MSNBC’s Hayes: ‘Urgent Matter’ of Health and Safety for Trump ‘to Resign’
2:28
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” host Chris Hayes said that it’s “an urgent matter of public health, of public safety, at this moment, for the president, Donald Trump, to resign.”
Hayes began by saying, “This moment, we are in the midst of one of the worst governing failures in American history. When all is said and done, it may end up being the worst since the Civil War. There is no country on earth this far into this pandemic that has bungled it this badly. And we need leadership and a leader to get us out of this. But we do not have that leader, we have Donald Trump. And from the very first day, this has been a terrible presidency. From the first moment, the first speech, it has been terrible throughout.”
He later added that President Trump “ignored warnings from his public health experts. That resulted in tens of thousands of preventable deaths. And we’re looking at tens of thousands more. Right now, we are seeing our chance as Americans to get back to some semblance of normalcy, the way other countries have, with work and school and even sports, we’re seeing it slip away because of Donald Trump. We are suffering through the incompetence of a man who took a huge inheritance and squandered it on stupid, glitzy investments and bankrupted his company six times because he was not up to the task. If this presidency had creditors, the virus’ resurgence this week would’ve been a default event. Only it is not his creditors who are suffering, it is us. It is the people who could have survived this virus. It is friends and loved ones in nursing homes, and the people on the front lines and the ones working in meatpacking plants and the ones serving time in prison. It is everyone who has lost a job and every small business that shut down. Things are falling apart because of him. And Republicans know it. But all they do is complain about his tone or they send some passive-aggressive tweets, while professing their loyalty.”
Hayes concluded, “The problem is not his tone. There is not going to be some course correction. Donald Trump does not learn. He is not going to get good at this. He is not going to change. He has failed, definitively. And it is an urgent matter of public health, of public safety, at this moment, for the President, Donald Trump, to resign.”
(h/t Mediaite)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
2:28
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” host Chris Hayes said that it’s “an urgent matter of public health, of public safety, at this moment, for the president, Donald Trump, to resign.”
Hayes began by saying, “This moment, we are in the midst of one of the worst governing failures in American history. When all is said and done, it may end up being the worst since the Civil War. There is no country on earth this far into this pandemic that has bungled it this badly. And we need leadership and a leader to get us out of this. But we do not have that leader, we have Donald Trump. And from the very first day, this has been a terrible presidency. From the first moment, the first speech, it has been terrible throughout.”
He later added that President Trump “ignored warnings from his public health experts. That resulted in tens of thousands of preventable deaths. And we’re looking at tens of thousands more. Right now, we are seeing our chance as Americans to get back to some semblance of normalcy, the way other countries have, with work and school and even sports, we’re seeing it slip away because of Donald Trump. We are suffering through the incompetence of a man who took a huge inheritance and squandered it on stupid, glitzy investments and bankrupted his company six times because he was not up to the task. If this presidency had creditors, the virus’ resurgence this week would’ve been a default event. Only it is not his creditors who are suffering, it is us. It is the people who could have survived this virus. It is friends and loved ones in nursing homes, and the people on the front lines and the ones working in meatpacking plants and the ones serving time in prison. It is everyone who has lost a job and every small business that shut down. Things are falling apart because of him. And Republicans know it. But all they do is complain about his tone or they send some passive-aggressive tweets, while professing their loyalty.”
Hayes concluded, “The problem is not his tone. There is not going to be some course correction. Donald Trump does not learn. He is not going to get good at this. He is not going to change. He has failed, definitively. And it is an urgent matter of public health, of public safety, at this moment, for the President, Donald Trump, to resign.”
(h/t Mediaite)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
As pandemic rages, Trump administration calls on Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare
27 June 2020
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court late on Thursday to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was signed into law by Barack Obama in 2010. The filing came the same day the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported that nearly half a million Americans had signed up in April and May for health care plans under the program, popularly known as Obamacare, amid the economic devastation from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ending the ACA would wipe out health care coverage for as many as 23 million Americans. In a week that has seen the highest number of new cases since the coronavirus outbreak began, the filing shows the indifference and contempt of the government for the American people, who are struggling with unemployment, sickness and death as a result of a pandemic that has been allowed to ravage the country.
Some 45 million people have lost their jobs over the past three months, in many cases losing their employer-sponsored health insurance as well.
The administration submitted an 82-page brief to the high court an hour before the midnight deadline on Thursday. It joined Republican officials in Texas and other states who argue that the then-Republican-controlled Congress had rendered the entire law unconstitutional when it reduced to zero the ACA’s tax penalty for those not covered by employer- or government-provided programs who fail to buy insurance—the so-call individual mandate.
Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco argued in his brief: “Nothing the 2017 Congress did demonstrated it would have intended the rest of the ACA to continue to operate in the absence of these three integral provisions.” He added, “The entire ACA thus must fall with the individual mandate.”
With his hardline stance against the ACA, Trump is playing to his base and the ultra-right in the lead-up to the November election. However, some officials in his administration, including Attorney General William Barr, had urged the president to take a less aggressive position against ACA, fearing the stance could backfire against Republicans in the election.The Supreme Court has already ruled on two legal challenges to Obamacare, both times leaving most of the law intact. Trump had previously supported preserving the law’s more popular provisions, such as guaranteed coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions and allowing those up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ insurance coverage.
