Trump obliterates Republican excuse for his abysmal coronavirus response

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

President Donald Trump actually made at least one true statement during Tuesday’s White House briefing on the novel coronavirus. When it comes to the way he handled the administration’s response, he wasn’t affected one bit by impeachment. “I don't think I would have done any better had I not been impeached,” Trump told reporters, when asked whether the impeachment process impeded his response.

Trump’s response basically destroyed one of Republican lawmakers’ favorite new talking points. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a conservative radio host on Tuesday that impeachment had "diverted the attention of the government.” It was nothing if not an admission that Trump and GOP lawmakers totally fumbled the ball on this public health disaster. If anyone thought they were really doing a great job, Republicans would be cooing about how wonderfully they’ve managed the response. The real question is, why did Senate Republicans vote to keep the ever-incompetent Trump in charge when they very clearly had a sense of the calamity that lay ahead for the country?

Of course, Trump is delusional enough to think he’s been just great. “Did it divert my attention?” Trump said during the White House briefing. “I think I'm getting A-pluses for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment, okay? It was a hoax.” Trump said he may have thought about impeachment, but added, “I don't think I would have done any better had I not been impeached, okay?”

Trump isn’t getting A-pluses.

Impeachment wasn’t a hoax.

But he was constitutionally incapable of mounting an aggressive, coordinated response to this crisis. So—ding ding ding!—impeachment or no impeachment, Trump wouldn’t have done any better. Correct.

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Senate Republicans knew the country was facing disaster yet still voted to keep Trump in office

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

After a week during which the nation began to watch the coronavirus horrors we have seen play out in other countries finally make their way into our own hospitals, it's worth remembering the active role Senate Republicans played in getting us here. During the critical early handling of the virus here in the U.S., senators from both parties had a window into what was to come—well before the virus had even made the radar of most Americans. 

But instead of focusing on preparing for a potential pandemic in the making, Senate Republicans were busy staging a sham no-witness impeachment trial for Donald Trump so they could ultimately vote to acquit him, ensuring that Trump would be at the helm as the nation faced the greatest public health crisis in a century. That trial began on Jan. 16 and concluded on Feb. 5 with Trump's acquittal. But that critical three-week period also included early warning signs that U.S. senators, in particular, were privy to. As one U.S. official told The Washington Post about the intelligence reporting shared with both Trump officials and members of Congress in January, "Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were -- they just couldn't get him to do anything about it. ... The system was blinking red."

On Jan. 20, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed the first case of novel coronavirus here in the U.S., a Washington man who had recently returned from visiting Wuhan, China, the city where the disease had first taken hold.

On Jan. 24, the Senate Health and Foreign Relations Committees hosted a private, all-senators briefing on the coronavirus with Trump health officials, including the CDC director and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That date has gained some notoriety in the past week as reports emerged that four U.S. senators began dumping stock shortly after that briefing. In fact, one of them, Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, reported her first stock sale on that very day. GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma sold at least $180,000 in stocks on Jan. 27.

But the most glaring case was Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina unloading up to $1.7 million in stocks on Feb. 13 after getting access to all the latest intelligence on the virus as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. As a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Burr was also briefed on Feb. 12 by government health experts about overall national preparedness and how an epidemic might impact the U.S. In fact, there's no question Burr was alarmed by what he was hearing because he ultimately relayed a very stark assessment of the catastrophe ahead during a private meeting with wealthy constituents in late February.

Bottom line: Republican senators were getting a window into the calamity the U.S. might be facing in just a couple of months’ time. GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa put out a statement on Feb. 4 saying the panel he heads, the Senate Finance Committee which oversees the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), had just been briefed by the National Security office within HHS.

“The coronavirus doesn’t appear to pose any imminent threat to Americans who have not recently traveled to the Hubei province of China," he said in a statement, downplaying the threat. “For now, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control have the resources needed to prevent any significant contagion from spreading into the United States. If more resources are needed, Congress stands at the ready."

