Trump too personally wounded by Pelosi to negotiate with her on coronavirus stimulus deal

After accusing Democrats of falsely hyping the coronavirus to hurt him, Donald Trump is now in need of Democratic votes for an economic stimulus package for the country. Indeed, GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday the Senate would simply step aside and let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi negotiate a deal directly with the White House.

Unfortunately, Trump, master deal maker and negotiator savant, won't be involved in those talks, instead Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin will take the lead. According to NBC reporter Eamon Javers, Trump feels too personally wounded by impeachment and other interactions with Pelosi to get in a room with her and pound out a plan to help the country weather the coronavirus. "It doesn't seem like that would end well," Javers said of the thinking of White House aides about trying to get Trump and Pelosi together.

"What the White House would say is, that's Pelosi's fault," Javers explained, "because she ripped up his speech, she's been tough on him, she impeached him and therefore the president has every right to not want to be in a room with her."

So to review: Trump blamed Democrats for stoking concerns over the coronavirus; the stock market crashed because the coronavirus is a real thing; now Trump needs Democrats to dig himself out of a hole after he promised the virus was a nothingburger; but Trump's a little too fragile and spiteful to sit across the table from Pelosi in order to make a deal to help steer the nation through this global public health crisis.

That doesn't sound like someone who should be running the country, that sounds like someone who should be having a pretty epic time out until such time as he can play nice again with the other children.

Here’s the clip

YouTube Video

 

Republican leader puts out racist coronavirus tweet and gets demolished in the process

In lieu of doing their jobs to protect the American public, Republican Party officials are working very intensely to misinform the public, while also blaming China for COVID-19. One of the top GOP officials today is Republican House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. You might remember his grotesque displays of fealty during the impeachment inquiry and trial of Donald Trump. If you know anything about Rep. McCarthy, you know that he will tow whatever party line Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump think up for him. And since the GOP’s brand these days is “Being racist assholes,” McCarthy decided on Monday to help out with the public health effort by tweeting out the government’s CDC.gov url along with this thinly veiled racist statement: “Everything you need to know about the Chinese coronavirus can be found on one, regularly-updated website:”

Fellow Californian and Democratic Rep. Katie Porter was justifiably pissed off at the leading GOP stooge.

Will stop spread of coronavirus: � washing your hands � staying home if you�re sick Won�t stop spread of coronavirus: � racism � xenophobia Delete this tweet, @GOPLeader. https://t.co/hd6VX3RuHo

— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) March 10, 2020

The Trump administration and the Republican Party, having stripped down and rolled back Obama-era development of our CDC, and specifically our infectious disease research and response, is now trying to use the age-old defense that they shouldn’t be in trouble because it’s someone else who “started it.” Unfortunately, they have a racist base who will likely eat up this xenophobic handling of a public health crisis. But the Republican base is a minority in our country, and the majority of people know Rep. McCarthy is a craven prick. And the responses to his lack of leadership were fast and furious.

As one responder to McCarthy’s racism explains: this is just the same playbook we’ve seen out of these incompetent grifters for years now.

Racism is the GOP Trump card. Calling it a hoax didn�t work because people keep dying. Blaming it on Obama never got off the ground. We�re now at stage three: xenophobia.#CPACcoronavirus

— Chris Alexander (@hoos30) March 10, 2020

And here are some simple facts: 

w00f

— Liz Garbus (@lizgarbus) March 10, 2020

Our government is super racist: also they really suck at keeping US safe and prosperous.

— David Rothschild (@DavMicRot) March 10, 2020

Your swastika is showing � �

— ImpeachmentForDummies (@Canadiancentri2) March 10, 2020

Of course, maybe Kevin misspoke?

Kevin, you misspelled #CPACVirus also known as #TrumpVirus. Get your facts straight you racist asshole.

— Comfortably Numb (@YGalanter) March 10, 2020

Of course, here’s a side note reminder:

Vote for @KimMangone and dump treasonous �Steve� McCarthy! pic.twitter.com/RmSoPXT7kR

— Medusa (@MedusaSeesYou) March 10, 2020

And finally, the tragically comic reality of it all.

I live in the US. Is there a website for the American coronavirus? In particular is there info on the Republicans quarantined and potentially spreading it? pic.twitter.com/JSjWXiaVvU

— Rob Jackson (@muh_thoughts) March 10, 2020

And an honest piece of advice for the GOP Leader.

You're a racist, a coward, and a sycophant. Resign.

