The Saturday Night Live cold open last night featured a famous actor playing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump’s (soon to be ex-) director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. What you may not know is that a few weeks ago, Fauci was asked by a reporter who he would want to play him on SNL. Fauci replied “Brad Pitt, of course”. SNL made it happen, and Pitt did a fantastic job.
You can watch all the sketches from last night’s show too.
Donald Trump claimed that he has total authority, but backed down in less than 24 hours, and pretended to “allow” the governors to do whatever they want.
But when he said “I take no responsibility” for the failures of the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, I think he was actually telling the truth. Is that a miracle, or what?
You know this was going to happen, based on the recent very sound medical advice from Donald Trump, our very stable genius. Let the memes begin!
And here’s some relevant poetry, sarcastically attributed to Trump:
You know I’m not a doctor – but of course I could have been,
That’s why, until a week ago, I touted chloroquine.
Now, evidence suggests that might have been an overreach,
So I’ll tout another treatment: shooting up with bleach.
The latest news is that Trump is going to dramatically cut back on his daily briefings. Since he started doing his meandering, nonsensical (and dangerous) briefings, polls show that public opinion of his management of the coronavirus crisis has plummeted 16 points.
UPDATE: There was a spike in New Yorkers ingesting household cleaners during the 18 hours following Trump’s claim that such products might be able to cure coronavirus.
Donald Trump campaigns by attacking his opponents. He did it in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. Now in 2020, the need is even more dire, because he can’t campaign by taking credit for a good economy anymore. So he is doing what he always does, throwing out attacks constantly to see which ones stick (in other words, which ones get picked up by right-wing media).
The other interesting thing that Trump does is attack others for the things he is most guilty about himself. For example, he keeps calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” and painting him as too old and incompetent. But that doesn’t seem to be working, maybe because Biden and Trump are both in their seventies (only 4 years apart in age), and more often than not when Trump opens his mouth, gibberish and misinformation flow out.
We also know that Trump tried to get the Ukraine to investigate Biden, but was so ham handed about it that he got himself impeached.
The latest attack from Trump is that Biden is soft on China. Trump has warned that “China will own the United States” if Biden is elected. Their evidence is to point out that Biden’s son did a $1.5 billion deal to manage an investment fund in China when his father was vice president. However, Hunter Biden wasn’t part of that deal and didn’t get any money from it. In fact, he didn’t have any direct involvement in that company until he invested $420,000 in it, receiving a 10 percent stake. And that happened in 2017, when his father was no longer vice president.
Unlike Biden and his son, Trump is pretty much already owned by China. The Trump Tower in Manhattan Trump owes the Bank of China (which is owned by the Chinese government) $211 million. That loan is due in 2022, which would mean that Trump would be scrambling to repay it when he is president. And it is suspicious that this loan was the first time that the Chinese national bank made any investment in the US. What are they expecting in return? Is this why Trump is so desperate to hide his tax returns? Does he even have enough cash to repay his obligations?
But there’s more. Chinese state-owned companies are constructing two luxury developments for Trump in United Arab Emirates and Indonesia. Not to mention the valuable trademarks that were awarded by the Chinese government to Trump and his daughter Ivanka, and Jared Kushner’s dealings with Chinese investors.
11. Make more music over Zoom. I’m beginning to believe that the official music of the coronavirus pandemic is Funk.
Most of you don’t know this, but I’m also an amateur musician (I play bass). Lately (like many musicians) I too have been participating in Zoom calls to make music. It really helps to play songs that have a strong beat, to keep everyone together. So Funk it is!
I’m dying here…
It’s amazing how much people want to get to work, they just — they’re dying to get back to work. — Sean Hannity
10. The Dad-osaur. Coming to a home near you.
I totally cracked up laughing at this one.
This is hilarious:
So many interesting videos today!
We should always follow the rules, except when we can’t.
I think we could make a video just like this, created entirely from video clips of Donald Trump. That might clear one thing up.
