Trump Is Shooting Us on Coronavirus Avenue and Getting Away With It
March 30, 2020
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
On Sunday afternoon, March 29, the ringmaster of political media, Donald Trump, claimed that 2.2 million people would have died from COVID-!9 in the absence of concerted action on his part, which never took place. It was Trump’s way of declaring that he was a purported savior since Dr. Anthony Fauci earlier Sunday indicated that 200,000 - 300,000 Americans would die from Coronavirus (with millions more infected), even if the current quarantining stays in parts of the US stay in place and social distancing does not stop. Trump made a concession by announcing that the federal social distancing recommendation be extended to April 30.
It remains to be seen if Trump will allow further and necessary mitigation steps to be taken, since he has been obstructing reducing the numbers of infections and deaths for weeks and weeks. His mercurial and pernicious “Mr. Hyde” character may just be doing lip service in announcing limited federal action, while he continues to undercut federal support for the states fighting the pandemic and a federal systemic approach to limiting COVID-19 spread.
Indeed, it was a false claim by Trump because far fewer than 200,000 - 300,000 might not now die if Trump hadn’t failed to act to mitigate the Coronavirus earlier. Clearly, on Sunday, Trump had craftily shifted his stance to accept that there is a pandemic that is ravaging the US. There does appear to be more activity on the part of the Trump administration to ramp up testing, including a new five minute Abbott Labs test (not yet employed) that was just approved, and providing some Protective Personal Equipment (PPE’s) and respirators to beleaguered hospitals, although how much help is at hand and how soon remains unclear. After all, Trump can never be trusted. He always wants “a favor.”
He wants to be “the arsonist who wants credit as the fireman,” as one pundit said.
However, nothing Trump or his acolytes say, except for Dr. Fauci, can be trusted. In fact, Trump, who has wildly alternated his statements on testing availability from “anyone can get a test at any time” to those without symptoms should not get tested (which would lead the asymptomatic carriers to spread the disease further), once again attacked the media whenever confronted with his own quotes that evidenced his mob style approach to providing whatever assistance he has been forced to provide.
I particularly twice addressed the need for universal testing to screen out, isolate and trace back contacts of asymptomatic carriers this week, and included a tweet by The New York Times about Trump’s repeated lying on the issue of availability. Until Sunday, Trump was still backing a negligent manslaughter, perhaps genocidal plan, to try and force people back to work on April 13. He appears to have abandoned “packed” churches on Easter, April 12, which would have made the holiday of Resurrection a death sentence for untold thousands upon thousands of people. But the idea may return in a tweet at any moment.
The tweet on top of this commentary (and others on Sunday) indicate his briefings are still the daily stage-managed Trump show. For example, he once again singled out Yamiche Alcindor of the PBS NewsHour when she read a direct quote Trump had said in a Sean Hannity interview that New York did not really need 30,000 respirators. Trump viciously verbally and personally berated Alcindor, who persisted to try and ask her question by pointing out that she was repeating Trump’s own words. Then Trump, amidst his tantrum, curtly cut her off and went on to the next question. Alcindor has been a BuzzFlash hero for twice before confronting Trump and not being intimidated by him, despite both times being the target of the parrying that Trump learned from the mob and Joseph McCarthy lawyer, Roy Cohn: when on the defensive, attack, attack and attack.
CNN’s Jeremy Diamond, in an unusual act of DC Press Corps solidarity against Trump’s bullying, handed the mic back to Alcindor when he got a hold of it, who asked Trump what health experts he had spoken to who supported his claim that there would be more suicides if the economy weren’t opened up soon than an increase in Coronavirus deaths, which Trump refused to answer. Diamond was eventually able to ask his own question. of Trump and read a direct quote to him, made by Trump, that he wouldn’t call the desperate governors (who happen to be mostly Democratic) because they didn’t “appreciate him.” Trump accused Diamond of lying and taking the quotation out of context. Deny, deny, attack, attack.
As mentioned, BuzzFlash has chronicled and saluted Alcindor for her fearless calling out of Trump in a generally docile DC Press Corps, who most often asks softball questions of Trump or let him berate them without a whimper. In the absence of the entire press corps standing up to Trump, he has successfully convinced his base and some independents that the media is “the enemy of the people.”
I have written two commentaries in praise of Alcindor’s courage, particularly considering the obsequiousness of most of the press: “PBS Reporter Yamiche Alcindor Challenges Trump to His Face to Accept Responsibility for Shutting Down WH Pandemic Preparedness Division. He Responded by Calling Her "Nasty" and Cutting Off Her Mic”; and “PBS Reporter Calls Trump a Liar to His Face.” There are just a few other DC Press Corps reporters, including CNN’s Jim Acosta, who confront Trump with his lies, but Alcindor is the unflappable model of what the DC Press Corps should all be doing to expose the pathological lying of a man who is an impostor president.
Although on Sunday, Trump went into morbid detail about cooler trucks filled with the cadavers of COVID-19 victims, due to the shortage of morgue space at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, he still has yet to express sympathy for the victims of the Coronavirus or condolences to members of families of those who have died (although Mike Pence did offer empathy during his appearance on Sunday). Trump is devoid of empathy and actually appears to delight in his power over life and death. After all, the victims of CV have upended his bull stock market campaign strategy, and have become his enemy in a way. Trump doesn’t take kindly to anyone who disrupts his game plan, dead or alive.
As the astounding tweet at the top of this commentary indicates, Trump understands the importance of these “White House Coronavirus Task Force Briefings” as replacements for his temporarily canceled campaign rallies. At those rallies he is an Elmer Gantry style huckster who masterfully incites the basest instincts in his cult followers. It took him but a few days to realize that he could replace the canceled rallies with a daily television program in the guise of a briefing.
