Today’s media was consumed with news of the spread of coronavirus to the president and First Lady, as well as concern over the degree to which it has spread to other people associated with the White House. A number of those who attended the Rose Garden announcement of Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court have tested positive. That number includes the Trumps, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), and Fr. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. Also infected are Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, and at least three journalists who have attended White House events in the past week.
And tonight, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway reported that she, too, has tested positive.
As I write this, just before midnight, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien has just announced he, too, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Five minutes after midnight, we learned that 11 staffers from the Cleveland debate also tested positive.
We will not learn of infections among the Secret Service.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tested negative, as have Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden.
This evening, medical professionals transferred the president to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center “out of an abundance of caution.” He walked from the helicopter under his own power, and posted a short video to his Twitter account assuring viewers that he is doing “very well.” He remains in charge; power has not transferred to Vice President Mike Pence.
[Reportedly, Trump has a low grade fever, chills, fatigue and congestion. He is receiving an experimental drug which is hoped to increase his amount of antibodies. Trump is 74 years of age, clinically obese, and we do not know what coexisting conditions he has. Some doctors speculate he has heart disease based on what we know of what medications he takes.--Esco]
Aside from the personal implications of the spread of this illness—and let’s remember that there are 46,459 other Americans who have contracted the coronavirus in the last day-- this major news story has huge implications for the upcoming election. It also illustrates how the administration’s secrecy and lies take away our ability to make informed decisions about our own lives, as well as about the nation.
The Trump entourage has refused to wear masks, social distance, or follow the advice of public health experts for reducing the spread of the virus. Now it appears that White House officials deliberately withheld information about their condition, directly endangering other people who acted on the presumption that the Trump people weren’t infected. The Washington Post reported that Secret Service agents, who risk their lives to protect the president, are angry and frustrated: “He’s never cared about us.” The 30-50 Republican donors who met with Trump Thursday night at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, are “freaking out,” one report noted. Tickets had cost up to $250,000, and Trump met privately with about 19 people for 45 minutes. Trump knew his adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive when he left for the club, but he went anyway. He did not wear a mask.
Reporter Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who moderated Tuesday’s debate and so was one of those the Trumps’ entourage endangered, revealed today that Trump arrived too late on Tuesday for a COVID-19 test, as the venue required. Instead, there was an “honor system.” Organizers assumed the people associated with the campaigns would not come unless they had tested negative. Trump’s people arrived wearing masks, which they had to have to enter the auditorium, but then removed them shortly after sitting down, and refused to put them back on. During the debate, Trump mocked Biden for his habit of wearing a mask.
The campaign did not tell the Biden camp that Hicks, who attended the debate, had tested positive for coronavirus the day after the event. The Biden organization learned it from the newspapers. The White House did not even tell former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who spent four days in close quarters with Hicks and Trump, helping the president prepare for the debate. He, too, learned the news from the media. [Rudy Giuliani was there as well-Esco]
This crisis shows the administration’s refusal to share information and its insistence on its own version of reality .Its history of secrecy and lies means that few people actually trust anything its spokespeople say. It was striking how many people did not believe the Trumps were actually sick when the news broke; we are so accustomed to Trump’s lies that many people thought he was simply looking for a way out of future debates.
The constant lies—about coronavirus and virtually everything else—destabilize the nation because we cannot know what the truth really is. And if we don’t know what is actually happening, we cannot make good decisions. Today the editorial board of the Washington Post warned that the White House simply must let us know the truth about the president’s health so that we know who is actually running national security, the economy, and the election on our behalf.
That plea did not appear to make much of an impression on the White House: it did not bother to tell Nancy Pelosi, who is third in line for the presidency, that Trump was being helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital.
And so we are facing a pandemic spreading through the upper ranks of the government just before an election with little faith that we will learn the truth about what is happening. That, just as much as the infections in the administration, is a crisis.
To its credit, the Biden campaign has identified this crisis and is doing its best to restore our sense of a shared reality, based in our history and our better principles. Rather than expressing outrage that the Trump camp exposed him and his wife and guests to coronavirus, Biden offered his best wishes for Trump and the First Lady, as did his running mate Kamala Harris. Biden’s campaign pulled all its negative ads out of respect for the president’s illness (the Trump campaign refused to follow suit).
Biden spoke in Michigan today, assuring the audience that “We can get this pandemic under control so we can get our economy working again for everyone.” But, he emphasized, “this cannot be a partisan moment. It must be an American moment. We have to come together as a nation.” He promised to get rid of the toxic partisanship that is keeping us all off balance. “I’m running as a Democrat,” he said, “but I will… govern as an American president. Whether you voted for me or against me, I will represent you... and those who see each other as fellow Americans who just don’t live in red states or blue states but who live in and love the United States of America. That’s who we are.”
To an increasingly weary country, he offered hope that we really can heal the nation’s ills. “There’s never been a single solitary thing America’s been unable to do. Think of this. Not once. Not a single thing we’ve not been able to overcome when we’ve done it together. So let’s get the heck up. Remember who in God’s name we are. This is the United States of America,” he said. “There’s nothing beyond our capacity.”