— Dr. Jack Brown (@DrGJackBrown) March 10, 2020

Democrats Worry Biden Camp Is Unprepared for Coming Disinformation Onslaught

Democrats Worry Biden Camp Is Unprepared for Coming Disinformation OnslaughtFor close to four hours this past weekend, a cropped video that appeared to show Joe Biden endorsing Donald Trump gained steam on Twitter before the Biden campaign publicly pushed back. Twitter eventually deemed it misleading, but by the time the post was labeled as such, it had already been viewed millions of times. Though the Biden campaign defended its handling of the video, the episode has nevertheless sparked fears in Democratic circles and beyond about its ability to navigate the fast moving world of online politics, where disinformation can shape conversations before the true version is known.“They’ve got to do something. You can’t surrender the ground,” said Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “We already know what the conspiracy is going to be. There’s going to be tons of disinformation out there. People tend to believe that which they see first and that which they see the most. If you can’t stop them from seeing it, you’ve got to be out there.”The video in question was taken from a rally Biden held in Kansas City, Missouri on Saturday. Posted at 8:18 p.m by Dan Scavino, President Trump’s social media adviser, it showed Biden appearing to stumble over his words before settling on: “we can only re-elect Donald Trump.” In reality, Biden said nothing of the sort. A fuller video showed him saying “we can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s gotta be a positive campaign, so join us.”  But for those looking on Twitter, the fuller video was not easy to find. Instead, the cropped version was amplified by Biden’s opponents. Trump retweeted it to his 73.5 million followers (“I agree with Joe!”) and other Trump-supportive conservatives, as well as some liberal-minded Biden opponents, followed suit. It would take the Biden campaign until just after midnight the next day to push back on the misleading version that Scavino had put out. Not only that, the campaign farmed out some of the fact-checking responsibilities to others. It was the Democratic National Committee that flagged the video to Twitter, the party committee told The Daily Beast, as part of their program to clamp down on the spread of disinformation in 2020. “This is an example of our ongoing disinformation work, and the same thing that we do for every campaign,” a DNC official said, adding that they “flag activity to each of the campaigns, and have set them up with tools to receive regular activity alerts themselves.”Speaking to The Daily Beast about their disinformation strategy, a Biden campaign adviser said that their more publicly hands-off approach was by design. The campaign, the adviser said, is partially relying on—and working with—reporters to police content that they flag for being inaccurate or misleading, as part of an “earned media” approach towards correcting disinformation. That strategy, according to the campaign, helped lead to Twitter, and eventually Facebook, labeling the video as either "manipulated media" or “partly false information” in what the campaign trumpeted as a first.“We and others took action on a fact-checking front in the press and in terms of directly appealing to Twitter,” the Biden campaign adviser said. “We lifted content online that showed it was false, from the media and generated by ourselves, in order to help achieve a drumbeat.”Indeed, one of the earliest forms of pushback to the video came from Biden’s response director, Andrew Bates, who tweeted “why am I not surprised?” at 12:05 a.m. on March 8 in response to a comment from freelance writer Bill Scher about the clip being “disinfo from the Trump campaign.” But Watts said their approach is unlikely to be sufficient come November. “I understand the credible messenger thing, but I don’t know if it works in this case,” he said. “The truth is a credible message. I feel like you’ve got to knock a lot of those things down. I think it’s a capability they need to have other than just hoping journalists catch it.”And other Democratic operatives who worked on opposing campaigns in the presidential primary said they were disheartened by how slow Biden’s operation moved to clear away any ambiguity that the cropped video may have raised. “You should respond quickly,” said a senior communications official on a former campaign. “It isn’t rocket science!” Another former senior communications aide added that if they faced a similar type of attack from the Trump campaign, they would have “responded to that within 15 minutes.”* * *Problems like these are not a new phenomenon when it comes to campaigns. Rumor, innuendo, and smear are as old as politics itself and have proven effective at swaying elections. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) had his war credentials questioned so effectively that an entire genre was named after the character assassination. Every Democratic candidate since has pledged not to be “swift-boated.” And each has set up war rooms and websites meant to push  back against such attacks in real time. What has posed problems, in recent cycles, is not just the speed with which disinformation has traveled but the ability for people to spread it without ever revealing who they are. “I am less worried about things they are tweeting out because everyone can go and dunk on them,” said Zac Petkanas, a senior campaign adviser who ran Hillary Clinton’s rapid response effort four years ago. “It’s stuff that’s going to be pushed out with no fingerprints that’s more concerning. That’s the stuff that has real consequences.”Biden’s team has certainly had time to prepare. During the height of the Senate impeachment trial, when the former vice president’s son Hunter was being targeted by Trump on a daily basis, they did not set up a  war room to counter the smears. Instead, as The Daily Beast previously reported, they relied on existing infrastructure that they had used throughout the campaign to push back. The attention dipped after then, with Biden fading in the polls. But his campaign resurrection has brought with it both a heightened amount of scrutiny and a new barrage of interest from Trump and his allies. And it’s raised questions about whether Biden, his team, and the Democratic Party writ large need to rethink their approach. “There’s a larger question about whether we are prepared to deal with the onslaught of disinformation and misinformation,” said Petkanas. “The answer to that is unequivocally no, we are not.”Academics say there’s little clarity for campaigns on best practices to deal with these efforts.  David Rand, an expert on misinformation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said there's not a clear answer on when rebuttal is effective versus when it's amplifying."It doesn't seem crazy to me to say, wait till it starts taking off because a correction is unlikely to really like nip in the bud," Rand said. "In that a lot of people that are sharing it are sharing it because they think it's funny or because they don't like Biden or whatever, and not because they necessarily think it's true. In that, I'm sure that there's a lot of people, certainly people that are either pro-Trump or pro-Bernie that would strategically share it, even after knowing that it wasn't true."Saturday's situation was more of the low stakes variety, said Leticia Bode, a professor at Georgetown University focusing on misinformation, and there is a danger for campaigns to get bogged down in dealing with it. "I think it really depends on the piece of misinformation," Bode said. "...I don't think that this is going to change the election, right? I don't think anyone is not voting for Biden because of this clip. I don't think anybody is voting for Trump because of this clip. So because it is so low stakes, I think that the campaign doesn't want to get bogged down in continuing this news cycle." Still, the efforts have been ongoing and are likely to ramp up as the general election nears. When Biden launched his presidential bid nearly a year ago, the president indicated “it will be nasty,” adding, “I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign.” Contemplating what’s at stake for Democrats, Biden campaign's approach to Saturday was "poor form," said Phil Cowdell, president of the consulting division at The Soufan Group who specializes in the weaponization of information."In my belief you have to take control of your own destiny and you have to have your own scenarios and defense planned," he said. "...You can't rely on a third party to take care of business.""If they're not ready now and they can't deal with something as sort of simple as a Scavino tweeting something with a selective edit,” Cowdell added. “I think they're going to be very vulnerable to the escalation level of attacks that we're anticipating.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.