9. Make YouTube videos using Zoom conferencing:
I especially like the fake falling thing starting around 1 minute in.
Donald Trump wants you to think that the small anti-quarantine protests that took place this weekend in various state capitols were spontaneous grassroots events, but they were anything but.
First of all, Trump’s tweets in support of these protests were all aimed at states with Democratic governors, and ignored Republican governors who also issued stay-at-home orders. So clearly political. And never mind that Trump was inciting people to break laws and guidelines that he himself had endorsed just a couple of days beforehand.
Secondly, the Facebook traffic that coordinated these protests was organized by Ben Dorr (along with his two brothers), who is the political director of Minnesota Gun Rights. And the protests themselves were organized by pro-Trump activists (including some who are surrogates for Trump’s campaign, or are prominent conservative donors.
In fact, the state with the largest and most vehement protests was Michigan, which were organized by Michigan Conservative Coalition, which was founded by a Republican state lawmaker whose wife sits on the advisory board for Trump’s campaign. Also promoting the demonstrations was the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is funded in large part by the DeVos family. Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary, and her husband ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan in 2006.
The online activity (mostly on Facebook) was created (and paid for) in order to make it look like opposition to sheltering-in-place is popular and widespread. But this is fake news. Even among Republicans, close to 70% are in favor of a national stay-at-home order. And needless to say, 95% of Democrats are in favor.
So the number of people who demand that the governors “give them liberty or give them death (or both)” is quite small and is being egged on by conservative political activists.
UPDATE: After I wrote this, I found a post from Heather Cox Richardson on the same subject. Definitely worth a read.
I’ve really been enjoying the posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her free column “Letters from an American“. Here’s an excerpt from her April 12 post, talking about the ongoing destruction of our democracy. Of course there are plenty of mentions of Donald Trump, but then she points out a related problem that many of us may not be very aware of, in the person of Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate.
Our system has a built-in remedy for a president who abuses his power. Our Constitution requires Congress to check a runaway president. The House of Representatives is trying hard to do so, but the Republican Senate refuses.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has consistently supported Trump as he has attacked our democracy, and a terrific piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker today explores why. In a piece entitled “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief,” Mayer argues that McConnell is determined to wield power above all else, and believes that the only way to do that is to control huge financial resources to get his party’s candidates elected. To gather those resources, he needs to work with wealthy donors, including business leaders for whom he does favors.
McConnell is virtually shutting down Congress to avoid taking up anything that would upset Republican donors. “At the end of 2019,” Mayer writes, “more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell’s desk.” These included an enormously popular bill for lowering the costs of prescription drugs, but McConnell, who gets more contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than any other senator, refused to take it up, saying he opposes “socialist price controls.” Political scientist Norm Ornstein of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute says McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He told Mayer, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”
McConnell is no fan of Trump, but needs him. McConnell is enormously unpopular in his home state of Kentucky. Voters there love Trump, though, and McConnell’s ratings go up whenever he bolsters the president. So while he works to keep money flowing into the coffers of Republican Party leaders, McConnell is careful not to cross Trump, no matter what he does. In turn, his fellow Republicans cannot buck McConnell without losing access to the money and favors that will keep them in office.
It is indeed dangerous that Trump has such sweeping emergency powers at his disposal, but the problem is not the emergency powers. The problem is the president and the Republican senators, who could check Trump’s increasing authoritarianism at any time, if only they wanted to.
Also note that four of the top five donors to McConnell’s leadership committee are executives for the Fox News Channel. Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, Viet Dinh (FNC’s Legal Adviser and Policy Director), and the president of 21st Century Fox all gave $20,600.
The term “chickenshit” has two definitions: “petty, insignificant” and “coward, chicken” (as in “lacking courage, manliness, or effectiveness”). For example, “That guy likes to make threats but he’s too chickenshit to act on them.”
