TRUMP RUNNING PANDEMIC LIKE A TYPICAL TRUMP DISASTER BUT ONE HE CAN'T WRITE OFF IN BANKRUPTCY COURT!

Trump Is Running a Pandemic Response Like a Business, With Disastrous Results

He thinks coronavirus is only a PR problem.

by David Atkins

March 14, 2020

POLITICAL ANIMAL

The White House/Flickr

One of the most tired cliches in conservative politics is that we should run government like a business. Donald Trump’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic is a perfect demonstration of how pernicious that philosophy can be when applied to governance.

Much has already been said about how Donald Trump’s personality flaws and questionable policy obsessions have hampered America’s response to the growing pandemic. His narcissism leaves him unable to consider anything but his own political fortunes; his racism makes him treat an international medical problem like a clash-of-civilizations and border control problem; his incuriosity makes him unable to digest new information and respond with flexibility, must less act foresight to head off problems. Whole books could be—and likely will be—written about how the convergent moral failings of the president and his favorite conservative infotainment networks have contributed to a ruinously incompetent response to the burgeoning pandemic crisis.

Even in more competent and empathetic hands, the Trump (and more broadly, the conservative) approach to governing philosophy would still run counter to the demands of the moment, at a time of crisis requiring foresight and intervention by public sector.

At every step of the way, Trump and the conservative media have treated the coronavirus as a PR problem, a political problem, and a business problem. They have tried to downplay the severity of the disease, tell people to continue life like everything is normal, continue flying and going on cruise lines, and boost the markets however possible. Friday’s bizarre press conference was little more than an infomercial for some of the top health-related businesses in the Dow Jones average, with a parade of CEOs talking about their commitment to doing vague somethings about the pandemic right before the closing bell. It worked, at least for now: the Dow surged as a result of the upbeat corporate presentation. For weeks now the administration has slow-played testing under the theory that lower reported numbers would somehow look better and magically change the actual reality on the ground until the problem went away.

Like so much of modern American business culture, the ethic here is short-sighted and self-serving at best, and cruel, callous, and malevolent at worst. Today’s fast-moving capital markets are explicitly designed to be reactive rather than proactive, and every incentive built into them is to push for growth at all costs. Problems are meant to be pushed to the side and out of sight so the good times can keep rolling at the top; inconvenient costs are externalized and socialized on the backs of workers, the impoverished, and the environment. In the best of times, this dynamic creates massive inequalities and injustices that the market doesn’t notice, because the victims most affected are insignificant to—and go unnoticed by—the invisible hand. In the worst of times, however, it utterly hobbles a society’s ability to respond to crises that require active management before they can be directly felt in the marketplace.

The coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis are similar here: by the time the capital markets notice there is enough of a problem here to affect their bottom lines, it will be far too late to actually solve the problem. It’s true of any problem with an exponential curve whose solution requires acting well before the curve turns irrevocably steep, but where the action to prevent it would impact corporate profits.

Conservative ideology generally is incapable of handling problems like this. The philosophy of minimal government and just-in-time responses through privatized action is doomed to fail when the challenge requires redundancy, massive public investments, and temporary inconvenience to private sector profiteering. Paying for a pandemic response office, universal healthcare, a larger number of available hospital beds, and such would be inconvenient for some executives and their tax burdens, but it’s invaluable for social justice—and to keep people alive when systems are stressed. The same analogy can be made, but on a much bigger and more consequential scale, for climate change: adopting a Green New Deal may be expensive and inconvenient for some yacht owners today, but it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in disaster costs tomorrow.

Republicans and their conservative media allies have become so used to the “sweep-it-under-rug-and-say-whatever-you-have-to” approach to problems that they’ve forgotten how to do anything else. It’s not just a cruel dismissal of the needs of the young, the stranger, and the unfortunate: it’s also an entire culture of refusing to see problems that run contrary to their ideological framework. Every political problem can be solved by providing their base a comfortable alternative reality.

Donald Trump’s own personal brand of narcissism, pathological lying, and blunt ignorance is just an extra dollop of dangerously cruel incompetence. Outside of Trump, the conservative movement’s reaction to coronavirus reveals an ideology that has not been fit to deal with inconvenient problems for decades—whether it be climate change, the costs of education, healthcare and housing, or even other epidemics like the AIDS outbreak in the Reagan era.

Of course, a virus doesn’t care what presidents say, what University of Chicago economists write, or Fox News talking heads broadcast. A virus does what it does. Exponential curves are what they are. Sometimes, reality intrudes no matter what alternative realities are created, and no matter what actions are taken to try to sweep it under the rug so the champagne can still flow at Wall Street after-parties. A pandemic like this can kill the rich and the poor alike.