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GOP lawmakers ‘on edge’ as they watch Trump’s abysmal coronavirus response sink their reelections

In the annals of make-or-break political moments for a president, life and death situations often loom largest. The Iran Hostage Crisis and Hurricane Katrina come to mind immediately for helping to sink the approvals of a president who never quite recovered and indeed helped doom his party in the upcoming election. Katrina, for instance, shook America's confidence in the competence of the George W. Bush White House, helping Democrats notch massive wins the following year during the midterms that flipped control of both the House and the Senate. By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he had the benefit of historic Democratic majorities to help him usher in a major change to America’s health system.

Now Senate Republicans hoping to hang on to their seats in November are fretting as they watch Donald Trump's bungled coronavirus response. After holding a sham impeachment trial and acquitting Trump of any wrongdoing, Republicans have now cosigned every disastrous mistake Trump makes. Among the things Republicans have gifted to America in this moment are Trump’s stunning incapacity for human empathy and total inability to understand even the most basic public health concerns. According to the Washington Post, Trump's GOP allies on the Hill have become "unsettled" and "on edge" as they watch Trump's overwhelming incompetence in the face of a life-threatening crisis.

Let’s give Senate Republicans the boot! Give $3 right now to help restore responsible leadership to the Senate this November. 

“It’s really bad for those who have kind of hitched their wagon to the president ahead of this year’s election and are relying on him and his base,” former senator Jeff Flake told the Post, in an admission more candid than any sitting GOP senators would be willing to make. 

Democrats, however, are plenty eager to state the obvious. 

“I don’t think we can ignore how disastrous their performance has been,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said of Trump and his administration. “In many ways this was the moment we feared: a true security threat to the nation and a president who can’t tell the truth, who can’t organize a consistent response, and doesn’t have enough experienced people on the job.”

