Seth Meyers: A Closer Look

The President is a threat to public health. He is not capable of distinguishing between his own personal interests and the duties of his office. He uses his daily platform on national TV to spread misinformation and to air petty grievances. No one watching these press conferences actually learns anything. In fact, if you watch Trump talk for any amount of time you end up asking yourself sincerely “Oh, my word! Will the universe survive?” [Showing a clip of Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate floor, March 25, 2020.] 

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Seth Meyers on his “A Closer Look”      March 26, 2020

Twilight Zone

Protective Mask

Dr. Fauci unveils a mask that could save millions of lives!

First 100 Days

The same cartoon from 2017 -- one in color, the other in black and white.

Uncertainty

Closing remarks from Chris Cuomo, Cuomo Prime Time 03/18/2020

Coronavirus, living up to its name, Corona, Greek, crown. It's ruling everything, everyone.

Let's be honest. To this point, isn't the hardest part not knowing? Uncertainty is as contagious as the virus, and certainly sickening, in and of itself.

We keep hearing about people being sick, but they can't get tested. They keep saying the tests are coming, and we're going to get caught up on the data, but when? Uncertain. And uncertainty mixed with shortage of trust in government, toxic.

The numbers, they keep jumping. But we know they're not accurate because they're not testing. We thought the real lethality risk was this thing about how many elderly this disease would take from us, this virus, how many of the compromised.

But now it is uncertain how many of us may be compromised.

The young and strong were worrying about being ignored in all this online, but out and about ignoring the very warnings that they wanted. Now, it turns out they're getting sick too, some, badly.

The one bright spot was this virus seemed to spare the young, the toddlers, teens. Now, uncertain. How many? How long? Uncertain. How long will this last? It keeps changing in wild ways.

Trump went from "Not going to happen" to "One and done" to "15 cases and case closed" to "It will magically disappear" to "We got this" to "15 days" to "August" and now, an 18-month contingency plan.

The scariest part, while we know he was BSing in the beginning, now his ignorance is actually justified. It is uncertain. They don't know. Nobody knows. You can't know.

And look, I know I'm on TV, but I'm living it just like you, in almost all the same ways, especially if you're not sick, God forbid. My family is 100 miles away. My mom is living with us.

I'm working here. Have I been exposed? Maybe. My cough, and my icky feeling, is it allergies, is it a cold, should I be tested? Uncertain. Probably not. If I go home, am I going to risk my kids? Am I going to risk my mother? Do I have to stay away? For how long? All uncertain.

Now here is what is not uncertain. And I don't want to have to tell you this, but you have to hear it. This is just starting. And we know that playing uncertainty the wrong way is dangerous. How do we know?

Four out of five people who get this virus get it from someone who didn't know they had it. And in that fact is the answer to what seems to be this vexing question. How do you deal with uncertainty because we're seeing two options play out, under-prepare or over-prepare.

Under-prepare is what you see out all too much, flouting self-isolation, writing it off as fake news. Ask Italy and a dozen other countries how fake this is. That is stupid and selfish, to me.

In the face of the unknown, the only choice is to do everything we can to prepare. Be certain about that.

No matter how onerous, costly to government, frustrating, we must encourage friends and families, online and in person, to do the same. We must demand government do the same. Be certain about this.

If you do not prepare for the worst, hoping for the best is certainly asking for the hardest times to come.

God bless you. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay together.

"I Knew All Along"

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.

Asked at his news briefing on March 19 about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

The October 2019 report (code-named Crimson Contagion) in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.

“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference.

In fact, they had. Read up on Crimson Contagion and see how the White House flubbed a test-run at handling the coronavirus.

Trump's New Fixation

A couple days ago, President Trump suddenly stopped referring to the Covid-19 coronavirus by its common name, which experts and laypeople and the president himself had been using for months, and started using a racist designation: the “Chinese virus.”

The world has been trying to move past the racist disease-naming conventions of the past in recent years, making it all the more telling that Trump has revived them in a moment of crisis. The term he’s been using has potentially dangerous consequences, particularly for Asian Americans.

Looking at Trump’s Twitter account, his megaphone to the nation, he tweeted about “coronavirus” about 40 times between January 24 (the first mention) and March 15. But on March 16, his rhetoric flipped: He hasn’t referred to the “coronavirus” at all and has instead tweeted using his new preferred racist name.

There is a long history of racializing pandemics by attaching them to a specific place and people. Trump’s comments are just yet another example of this lamentable instinct and another illustration of his xenophobia in office. This is the same president who referred to some African countries as “shitholes” in advocating for restrictive immigration policies.

When naming this disease caused by the novel coronavirus, international leaders actually went out of their way to avoid a name with any reference to people, places, or even animals.

In 1918 the Spanish flu didn’t get that name because it started in Spain. It actually started in Kansas. It became commonly known as the Spanish flu because in the middle of World War I, in which Spain remained neutral, Spain was one of the only Western nations willing to report frankly on the pandemic.

The president is not doing his part at all and doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of his words. Instead, he risks making the situation worse.

Stop Talking

President Trump addressed the nation last night on the topic of the coronavirus. Afterwards CNN Tonight with Don Lemon critiqued the speech.