Even for the well-heeled, running a government like a business only works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the consequences are beyond disastrous not just for the economy, but for life itself

Trump Is Scared of Being Humiliated By Pelosi Again

Even in the midst of a national crisis, the president is consumed with nursing his fragile ego.

by Nancy LeTourneau

March 12, 2020

POLITICAL ANIMAL

The White House/Flickr

Last week, Congress passed a bill to spend $8.3 billion on fighting the spread of the coronavirus, more than triple what the Trump administration had requested. Nevertheless, the president signed the bill.

Now, as the country is teetering on the brink of a recession, there is talk of passing another spending bill to shore up the economy. During his speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, this is what Trump proposed.

President Trump spoke from the Oval Office late Wednesday, announcing the administration would take action on its extending paid leave to people affected by coronavirus — though details on how were sparse — and calling on Congress to extend that work. He said the Small Business Administraiton would exercise available authority to provide capital to firms affected by the coronavirus outbreak, and called on Congress to devote an additional $50 billion to the effort…

Trump also said the Internal Revenue Service would defer some tax payments, and he renewed his call for a broad payroll tax cut, something that’s widely opposed on Capitol Hill and not expected to advance…The tax cuts alone that the White House has proposed could cost as much as $400 billion over one year.

Trump has also proposed a bailout for certain industries affected by the coronavirus, such as airlines, hotels, and cruise lines.

On Thursday, the House is set to vote on a package that is focused primarily on putting families first.

The legislation includes free coronavirus testing, up to three months of emergency paid leave benefits to all workers affected by the coronavirus, and could also include an 8 percentage point increase in the federal share of Medicaid payments to states, lawmakers and aides said…

The paid sick leave component of House Democrats’ plan would replace two-thirds of wages for most workers, up to a $4,000 a month plan. The proposal would extend eligibility for unemployment insurance. It is also expected to include about $1 billion in emergency appropriations to expand access to food security programs including food stamps, Meals on Wheels and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

Heather Caygle and John Bresnahan report that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been putting that package together and, when it comes to coordinating with the White House, she’s been working with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Just hours before [a meeting between Mnuchin and Pelosi], Trump had taken his latest shot at Pelosi in a morning tweet. But that didn’t deter the speaker, who huddled with Mnuchin for a 30-minute meeting in her office. The two also chatted on the phone twice on Wednesday, and Pelosi is now on the verge of pushing through a massive stimulus bill that could earn GOP support, as well as Trump’s signature…

For any other leader, the rapid turnaround on the recovery plan would be a herculean feat at best. But for Pelosi, successfully negotiating a multi-billion-dollar economic package with a hostile and often antagonistic Trump administration was just another day in the speaker’s suite.

It’s also a reminder that for all Trump’s omnipresence on Twitter and cable TV, Pelosi remains the dominant figure on Capitol Hill when it comes time to actually getting something accomplished.

The reason Pelosi is working with Mnuchin instead of Trump is that our commander-in-chief is having a bit of a hissy fit about how the Speaker of the House has been treating him. 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. Apparently, the president is worried about being humiliated once again.

All of official Washington has come to an agreement that swift, bold action is needed to counteract the dramatic economic impact of the coronavirus’ spread. But negotiations around such a package have been complicated by the fact that President Donald Trump can’t stand the idea of negotiating one-on-one with his chief counterpart, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he suspects that she would use the moment to try to humiliate him.

Two senior Trump administration officials described a president who, out of an intense bitterness toward the House Speaker, has shuddered at the prospect of being in the same room with her during the ongoing public-health crisis and economic reverberations.

If memory serves, the last time Speaker Pelosi attended a meeting with the president at the White House, it was to discuss his decision to remove U.S. troops from Syria. She pointed out that, when it came to his actions, “all roads lead to Putin.” That is the moment that was captured by the White House photographer with this image that went viral.

You can understand why the petulant child doesn’t want to repeat that scene. So even in the midst of a national crisis, he is refusing to be in the same room with the one person whose cooperation he needs to address the situation.

I doubt that any of this bothers Nancy Pelosi. She’s too busy trying to actually get something done. But this is the president—who sold himself as a master dealmaker—demonstrating that he’s too scared of being humiliated by a woman to even meet with her. For anyone interested in learning how to deal with a narcissistic bully, Pelosi has been giving us a master class on the subject for months now..

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Read an excerpt:
‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals

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