The following day, Feb. 5, Grassley and 51 of his Republican colleagues voted to clear Trump of wrongdoing and keep him in office—every GOP senator except Mitt Romney of Utah.

They knew. They voted to keep Trump in charge. They own it. Never forget.

Coronavirus reshuffles battle for the House, boosting Democratic prospects

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Just two months ago, the House impeachment and subsequent Senate acquittal of Donald Trump was the talk of Washington. Throughout the fall, GOP-aligned groups had blasted House Democrats with ads attacking their votes to impeach Trump. The conservative American Action Network had already dumped $11 million into targeting Democrats over impeachment, but by early February all those ads had been pulled, according to Politico. 

Now everyone's reassessing. After a political year that featured a record-setting government shutdown, the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, and a historic impeachment vote, the coronavirus has shifted the political calculus all over again—and likely for the long haul.

“This is just going to dominate American life through Election Day,” one Democratic strategist who tracks House campaigns told Politico. This week, a Democratic super PAC said it was making its first calculated foray into messaging on the coronavirus—a $5 million digital ad buy criticizing Trump’s response to the pandemic. But for the most part, strategists in both parties are trying to figure out how to calibrate both their messaging and fundraising so as not to be seen as capitalizing on a national tragedy that is also wreaking havoc around the world.

One group of lawmakers breathing a sigh of relief in particular is freshman Democrats who flipped conservative seats blue in 2018. Republicans had tagged that bloc for special treatment after House Democrats voted to impeach Trump last fall. Now, however, that vote doesn't carry the baggage Republicans had hoped it would. In fact, Trump's supremely dismal leadership has put that vote in a whole new light, even for the Democrats who took it.

“Some of his reaction and what he says — ‘I didn’t want the people off that boat because I like the numbers where we are’ — that reminds me of the president we impeached. Because, again, it’s about thinking of the self-interest ahead of the nation," said New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski, a freshman Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018.

Democrats will have plenty of chances moving forward to skewer Trump’s leadership in the critical early stages of this epidemic using his own words. In fact, Trump’s repeated assertions that the virus was “under control” when it was clearly spiraling out of control, and his persistent failure to take responsibility during the crisis will continue to compromise the position of Republican lawmakers straight through November. 

White House halts participation in congressional coronavirus hearings

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The White House has told Congress that it's simply too busy to spare the time to testify at any coronavirus hearings, at least until the end of March, according to Roll Call. “While the Trump Administration continues its whole-of-government approach to stopping the spread of COVID-19, it is counter-productive to have the very individuals involved in response efforts appearing at congressional hearings,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement Wednesday. 

Apparently, "whole-of-government" doesn't include Congress in the view of the White House. The blackout approach to information sharing with Congress was outlined in a memo obtained by Roll Call. “We remain respectful of the essential role of Congress in this effort and we look forward to working with Congress closely as we all rise to meet this challenge,” the memo read.

Frankly, it's hard to believe anyone in the West Wing even bothered to write that line. The Trump administration has made it crystal clear that it views Congress's "essential role" as entirely subservient to that of the executive branch. In everything from basic congressional oversight to the impeachment inquiry to the most threatening public health epidemic in a century, the Trump administration has spiked cooperating with Congress at every turn. 

The only difference this time around is that the White House isn't exclusively stiff-arming House Democrats. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was forced to cancel a hearing Wednesday that lawmakers had arranged to livestream publicly. Lawmakers had lined up witnesses from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.

That hearing has been postponed indefinitely while the White House continues the "whole-of-government" response it adopted several days ago after Donald Trump finally realized his delusional world was no match for a highly contagious virus that threatens to kill nearly 1% of the people who get it or more, depending on available care for the most critical cases.