Notes:
Pelosi informed:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/
Biden:
Earpiece ad: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/
didn’t tell Biden camp: https://www.cnn.com/politics/
Honor system:
https://www.politico.com/news/
https://www.politico.com/news/
11 staffers:
Christie:
WASHINGTON, DC – America’s capital is more on edge now than at perhaps any other time since the eve of the Civil War in 1860. The city was tense during Watergate, of course. But as much as Richard Nixon tested the constitutional system, as a lawyer who had served in government for decades, he recognized that there are limits that even a president dares not transgress. And now, with President Donald Trump, the First Lady, and a top aide all testing positive for COVID-19, there is more uncertainty in Washington, DC that at any time in living memory.
The non-medical crisis now facing the United States is that Trump doesn’t recognize limits. There is scant indication that he even understands, let alone respects, America’s constitutional order, the survival of which depends on whether those to whom power has been entrusted exercise restraint.
Trump, recklessly breaking precedents and norms, has consistently attempted to disable any checks on his behavior. He insists that Article II of the Constitution “gives me the right to dowhatever I want to do.” And he is buttressed in his view by Attorney General William Barr, who is the kind of fealty-first law-enforcement chief that Trump has craved.
A critical part of Trump’s effort to undermine confidence in the election outcome, if it goes against him, is his attempt to discredit millions of ballots preemptively. The assumption is that, because of the COVID-19 pandemic that Trump has allowed to get out of hand, more Americans than ever before will vote by mail, and that most of those who do will be Democrats.
Earlier, misreading public opinion as he so often does, Trump sought to slow mail deliveries in order to disqualify millions of mail-in ballots. After a public backlash, these activities were supposedly suspended, yet mail delivery remains slower than before.
Then, in September, Trump started saying that the election aftermath will be peaceful as long as “we … get rid of the ballots” – whatever that means. He and his campaign team are now casting about for more ways to shape or otherwise invalidate the election’s outcome if necessary.
Allies of Trump’s challenger Joe Biden are discussing how to forestall Republican meddling with the outcome, and force the president from the White House if he loses the election but refuses to leave. The need to take this astonishing possibility seriously is a sign of how far things have deteriorated.
And so, the legal guns are being readied. With luck, real weapons won’t be used. But Trump has been encouraging violence since he first ran for office, and he doesn’t convincingly eschew it now. His calling at the first presidential debate on the Proud Boys, a violent right-wing white-supremacy group, to “stand back and stand by” has embroiled the White House in efforts to sanitize this ominous statement.
Meanwhile, the New York Times’ recent exposé has made clear why Trump has frantically sought to keep his tax returns secret: he paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and nothing for many years before that. The revelations about Trump’s dicey tax record and business dealings offers one explanation for his desperation to win another term in office. The Times’ reporting has scraped away Trump’s populist façade and revealed that the underlying rationale for his presidency – that he was a savvy billionaire who would apply his amazing business acumen to running the country – was entirely bogus.
The Times report also showed that, as was widely suspected, Trump had received financial help from authoritarian countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And Trump reportedly has voiced his own assumption that he has benefited from Russian oligarchs at the behest of Vladimir Putin. Numerous observers warn that Trump’s indebtedness to foreign countries makes him a national-security threat. As it is, Trump owes over $400 million in debts that will come due in the next few years; there’s no knowing where he’ll find the money.
Trump’s performance in the first presidential debate was the latest demonstration of the threat he poses to democracy. His thuggish behavior – serial interruptions, nasty wisecracks, and blatant distortions – were an extension of his persistent effort to destroy any means of holding him accountable. The debates are another democratic practice that Trump seeks to destroy. But despite all the lamentations over what a miserable event the debate was, the tens of millions of Americans who loathe him should celebrate his performance, displaying as it did the unvarnished Trump.
The so-called debate didn’t ease Trump’s political predicament. He can scarcely afford to lose support at this point. His unwillingness to denounce white supremacists unambiguously, his apparent incitement of violence, and his threats – “This is not going to end well” – were as alarming as they were norm-shattering. Even some of Trump’s Senate Republican lackeys openly expressed unease.
Though Biden provided some substance and obviously didn’t stoop to Trump’s level, he wasn’t at his best. He occasionally appeared thrown off by Trump’s behavior, and failed to convey the stature and sense of command that people desire in a president. By calling Trump a “clown” and telling him to “shut up,” Biden may have been trying to show that he, too, can play a tough guy. But is this how Americans want a president to talk?
Some semblance of a coherent argument could be glimpsed in Trump’s attempt to ram through the Republican-controlled Senate the nomination of the right-wing judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of the liberal hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By trying to have her confirmed and seated in a few weeks, Trump is again going against democratic assumptions, and also public opinion. Trump openly states that he wants Barrett on the bench to improve his chances if a case involving the election outcome reaches the Court. Republican senators seem unwilling to insist that Barrett recuse herself to avoid such a flagrant conflict of interest.
Trump’s disinclination – and perhaps inability – to reach beyond his right-wing base, which is insufficient to elect him, also calls into question his political acumen, and is one of many reasons to doubt his basic intelligence (an issue on which he is quite sensitive). But one thing about the president is now clearer than ever: in order to perpetuate his hold on power, Trump is testing the constitution in unprecedented ways.