Frank Bruni, CNN contributor: We're talking about extraordinary developments, extraordinary changes in American life. And I think in the context of that, people need more than they got from the president tonight.

I mean, let's be grateful he did not flat out minimize the crisis, which he's done before. He did not bash the media or bash Democrats. It was pretty low bar for him to clear. He didn't do those things. But I didn't hear, in that speech tonight, I didn't hear real empathy for what Americans and for the rest of the world is going through.

I mean, I heard a lot of jingoism about how great America is and hey, we're doing better than Europe. I heard a ridiculous plea for no partisanship from the president who has done nothing but exercise partisanship since this began. And he had the aspect of a third grader doing a homework assignment that he was doing under duress.

Bruni went on to explain what he said: This is going to sound really, really harsh. I would like to think it's nerves and any one of us could sympathize with nerves. I think it's annoyance. This pandemic is raining on his parade. And I know that's a really harsh judgment but I think if you really look carefully at the character of this president, as revealed over the three year plus of his presidency, there's no other conclusion to reach.

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Earlier in the day the president’s actions related to the coronavirus was discussed on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

Rep. Denny Heck (WA-D) said: I'm not being facetious here -- I wish the president would just stop talking. He doesn't seem to add anything constructively when he enters into this dialogue about what it is we should do and can do going forward. I'd much rather that he allowed the health care professionals that work within the administration to do their job. This is a serious situation, and it's getting more serious.

Spinning the Coronavirus

From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth. Even as the government’s scientists and leading health experts raised the alarm early and pushed for aggressive action, they faced resistance and doubt at the White House — especially from the president — about spooking financial markets and inciting panic.

From Trump’s first comments on the virus in January to rambling remarks at the CDC, health experts say the administration has struggled to strike an effective balance between encouraging calm, providing key information and leading an assertive response. The confused signals from the Trump administration, they say, left Americans unprepared for a public health crisis and delayed their understanding of a virus that has reached at least 28 states, infected more than 300 people and killed at least 17.

On January 22 during a two-day trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the president chose to focus on the positive. “It’s one person coming in [to the U.S.] from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 10  -  Trump said, “By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Meanwhile, Americans stranded in Japan on a cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, were finally returned home February 17, but the president became enraged when he learned that 14 of the passengers had tested positive for the virus in the process of being transferred to government planes. He later said that he was worried that bringing back people who tested positive for the virus would increase the public tally of people infected in the United States.

Late last week, during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the president, as part of a discussion about another cruise ship with Americans on board, said, “I would like to have the people stay.” His concern? It would increase the tally for the number of people infected in the United States. “Because I like the numbers being where they are,” the president said. In other words, it’s better to prioritize “attractive numbers” over treating ailing Americans.

This Week with George Stephanopoulos  03/08/2020
Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Obama and mayor of Chicago, speaking about Trump and COVID-19: “This administration right now looks like they couldn't organize a one-car parade. And I think here's what's going to be devastating for Donald Trump. Beyond the fact that this requires science, management, data, and being transparent, which are all his weaknesses, you're going to have a point within about two months where you cannot have big events together….. He is not going to be able to have his rallies….. His inability to get the admiration, the adulation from that crowd is going to psychologically torment him. And his isolation is going to get more intense. And his tweets are going to get more vicious.”

The Trump Administration and the Coronavirus

The host of "All In with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC, who has been speaking regularly to infectious disease experts, is concerned about the U.S. government's tepid initial response to the Coronavirus thus far. Chris Hayes discussed the situation with Stephen Colbert. The following is an edited transcription.

Hayes: People are little unprepared for the level of disruption that we are likely heading into. I have been speaking to experts. The response, thus far, has been a failure and has been terrible. We are not testing at [the level] that we need to be testing at.

The CDC webpage says there are 80 cases in the U.S. There is not a single public health expert in this country who thinks that’s a real number. No one thinks that’s the real number because it’s not the real number.

We have genetic evidence that the virus has been in the state of Washington 5 or 6 weeks before the first case was caught. We have computational modeling that suggests there might be 5 or 6 hundred cases. We know that the more you test, the more you find. This has been the experience in South Korea.

There has been a complete failure to deploy accurate wide-scale testing at a scale that is necessary to get your arms around the scope of the epidemic.

Colbert: Knowledge is not the enemy. This particular government does not want you to know things so that they can control the narrative.

Hayes: The problem is we’re not testing enough to know the actual scope.

The message from leadership, president of the United States, is (1) cases are going to go to zero, (2) it might disappear like a miracle, (3) it’s not going to be that bad -- the first two are direct quotes -- (4) and there may be a vaccine in two months.

The political leadership has sent the message to the bureaucracy and to the public: they want this to go away, they don’t want it to be a big problem, they don’t want the markets to tank, and they don’t want it to hurt the economy.

The fact of the matter is we have already learned from the trail of this pandemic -- from China through Iran to Korea, Japan, and Italy -- that the worst thing you can do, at the front end of this, is to tamp down and deny the scope of the problem you’re dealing with.

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The Late Show with Stephen Colbert      03/04/2020