Wednesday was one of the deadliest days in American history, as the coronavirus killed 3,140 people. This is 673 more Americans than the Japanese massacred in their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It is more than twice the number of souls as perished aboard the Titanic.
In another record, 106,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with covid-19. President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is no longer among them. He flashed reporters a thumbs-up as he was driven away from MedStar Georgetown University Hospital at around 5 p.m. on Wednesday.
“Back 100% and lost little time,” Giuliani tweeted this morning.
The former New York mayor said he received remdesivir, dexamethasone and “exactly the same” treatment that Trump got in October when he was hospitalized, which the president has often credited for his speedy recovery.
“The minute I took the cocktail yesterday, I felt 100 percent better,” Giuliani said in a Tuesday afternoon interview with WABC, a New York talk radio station. “It works very quickly. Wow! … By the next morning, I felt like I was 10 years younger.”
As beds fill up, patients who need hospital care — for the virus or for something else — cannot get it.
Many intensive care units are overwhelmed. More and more places face looming, life-and-death decisions about rationing care.
Giuliani himself acknowledged that he got “celebrity” treatment. He said the president’s doctor, apparently referring to White House physician Sean Conley, talked him into being admitted. “I didn’t really want to go to the hospital, and he said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’” Giuliani recounted. “We can get it over with in three days if we send you to the hospital.”
But the VIP treatment for Trump and his crew, including access to the best cocktails of experimental drugs, seems like an important part of the explanation for why the president and his inner-circle continue to speak so flippantly about the dangers of the virus that has now killed at least 288,000 Americans.It is not unique to this era that the rich and well-connected have better access to the highest-quality care than ordinary folks. Our system has long been hideously unequal. It is acutely bad for communities of color.
Ben Carson speaks at a rally for President Trump on Oct. 30 in Michigan. A week later, the HUD secretary announced he tested positive for the coronavirus. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The antibody drugs are complicated to make because they are created by live cells. “The manufacturing process can’t be rushed. And the drugs must be administered intravenously, creating challenges for health facilities that must set up separate infusion centers so patients with cancer and autoimmune disorders aren’t exposed to people who are infected,” Laurie McGinley and Josh Dawsey report. “Carson, Christie and Trump all got the drugs under ‘expanded access’ programs before they were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. Health experts worried their experiences would give Americans the wrong impression about the drugs’ availability. …
“Several other people in Trump’s orbit also have had covid-19 and were offered help getting access to the drugs. One adviser who contracted the virus said the president offered to get the Regeneron drug for him. ‘It’ll make you better overnight,’ the president said,” per McGinley and Dawsey. “After the president’s hospitalization, some advisers also warned him against speaking about the coronavirus as if it were a small inconvenience after he had benefited from experimental drugs unavailable to others. Trump’s response was that he wanted to make a video telling the American people that they’d get the drugs, too, though the White House had no ability to ramp up production.”
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at Giuliani during his monologue on ABC, but then he got serious: “Why aren’t we madder about the fact that Rudy and Donnie and Jr. and all the swamp monsters pretending to be human are getting a special miracle cure nobody else seems to be able to get?”
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- The number of new unemployment claims rose sharply to 853,000 last week, an increase of 137,000 from the week before, another sign of the toll the pandemic is taking on the labor market. An additional 427,600 claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program for gig and self-employed workers. (Eli Rosenberg)
Hunter Biden confirms he is under federal investigation.
“Federal prosecutors have been investigating Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, to determine if he failed to report income from China-related business deals, according to people familiar with the matter — a politically explosive probe that is likely to challenge the Justice Department in the incoming administration,” Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett and Colby Itkowitz report. “The investigation into the president-elect’s son began in 2018, though little could be learned immediately about what, if any, wrongdoing it had found. The existence of a tax investigation was confirmed Wednesday by Hunter Biden in a statement saying he had just been advised of it. … FBI agents had been seeking to talk to Hunter Biden as part of the case on Tuesday — though an interview has not yet been scheduled or taken place — as well as serve subpoenas on Hunter Biden and his associates. …
“Although the investigation has been ongoing for some time, it is unclear how far along prosecutors consider themselves toward building a criminal case or closing the matter … A person familiar with the case said that the investigation continued during the election year but that agents took care not to take overt investigative steps as voting neared that would have made it more widely known. Those precautions, the person said, became unnecessary once the election was over. If the investigation is continuing when Joe Biden takes office, it will mark a major test for him and his attorney general. …
“Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) quickly called for a special counsel investigation of Hunter Biden. … If Barr does not appoint a special counsel, Joe Biden’s attorney general could face pressure to do so, to help ensure the probe’s independence. Any special counsel would still answer to the attorney general. Another possibility would be for the current Delaware U.S. attorney to remain in that job to continue the Hunter Biden investigation. … A person familiar with the Hunter Biden investigation said it ‘is not connected to the attacks the Trump campaign and their allies made against Hunter during the campaign.’”
- Hunter Biden statement: “I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
- Biden transition team statement: “President-elect Biden is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.”
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Today more than half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives signed onto Texas’s lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install Trump, rather than the legitimately elected Joe Biden, into the White House.
Twenty-three Democratic-led states and territories, along with the Republican Attorney General of Ohio, Dave Yost, today signed a brief supporting the four states Texas is attacking. The District of Columbia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington all backed the states whose votes Texas is trying to throw out.
But six states—Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah—joined Texas’s lawsuit today. Pennsylvania’s brief notes that Trump has “flooded” the courts “with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election.” The brief warns, “Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”
What on earth is going on?
First: Trump is throwing at the wall anything he can in hopes of staying in office. The more chaos it creates, the happier he is. The lawsuit crisis has, for example, muted the story that at least 2,923 Americans died today of Covid-19, and 223,570 cases were reported, a 28% increase in the weekly average of cases since two weeks ago.
It has also diverted attention from the fact that there is no deal, and no real sign of a deal, on a coronavirus relief bill. A bipartisan group of senators has managed to hammer out a $908 billion deal but Republicans refuse to allow its $160 billion for aid to state and local governments and Democrats refuse to agree to shield businesses from liability for coronavirus injuries. The bipartisan group tried to put the two things together, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that’s a non-starter. Meanwhile, 26 million Americans say they don’t have enough to eat.
Second: There is a war underway for control of the Republican Party. While a losing incumbent president usually loses influence in the party, Trump intends to continue to call the shots. He wants to run again in 2024, or at least to anoint a successor, rather than letting the Republican National Committee pick a presidential candidate. There is a struggle going on to control the RNC and, as well, to figure out who gets control of the lists of supporters Trump has compiled. Trump also controls a lot of the party’s money, since he has been out front as its fundraiser without a break since he decided to run for office. He was the first president ever to file for reelection on the day of his inauguration, permitting him to hold “rallies” and to raise money throughout his presidency.
So Republican lawmakers are willing to swear loyalty to him, either because they want to attract his voters in future elections, or because they want access to the cash he can raise, or both. They no longer defend traditional policy positions; they defend Trump.
This loyalty requires contortions. In Georgia, Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have backed it. The senators are facing a runoff election in January against Democrat challengers Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and they need Trump’s support. So they are taking a stand against their own voters, despite the fact that this position logically would overturn their own elections.