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- President Donald Trump said he is ready to resume his campaign rallies, insisting that he feels “perfect,” one week after he first announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. The president says he does not believe he is contagious. [CNN / Kevin Liptak and Ben Tinker]
- But the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Thursday on MSNBC that to ensure that he is not contagious, he must go 10 days without symptoms and receive two negative tests 24 hours apart. [AP / Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, and Jonathan Lemire]
- On Saturday, Trump plans to give remarks from a White House balcony to hundreds of people on the South Lawn. Trump also wants to hold a rally in Florida on Monday. This “peaceful protest for law & order” is supposed to be the precursor to him returning next week to full-time campaigning.
- CDC guidelines state that individuals should isolate themselves for 10 days after experiencing Covid-19 symptoms. If Trump were to follow those guidelines, he would have to wait until Monday at the earliest to start holding public events again. [The Hill / Brett Samuels]
- It doesn’t help that, when interviewed on MSNBC, White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern refused six times to say when Trump had last tested negative for coronavirus, indicating that either he was not regularly being tested—contrary to what the White House said—or he tested positive earlier than the public knows.
- The president insists he is fine, and that the danger of the coronavirus has been overblown. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drafted an order for masks on all public transportation, but Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House Coronavirus Task Force, refused even to discuss it. Trump’s reelection pitch is that the coronavirus is not a big deal, and we should just live with it. He told Limbaugh: “People are going to get immediately better like I did. I mean, I feel better now than I did two weeks ago. It’s crazy…. And I recovered immediately, almost immediately.” Today more than 850 Americans died of Covid-19, bringing our official total to more than 213,000.
Trump spent much of the last two days calling in to the Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and ranting in a manic way that suggests he is having trouble with the steroids he is taking for his illness.
In the interview with Rush Limbaugh today, Trump boasted that “our nuclear is all tippy top now,” and said about Iran, “If you f*** around with us, if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.” He tweeted that “Obama, Biden, Crooked Hillary and many others got caught in a Treasonous Act of Spying and Government Overthrow, a Criminal Act. How is Biden now allowed to run for President?”
As their chief is imploding, lots of key Republican players are silent. A number of people who were at the September 26 event have gone off the radar screen, including Attorney General William Barr.
Barr has, though, told top Republicans that the review of the origins of the Russia probe by his own, hand-picked investigator after the Inspector General for the Department of Justice determined the investigation had been begun legitimately and conducted without political bias, will not be out before the election. Barr had been promising the release of the report by U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham in time to sway voters, although such a release ran contrary to DOJ policies.
Last month, top aide to Durham Nora Dannehy resigned from the investigation, allegedly out of concerns about political pressure. The comments of a Republican congressional aide to Axios confirm that this “investigation” was about politics: “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn't happen before the election.”
The repercussions from the September 26 event in the Rose Garden celebrating Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court continue to pile up. Today, news broke that a teacher and two students from the school some of Barrett’s children attend have tested positive for coronavirus. This may or may not be related to the White House event, of course, but it increases attention to the irresponsibility of the organizers and attendees of that event.
A conservative activist who attended the Sept. 26 ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett – and who sat just feet away from 11 attendees, including Trump, who have since tested positive – failed to isolate at home in accordance with CDC guidelines. Instead, she’s traveling across the country in a bus tour to rally support for Barrett. Penny Nance is traveling as part of the “Women For Amy” campaign of the Concerned Women for America group that she runs. So far, she’s appeared at events in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. There are nearly 30 more stops ahead. (Teo Armus)
Both sides of the abortion debate are certain that Amy Coney Barrett would roll back Roe v. Wade. “A Fox News poll released this week found that 61 percent of registered voters said the Supreme Court should let the ruling stand, while 28 percent said it should be overturned … In private one-on-one meetings with senators, Barrett has been discreet on the question of precedent.
Congressional Republicans are wildly silent about the president's behavior, except for inklings they are distancing themselves from him and focusing on the confirmation of Barrett to the Supreme Court. Even this, though, does not suggest great support for Trump. To the contrary, Republicans appear to be determined to jam her through because they expect Trump to lose the election. Although 59% of Americans think the next president should fill the seat, and although the Senate is ignoring a desperately needed coronavirus relief bill, they are planning to shepherd her through to a seat on the court before November 3.
Today, the second debate between Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was cancelled when Graham refused to take a coronavirus test despite the fact he was exposed to the virus on October 1 at a meeting that included Mike Lee (R-UT) who has since tested positive. Graham is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a positive test would delay the start of the Barrett hearings, slated for Monday.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked Graham to postpone the hearing in light of the positive tests of two Republican committee members, Mike Lee (R-UT) and Thom Tillis (R-NC). Concerns about the spread of the disease have made Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recess the Senate until October 19, and the Democrats have noted that “no plausible public health or scientific rationale justifies proceeding with Senate Judiciary Committee hearings next week.”