Meanwhile, Trump's been openly mocking the media's coronavirus hysteria to his campaign donors. “It’s not that big of a deal,” Trump said at one event. Presumably that was before the stock market suffered its worst drop on Monday in over a decade. Trump sure rushed to the cameras after that Monday evening to reassure the markets and congratulate himself on how great his administration has been handling the crisis.

Speaking of which—congratulations to all the congressional Republicans who helped make Trump's stellar response possible. See you in November.

Claire McCaskill transitions from Senate to television

Claire McCaskill transitions from Senate to televisionNBC News analyst Claire McCaskill is talking about some of the shows on which she appears — “Morning Joe,” Rachel Maddow or Nicolle Wallace's hours — when a questioner slips in a little test: What's your favorite? Clearly, the political instincts of the former Democratic senator from Missouri haven't dulled since her defeat in 2018. McCaskill said Trump's impeachment lawyers had learned “the Trump ethos, which is if you're cornered, just lie” and sharply rebuked Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee on the air.


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DOJ must give Congress Mueller grand jury evidence, appeals court rules

DOJ must give Congress Mueller grand jury evidence, appeals court rulesAn appeals court has ruled that the Justice Department has to provide Congress with some secret grand jury evidence from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of House Democrats who are suing to access redacted material from the Mueller probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election as they continue to investigate President Trump, The Washington Post reports. This upholds a lower court ruling. Previously, Judge Beryl Howell ruled in October that the Department of Justice needed to hand over the grand jury material to Congress. Since then, President Trump was acquitted in the Senate's impeachment trial that centered around his push for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, though CNN notes the House has said it "could still consider impeaching Trump again because of his actions during the Mueller investigation." The Associated Press writes that Tuesday's decision on the grand jury information "softens the blow" for Democrats of the court recently deciding not to force former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify before Congress. The Post notes, though, that Tuesday's ruling is "unlikely to be the final word" on this issue, as it "can be appealed to the full court or to the Supreme Court." More stories from theweek.com Trump's former pandemic adviser: 'We are 10 days from our hospitals getting creamed' After finding piles of portraits in an abandoned studio, man finds a way to get them to rightful families A Seattle lab uncovered Washington's coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators


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Bernie: I Would Not Close the Border to Protect Americans From Coronavirus

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders insisted he would not shut down the border in order to protect Americans from the coronavirus.

He made the comments during a town hall hosted by Fox News.

President Trump has touted his early efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus in the United States by declaring a public health emergency in January and imposing travel restrictions from China.

When asked by host Bret Baier if he would consider similar steps or even going a step further to keep the American people safe, Sanders admitted he would not.

Open Borders Insanity

“If you had to, if you had to, would you close down the borders?” Baier asked during the town hall.

“No,” Sanders replied. “I mean, what you don’t want to do right now — we have a president who has propagated a xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment from before he was elected.”

What that false assertion has to do with restricting access to people who might have been infected with the coronavirus is anybody’s guess.

In a sane world, refusing to close the borders to head off a possible health crisis would be disqualifying for a presidential candidate.

RELATED: Bernie’s Camp Ripped AOC For Encouraging People Not to Cooperate With ICE

Continues to Portray Border Security as Racist

Sanders insisted he would take a more scientific approach in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

“What we need to do is have the scientists take a hard look at what we need to do,” he suggested. “There are communities where the virus is spreading. What does that mean? It may mean self-quarantining. It may be not having public assemblies.”

What if it means shutting down the border and ports of entry temporarily?

“Let’s not go back to the same old thing,” the Vermont senator continued. “Isn’t it interesting that a president who has been demagoguing and demonizing immigrants, the first thing that he could think about is closing down the border?”

What’s interesting is that, like a programmed robot curmudgeon, Sanders’ first response to everything is ‘keep the borders open.’ Let travel from any country flow freely. Even at the expense of the American people and their safety.

RELATED: Democrat Socialist Bernie Sanders: Not Everything Dictator Fidel Castro Did Was Bad

Bernie Would Have Allowed Coronavirus to Spread

Over a month ago, while Democrats and the media were consumed with the impeachment charade, President Trump took decisive action to combat Coronavirus.

He established a Coronavirus Task Force and suspended all travel from China while establishing a quarantine effort.

Sanders believes such actions are racially motivated, an absurdity at best.

“Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low,” President Trump said.

With the media panicking over the cases that have been reported thus far, imagine how bad things would have been if Trump followed Bernie’s advice and refused to enact some form of travel restrictions.

The post Bernie: I Would Not Close the Border to Protect Americans From Coronavirus appeared first on The Political Insider.