I think that pretty much sums up Donald Trump’s pathetic attempts to restart the economy. As you probably know, Trump has been repeatedly threatening to reopen the economy by the end of April, which means having people go back to work, eat out in restaurants, and basically party like its 1999 again, coronavirus be damned.
However, as anyone who doesn’t have (chicken) shit for brains knows, you can’t just “reopen the economy”. As Seth Meyers put it, “What do you even mean by opening up anyway? You can’t make people go out. Are you going to have federal agents knock on peoples’ doors and make them go to Olive Garden?” And even if you could do it, the result would be a massive “second wave” of people spreading the disease and even more deaths, which would make the economy worse than it is now.
Apparently, even Donald Trump is worried about that, because his “plan” (if you can call it that) to reopen the economy was to create a “task force” of business and other leaders to advise him on how to ease social distancing restrictions in order to ramp up economic activity. Trump even said that it was needed to counterbalance the public health officials who are still urging caution. Because, you know, those guys are scientists, and Trump doesn’t believe in science.
It quickly became apparent that this was a political stunt, because Trump invited every single Republican senator to join the task force, except for one, Mitt Romney. Never mind that Romney knows more about the economy and business than most senators (and certainly more than Trump). Trump apparently doesn’t want anyone who has ever criticized him on the task force. He prefers yes men and ass kissers.
Even so, this political stunt was a disaster even before it began. Trump didn’t even bother to let many of the members know about the task force. Some (including the CEOs of McDonalds and Cisco Systems) found out they were on the task force only when they heard their names mentioned at Trump’s daily coronavirus briefing.
It gets worse, because the Washington Post discovered the real reason for the task force. According to WaPo:
Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that if it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts.
When his plan fails, Trump is going to make scapegoats out of the members of the task force, as President Throw-You-Under-the-Bus does every time something he does goes south.
Except Trump forgot one thing. These people (many of them CEOs), aren’t completely stupid. If employers call their employees back to work and the workers get sick, the companies (and their leaders) could very well be liable. And having the president blaming them would certainly make this much worse.
So when Trump had his first phone confab with his task force on Wednesday, it was a “shit show“. Senior bankers are increasingly frustrated with Trump’s approach to the crisis, as even Wall Street says that the best plan is to keep everything shut until the virus is fully under control and consumers and businesses feel safe to resume normal activities. Executives called for more Covid-19 testing, but nothing was decided. Apparently, it was all for show. As one person put it “It was really nothing.”
Trump is clearly not tethered to reality. Trump started the call by saying that “testing was under control”, despite the fact that the White House ended funding for coronavirus testing last Friday. He asked the CEO of the Bank of America (and others) how the small business loan program was going, apparently not aware of the fact that it was out of money and was about to leave small businesses failing and forcing more now-former employees to apply for unemployment insurance.
“In the end, the country’s business leaders took the side of the public health experts.” Is that going to stop Trump from trying to blame the task force? Of course not.
UPDATE: More evidence that Trump is a chickenshit, as he is afraid to talk to any news network … other than Fox News:
According to the meticulous record kept by Mark Knoller of CBS, Trump hasn’t granted an interview to a non-Fox employee since January 22, when he chatted with CNBC’s Joe Kernen in Davos. Kernen began by asking about the coronavirus: “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”
“No. Not at all,” Trump said. “And — we’re — we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine.”
Since then, Trump has been interviewed a dozen times on Fox News and Fox Business. Knoller’s list also includes a February phone call to Geraldo Rivera‘s radio show, which is not a Fox production, but Rivera is also a Fox personality. Bottom line: The president is staying on Fox, i.e. shoring up his base, and avoiding all other interviewers during this emergency.
Is it my imagination, or was Barack Obama starting to channel Keegan-Michael Key as Obama’s Anger Translator near the end of this video?
I’m proud to endorse my friend @JoeBiden for President of the United States. Let's go: https://t.co/maHVGRozkX
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 14, 2020
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