The Democrats seized on Trump’s move as the occasion to posture as the champions of workers’ health care. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to the brief by saying, “President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus is an act of unfathomable cruelty.”
Lost in this bluster is the reality that Obamacare has always served to enrich the private insurance companies. Its central component, the individual mandate, forces individuals to purchase coverage from a private insurer or face a penalty, thus funneling billions into the coffers of the insurance monopolies.
While this mandate was shot down by the 2017 Congress, private insurers, pharmaceuticals, giant hospital chains and their CEOs continue to enrich themselves, as the ACA provides little oversight of what these private entities charge for their products and services.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential candidate, offered a particularly demagogic response to Trump’s attack on Obamacare. He argued that if the ACA is struck down, Americans “would live their lives caught in a vise between Donald Trump’s twin legacies: his failure to protect the American people from the coronavirus and his heartless crusade to take health care protections away from American families.”
In remarks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania on Thursday, Biden criticized Trump’s filing, making promises about what his administration would do to improve health care that he knows would never be fulfilled.
While pointing out that ending the ACA under conditions of a pandemic would be devastating for the 23 million Americans who receive coverage under the program, he did not touch on the murderous return-to-work campaign now taking place across the county, in which meatpacking, auto and other industries are forcing workers back on the job under conditions of rampant COVID-19 infection and no personal protection against the virus.
Like Trump, the Democrats are concerned about corporations continuing to run their profit-making enterprises and boosting their stocks on Wall Street. Biden said, “We need to find a way to run the economy as we bring the number of cases down.”
However, the former vice president provided no details on how he intends to go about this. The Democrats are complicit in the return-to-work campaign, presiding over states and cities across the country that are prematurely reopening in accordance with Trump’ de facto policy of “herd immunity.” Their major action in the course of the pandemic has been to authorize the doling out of trillions of dollars to big business through the CARES Act, while allocating pittances to workers in the form of supplemental unemployment pay, which is set to run out in a month, and a one-time stipend.
Among the promises Biden made Thursday was that he would restrict health insurance premiums to 8.5 percent of household income, and an undefined smaller percentage for those with low incomes. For a single individual making 200 percent of the official poverty income, an absurdly low $25,520 a year, 8.5 percent would amount to about $2,170 annually, or $180 a month. A household earning the median annual income of $59,000 would pay over $500 a month, or more than $6,000 a year.
It is only under conditions where the health care system is entirely beholden to private interests that such out-of-pocket costs are presented as a major improvement!
Biden also pledged to introduce a public option on the ACA exchanges.
It is possible that the administration’s suit against the ACA could be argued before the Supreme Court in October, before the November election. The earliest a ruling could be delivered is some time in 2021.
CNN’s Tapper: Trump, Pence ‘Feeding the American People Lies’ About Pandemic
3:11
Friday on CNN’s “The Lead,” anchor Jake Tapper accused the Trump administration of lying to the American people about the coronavirus.
Tapper said, “The coronavirus crisis is surge surging in two-thirds of the United States. You might not know that if you listen to the Trump White House, which today minimized the fact that there is a looming disaster in several states. The president and vice president continue to feed the American people lies about the state of this pandemic and their administration’s failures to rise to the moment. This map tells the story. Thirty-two states are battling an increase in cases. Eleven states are flat. Only seven states are showing a decline. With Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert warning today that the United States is at a crossroads and Americans can choose to be part of the problem or part of the solution. Unfortunately, President Trump and Vice President Pence seem to be opting to be part of the problem. Trump is refusing to set an example and wear a mask in public. He continues to hold rallies with no social distancing. Rallies that are veritable Petri dishes. Today at the first coronavirus task force briefing in two months, the vice president made statements to the American people that simply do not square with the facts. Pence insisted that states are opening safely and responsibly when the fact is very few states adhered to the White House’s own guidelines for reopening. Medical data clearly proves that it was a mistake. Then Mr. Pence said this.”
In a clip, Pence said, “The reality is we’re in a much better place with the efforts President Trump mobilized at the federal level. We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives.”
Tapper continued, “Now it’s true that things might be better today than weeks ago when 2,000 Americans were dying from COVID-19 every single day, but the curve has not flattened. The opposite is true. Just look at the chart of new cases. Yesterday, the United States reported more than 37,000 new confirmed infections of the Novel Coronavirus virus. That’s the highest one-day increase ever. And the curve, as you can see on the graph, is rising again. It has been brought down a little, and then it unflattened and is going north. The United States, with less than 5% of the world’s population, has a quarter of the world’s death due to coronavirus per official numbers. It did not have to be this way.”
He added, “There remains no aggressive or effective nationwide surveillance testing and contact tracing program in the United States. Now we’re learning there are divisions within the White House task force about how they proceed with testing program that is in place. To reiterate, the response has not been a success. It has been one of the least successful responses in the entire world. President Trump’s desire for this pandemic to be over does not make it over. In fact, the lies, including the projections we heard today of this false sense of security, these lies could likely make the pandemic even worse.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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