After temporarily halting negative ads against Trump while he was hospitalized, the Biden campaign unveiled several new commercials on Friday morning, including a few 30-second spots aimed at seniors. “Trump’s pushing to slash Medicare benefits. He’s proposed eliminating the funding source for Social Security, a plan that would drain Social Security by 2023,” a narrator says in one of the new ads, which will run in 16 states. “Joe Biden will protect Medicare, and he’s proposed a plan to increase Social Security benefits. The choice is clear.”
Biden pollster John Anzalone believes health care, Social Security and Biden’s frequent talk about bipartisanship have also played a major role in luring seniors, in addition to the coronavirus. He told Greg Sargent this week that the campaign’s research has found seniors remember that Biden made a good-faith effort to negotiate with GOP senators when he was vice president. Anzalone added that seniors feel like they “know” Biden because he’s been on the national stage for so long and that they tend to be perceive him as moderate, empathetic and trustworthy.
Guests that Trump may have exposed to the virus are scattered across America.
“With no systematic effort to trace or advise the hundreds of guests at the Rose Garden ceremony and other events in the surrounding days, many made their way home and resumed their busy schedules, according to interviews with more than 40 people who attended events with the president between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1, when Trump announced he had tested positive,” Isaac Stanley-Becker, Rosalind Helderman, Dawsey and Amy Gardner report. “Guests of the president and his campaign returned to at least 20 states, often by plane. They visited college campuses and sat across the dinner table from elderly parents. They attended church and addressed crowds at indoor conventions, including on the topic of election security. Upon learning they may have been exposed, some chose to quarantine or get tested. Others were waiting instead to see if they developed symptoms — despite months of warnings from scientists that it is possible to be contagious without feeling ill. And in many cases, the attendees said they were not worried, expressing faith in the health precautions taken by their hosts despite the outbreak.” The CDC is still playing a limited role.
The NIH’s former top vaccine expert, Rick Bright, said he resigned this week because Trump has so heavily politicized the pandemic response. “The administration has in effect barred me from working to fight the pandemic,” Bright writes in an op-ed for today’s newspaper. "The country is flying blind into what could be the darkest winter in modern history. Undoubtedly, millions more Americans will be infected with the coronavirus and influenza; many thousands will die. Now, more than ever before, the public needs to be able to rely on honest, non-politicized and unmanipulated public health guidance from career scientists."
Trump appears to be planning to combat his low numbers by spurring his supporters to violence and by rigging the system. Yesterday, he told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that Pence’s “best answer” at the vice presidential debate was when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in January. He is now saying that Biden committed “treason” and “shouldn’t be allowed to run.” His rhetoric is stoking radical fires, as extremists hear his advice to “Stand back and stand by” as a rallying cry.
The president is pushing the idea that, unless he is reelected, the election will be fraudulent, and that he will not accept the results. His campaign says it has recruited 50,000 volunteer poll watchers—polls already have certified watchers from both parties—who seem likely to try to disrupt the election in swing states. Republican leaders have tried to limit voting, with varied success: Texas Governor Greg Abbott [above] ordered all Texas counties to have a single ballot drop box (Democratic-leaning Harris County is bigger than the state of Rhode Island), but today, a federal judge ruled against him.
The Trump campaign is also looking the other way as Russia again interferes on his behalf.
In all of this—except the Russia part—Trump looks oddly like President Andrew Johnson, who took over the White House after Abraham Lincoln’s death at the hands of an assassin. Johnson was a former Democrat, and could not stand the idea of the Republican government ending systemic Black enslavement and leveling the playing field among races. He wanted to reclaim the nation for white men. Convinced he was defending America from a mob and that his supporters must retake control of the government in the midterm election of 1866 or the nation was finished, Johnson became increasingly unhinged until he began to compare himself to both the martyred Lincoln and Jesus Christ. He called his congressional opponents traitors who should be executed.
Egged on by the president, white supremacist gangs attacked Black Americans and their white allies, convincing Johnson that his party would sweep the midterms and he would gain control of the government to end Black rights.
Voters heard Johnson, all right. They were horrified by his attacks on the government and the violence he urged. It was an era in which only white men could vote, but even so, they elected to office not Johnson’s white supremacists, but Johnson’s opponents. And they didn’t just elect enough of those reasonable men to control Congress… voters gave them a supermajority.
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/
refuse to say:
fundraising email:
https://www.washingtonpost.
https://www.axios.com/barr-
Senate letter:
https://www.politico.com/news/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/
https://www.politico.com/news/
https://www.texastribune.org/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/