BRI consumers. Although the trail of debt-related issues will certainly not diminish going forward, they will hopefully become less severe in time.
The Chinese government has sought to integrate the BRI with its green growth agenda in an attempt to address criticism of its continued reliance on coal power and the lack of environmental oversight on Chinese infrastructure projects. Although Beijing has made great strides toward improving environmental and resource productivity, greater efficiency gains are vital to achieving a shift toward low-carbon, resource-efficient, competitive economies. Future progress will largely depend on the country’s capacity to integrate environmental aspects into the decision-making process for all its domestic and foreign policies to ensure that industrial and environmental policy objectives and measures are well aligned and mutually supportive.
Reputational Risk
At ongoing risk also is China’s reputation. The blowback it has experienced as a result of its rollout of the BRI from countries around the world has been unprecedented. The same may be said about its trade practices with the US and its response to COVID-19. Many of the world’s governments and people have simply lost confidence in Beijing, to the extent that they had confidence to begin with. The ball is squarely in Beijing’s court to raise the level of confidence the world may have in the future regarding what it says versus what it actually does. There is no better proving ground on that score than the BRI.
A combination of hubris, a bulldozer approach to getting things done and a complete lack of sensitivity had worked well for the Communist Party of China at home for 70 years, and Beijing apparently believed that doing the same would work well overseas. While some aspects of Beijing’s original approach ended up yielding some positive results, President Xi Jinping’s move toward “BRI lite” in 2018 had to be taken with a grain of salt. He deserves credit for acknowledging some of the initiative’s pitfalls, but the Chinese government’s pivot must ultimately be considered too little and too late.
If it wanted to more fully acknowledge the error of its ways, it would have offered to renegotiate every BRI contract that was clearly skewed in its favor rather than waiting to be asked to do so, award debt forgiveness on a broader basis and stop in its tracks any project under construction that is inconsistent with best environmental practices. That is clearly not going to happen.
*[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