Let’s just stop and review what a useless bunch of creatures Senate Republicans really are

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Our first clue that Senate Republicans planned to be exactly useless for the entirety of the 116th Congress was when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, backed by his caucus, conspicuously stood on the sidelines for weeks on end during what turned into the longest government shutdown in history, from Dec. 22, 2018—Jan. 25, 2019. Donald Trump alone manufactured that shutdown by demanding that nearly $6 billion in border wall funding be tucked into the budget deal, and McConnell decided he would simply let Nancy Pelosi and her newly elected majority tame Trump rather than help find a solution. 

In fact, McConnell seemed to have a good sense of exactly how useless Senate Republicans would be pretty early in Trump's administration. After the GOP-led Congress squandered most of 2017 on its Obamacare repeal debacle, Republicans just barely squeezed out their tax giveaway to the rich and powerful before the end of the year on December 20, 2017. By February 2018, McConnell was already selling his Senate majority as being "in the personnel business"—he just forgot to add the word, exclusively. And while it's undoubtedly true that McConnell's Senate has reshaped the federal courts by pushing through some 190 judges since Trump took office, it did so to the exclusion of almost all legislative work. Gloating over his chamber's unique lack of productivity, McConnell even embraced the nickname "Grim Reaper" for making his Senate the place where the people's business goes to die. McConnell has single-handedly refused to consider more than 400 bills passed by Pelosi’s House of Representatives.

Wanna restore sane leadership to the Senate? Give $3 right now to give Mitch the boot!

As for the one major piece of legislation Senate Republicans did manage to pass, that tax bill has now ballooned the deficit to nearly $1 trillion, hamstringing the government's ability to respond to a sudden jolt to the economy like the coronavirus. 

Speaking of which, McConnell's now running his "let Pelosi handle it" 2.0 play, tagging House Democrats with the sole responsibility of negotiating an economic response to the crisis with the White House. 

Simultaneous to that dereliction of duty, Republicans have stayed almost completely mum as Trump has spewed harmful lie upon harmful lie about the coronavirus. In fact, when Trump went to visit with the do-nothing GOP caucus Tuesday (because he refuses to meet with Pelosi), Trump told reporters the coronavirus would simply "go away, just stay calm," adding, "It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen." No. Hard no. A lot of good things are not happening. But to date, Senate Republicans have taken a total pass on correcting any of Trump's disinformation campaign.

Instead, they seem pretty content to rest on their success of banding together to run a sham impeachment trial with zero witnesses and ultimately vote to keep the most corrupt president in American history in office.

And by single-handedly refusing to remove Trump, Senate Republicans can now proudly share the credit for the epic economic and public health crisis that is quickly rippling through the country now. Heckuva job, Mitchy. See you in November.

 

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

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

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

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

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

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.

GOP Sen. Joni Ernst’s approval ratings are plummeting, another good sign for Senate Democrats

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

A year ago, things were looking pretty rosy for GOP Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, with her approval rating hitting a high point of 57% in February 2019. A year later, following Senate Republicans' sham zero-witness impeachment trial and their subsequent acquittal of Donald Trump, Ernst's approval ratings have taken a hit, slipping fully 10 points to 46%.

A plurality of Iowa voters, 41%, still say they will definitely vote for Ernst this fall, but 31% also vowed to vote against her, and another 20% were open to considering someone else. Democrats are currently fielding candidates in a five-way primary, so Ernst's challenger isn't clear yet. But starting the race with 51% of your constituents either vowing to vote against you or open to an alternative is not a strong start for an incumbent senator. 

Wanna take back the Senate? Give $3 right now to the effort to flip the chamber and kick Mitch McConnell to the curb.

Hawkeye State independents reflect the wariness of the larger electorate, with 32% pledging to back Ernst and 25% promising to vote against her, while 31% consider voting for someone else.

Trump's stumbles on trade and Ernst's unwillingness to challenge him on anything are also part of the equation. One undecided voter said she would support whoever was willing to take on Trump. "You have to get people in there who are willing to take him on,” said 62-year-old Kerri Christian. 