In his Sunday tweet, Trump reveals the danger in television stations covering his full campaign briefings (disguised as updates of “The White House Coronavirus Task Force”). To repeat, he tweeted:
Because the “Ratings” of my News Conferences etc. are so high, “Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers” according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. “Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.” said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!
Here he reveals his true self, the star of “The Apprentice,” the mastermind who in the absence of campaign rallies created a daily “briefing” that would allow him to state a couple of “developments” in the battle against Coronavirus (some of them true; many of them lies) and spend most of his time performing, diverting attention from his negligent homicide in mocking the COVID-19 as a “hoax,” eliminating White House pandemic planning, delaying efforts to prepare for it and to test individuals until it was too late to prevent war-time carnage.
At his “briefings,” among other “entertainment,” he offers deadly quack medicine. claims a vaccine is coming soon, places the blame for the virus on migrants or China (the “China Virus”), berates reporters, calls on his task force members to incredulously assert that he is a strong leader, and to, as his tweet boasted, put on a “show” that draws big ratings — and probably explains why he has risen in some polls.
The supposedly informational briefings are just an opportunity for Trump to show his razzle-dazzle as an entertainer par excellence and unparalleled liar. Television news stations generally cover the “briefings”-in-lieu-of-campaign-rallies” in full, when they could always just tape them and cover whatever, if any, important information is disseminated and thus avoid the harmful and copious disinformation.
However, the television coverage — and the print and online publications — are part of a corporate industry. Trump is a spectacle that sells well to the media audience and that he has tamed to tolerate his ludicrous and sometimes dangerous statements and behavior. Trump knows that the media needs him for news ratings. Indeed, media coverage of his 2016 campaign antics — along with Russian assistance — made him president even though he lost the popular vote. In short, there is a tacit understanding between the media and Trump that they need each other: Trump to motivate his base and the media to profit from his grand celebrity spectacles.
Meanwhile, as I write this commentary, more Americans are dying from the pandemic, more are infected, and the rate of mortality is exponentially increasing. Nurses, doctors and first responders are becoming infected and dying, many due to the absence of sufficient Personal Protection Equipment. As one example which we posted on BuzzFlash, nurses at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York have had to wear garbage bags as protective gowns as seen below.
More than 150 employees at four Boston hospitals have been infected. Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit has sent out a letter to staff about how to triage which patients will live and which patients will die because of a shortage of respirators. Some hospitals are trying to figure out how to jerry rig respirators to work for two patients. There are so many horrid and unnecessary anecdotes that all lead back to Trump’s sociopathic delays in addressing the needs of protecting Americans, healthcare workers and first responders from the ravaging virus.
When Trump isn’t putting on his “presidential” briefing or press “gaggle” shows, he is deriding the governors who are providing actual leadership as “little problem children” because they put his clown show, lack of leadership and willful negligence to shame. He accuses Andrew Cuomo of exaggerating the need for 30,000 respirators and scorns him to Hannity, as Yamiche Alcindor of the PBS NewsHour nailed him on it (as detailed above), and he excoriated her because she was pulling the curtain of his “briefing” show aside to reveal, yes, his hoax.
If Trump allows the areas that are sheltering-in-place to continue and gets red states to start quarantines. If Trump allows testing to continue to ramp up so that asymptomatic spreaders can be identified and quarantined. If he sets up a national network to identify contacts of newly identified infected persons and trace back and test them. If all these things happen, Trump will still have the blood of tens of thousands of Americans on his hands, but we may be able to dramatically reduce the infection and death toll by millions of people. However, Trump will have to be disengaged from the Coronavirus planning process. He is a diabolical obstruction to the efforts to reduce its devastating impact.
Of Trump’s Sunday tweet, Brian Stalter wrote in a late Sunday night CNN “Reliable Sources” email:
That's why it was so disgusting to see President Trump bragging about the ratings for the White House's coronavirus task force briefings. Talking about ratings while people are dying and others are pleading for help? It is beneath any human being. I said on "CNN Newsroom" that members of Trump's inner circle need to intervene and help him get out of his own way.
More is demanded, however, and this means the media must stop airing his briefings live, and air only fact-checked segments. If there is any news that comes out of the “briefings” that is credible, it can be reported on air as an anchor or reporter summarizes the credible information that was provided.
All of us remember Trump’s boast in 2016 that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and his followers would still vote for him. He has also bragged that the media wanted him to win because he boosts their ratings, which was certainly the case in 2016, and now the justification of live broadcasts of Trump’s White House “briefing” coverage.
Earlier this week, I wrote a commentary entitled, “Negligent Manslaughter: Trump Is Culling the Herd, Increasing Infection and Deaths, by Still Slow-Walking the COVID-19 Test Kits. Asymptomatic Spread Continues to Take Its Toll.” For the moment, and he is not to be trusted, it appears Trump has realized COVID-19 could not be intimidated by him, and he needed to prevent the mantle of leadership from falling to Andrew Cuomo and the other proactive, life-saving governors. Since they were demanding he act like a president, he would hold “briefings” and “act” the role of president.
But, remember, he still thinks he can get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, only now it is millions of lives at stake. Pseudo campaign appearances disguised as “briefings” will do nothing to change his pathology. He doesn’t care about human life, just himself, power and money.
He’ll do what he politically is forced to do and nothing more.
Dying from a virus is for “suckers,” and for Trump, they are an impediment to his narcissistic pathological goals.
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