Ernst joins a quartet of GOP senators who are facing an uphill climb to reelection: Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. In addition, Democrats just put another GOP seat in play with the announcement that Montana Gov. Steve Bullock would take on GOP Sen. Steve Daines for his seat in November. 

That's half a dozen solid GOP targets to work with in a year in which Democrats need a net gain of three or four pick-ups, depending on whether Trump is reelected, in order to flip the chamber.

As Trump plotted his purge of nonloyalists from government, Warren developed her coronavirus plan

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

As the number of coronavirus cases in the United States swelled Tuesday morning and Wall Street sneered at the Fed's slap-dash interest-rate drop, bafflement overtook very stable genius Donald Trump. "Six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, you never heard of this," Trump said of the coronavirus as he addressed the National Association of Counties. "All of a sudden, it's got the world aflutter."

Geez, who coulda seen it coming? Not Trump. He's the guy who found out just a couple of weeks ago that the flu can be deadly. "I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it," Trump marveled during a coronavirus-related press conference last week, "The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me." Yeah, we get it. You're a clueless navel-gazing narcissist who a month ago was gleefully planning your government-wide post-impeachment purge of nonloyalists.

Around that same time, Elizabeth Warren was preparing a global response to the emerging pandemic Trump had "never heard of." As Trump issued the opening salvo of his nonloyalist purge with the ouster of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother from the National Security Council, Warren was releasing her plan to prevent and minimize transmission by investing in global health agencies, investing in vaccine development, and preparing hospitals and health departments across the nation for potential outbreaks. Her plan emphasized the importance of science and disseminating factual information while countering misinformation.

“Diseases like coronavirus remind us why we need robust international institutions, strong investments in public health, and a government that is prepared to jump into action at a moment's notice,” Warren wrote in her plan. “When we prepare and effectively collaborate to address common threats that don’t stop at borders, the international community can stop these diseases in their tracks.”

A month later, Trump would be calling this burgeoning public health crisis a "hoax" and rushing to reassure the markets that he had this all under control. Trump surely viewed the Federal Reserve as his ace in the hole. But after it took the rare step Tuesday morning of cutting the interest rate half a percentage point between meetings in order to mitigate economic fallout from the virus, the Dow Jones stabilized briefly and then plummeted another 500 points.

Dow down another 500 points AFTER the Fed makes a VERY rare half percentage point cut between regularly scheduled meetings. Normally, a cut like this suggests the Fed has a grip on the economy. This looks like the Fed caved to Trump�s market-obsessed pressure

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) March 3, 2020

Goodness, just six weeks ago, who could have imagined? Warren not only could have, but she did, and got to work on a plan for that.

Ever since impeachment, independents have gotten really clear on which party cares about them

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Donald Trump’s impeachment and subsequent acquittal have clearly focused the minds of independent voters as to which party really gives a damn about them. When asked whether Democrats or Republicans are "more concerned with the needs of people like you?”, respondents consistently moved toward Democrats over the course of the impeachment process, and strikingly so after Senate Republicans acquitted Trump, according to data from Civiqs. 

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced the inquiry, a plurality of 34% of independent respondents said “neither” party cared, while 31% said Democrats, and 29% said Republicans. But over the course of the inquiry, the “neither” contingent dwindled, with most poll respondents concluding Democrats cared more about their personal concerns.

By the time House Democrats impeached Trump, a plurality of 33% of respondents said Democrats were more concerned with them, while “neither” and Republicans tied at 31%. But after Senate Republicans acquitted Trump, the share of independent voters saying Democrats cared about people like them shot up to 37%, while Republicans stagnated at 31% and “neither” dwindled down to 27%.

Civiqs Results

This data reinforces recent polling from Gallup showing that nearly 60% of voters think their congressional representative deserves to be reelected, the highest level of public satisfaction with congressional members since 2012. Both surveys bode well for Democrats in November.

But hey, impeachment was supposed to doom Democrats’ politically and pundits tell us Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is masterful for selling out our country. Apparently, independent voters don’t agree.