Democratic partisans recently increased
their attacks against the President's behavior, highlighting the
possibility of early dementia. Yet I'm old enough to remember the
same people and pundits were appalled, incensed, and apoplectic when
progressives accused Biden of the same issue during the Democratic
Primary. These same pundits, like Joe Scarborough or James Carville,
spend more of their energy attacking Trump for walking slowly down a
ramp (which happened in June, not May), then criticizing his
policies. In their minds elections are about winning (not policy),
for the purpose of retaining the status quo. They want to protect
their personal comfort, rather than improve the country.
On a more relevant topic, I've been
bedeviled by the question of relevance ever since I started this
project. As I said in The
Events: July 2018,”What's worse?” A thought, a speech, a
plan, a lie, an insult, an action, or inaction. I was initially
hesitant to consider the words of the President as relevant as a
policy, but the President has demonstrated that they can be one and
the same. His refusal to wear a mask, and his decision to label
masks as a politically correct scam, has killed thousands of
additional people.
The Presidential Events of May 2020 can
be found here.
Staff Changes
The President hired his fourth Press
Secretary,
who after promising not to lie, lied about the Flynn investigation,
while hosting the White House's first press briefing more than a
year.
John Ratcliffe, the
Texas congressman who was rejected for the position of Director of
National Intelligence in August of 2019
(because he was too partisan and unqualified),
was confirmed for the DNI post on a party line vote.
Trump placed a
top donor in charge of the United States Postal Service,
which he hopes to undermine, and has awarded
more Ambassadorships to donors than any previous administration.
With the Coronavirus pandemic ongoing,
the White House hired
the venture capitalist and pharmaceutical exec, Moncef Slaoui, as
“therapeutics czar” to coordinate the development of a vaccine.
Russia Investigation
The Russia Investigation continued as
the
Justice Department dropped all charges against former National
Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, who earlier
plead guilty to lying about his conversations with the Russian
Ambassador. Newly unclassified documents of conversations between
Flynn and Kislyak revealed that Flynn
urged Russia to take reciprocal action, before Trump became
president. In response to the DOJ's decision,
2,000
former DOJ employees called on Barr to resign.
Instead of releasing Flynn, the
judge paused the case and asked
a retired judge for advice. FBI
director Chris Wray ordered a review of the investigation of Flynn,
and a
top FBI lawyer was forced out for his involvment in the Flynn
prosecution.
Also,
the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the release of Mueller's grand
jury records, when an appellate ruling forced
the DOJ to release them.
Inspectors General and Corruption
Trump began a purge of one of the
non-partisan guardrails of the United States, Inspectors General.
The President
removed IG Christi Grimm, because she issued a report criticizing
Trump's pathetic response to the coronavirus.
Grimm was about to receive
a whistleblower complaint from Rick Bright, who oversaw the funding
of vaccines, tests, and treatments for the coronavirus.
Bright alleged
that he was fired after he criticized the White House's promotion of
hydroxychloroquine. Bright had consistently
rejected
pressure to favor lucrative industry deals over scientific rigor.
Trump continued to fire Inspectors
General. He
removed State Department IG Steve Linick who
was investigating
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Republican
Senators pitifully bleated in opposition, but didn't take any action.
Pompeo claimed he didn't know Linick was inspecting him
for arms
dealing and staff misuse, but the President
admitted Pompeo was the one who asked him to fire the IG.
Trump
said he was ready to fire any Obama appointed IG if his staff
recommend it, but legally the President isn't
allowed to fire IG without cause. In total, Trump
fired five IGs since April. That's 7% in two
months.
China and Hong Kong
In response to China's decision to use
the coronavirus pandemic to revoke Hong Kong's special status, the
White House threatened to impose economic sanctions on the two.
Pompeo said passage
of China's new law, which would allow Chinese forces to operate in
Hong Kong, would make the city no longer autonomous.
The President said he
would revoke Hong Kong's special trade status.
College Regulations
Secretary of Education, Betsy
DeVos, altered college sexual assault policies, reversing protections
for accusers put in place by President Obama.
Previously Betsy DeVos had issued restrictions that made it more
difficult to cancel student loans awarded for fraudulent colleges.
In May Trump
vetoed a bill passed by Senate Democrats and ten Republicans to
repeal DeVos' restrictions.
War
The Administration spent
half of the world's $73 billion investment on nuclear weapons.
Trump vetoed
a bill which restricted his ability to unilaterally declare war on
Iran. The President
pulled out of his third arms treaty with Russia.
The Open Skies Treaty reduced the risk of war by allowing Russia and
thirty-three other nations to fly observation planes over any nation
with advance notice. Conflict in Afghanistan
left more than forty dead, and ended the President's temporary peace
deal with the Taliban.
Environmental and Health Regulations
The White House continued
to dismantle environmental protections under the cover of the
coronavirus pandemic. Corporations
were allowed to delay paying fines for environmental crimes,
such as emitting volatile organic compounds illegally into the air
around Denver, releasing millions of water contaminated with coal ash
(mercury, cadmium, and arsenic) into the James river in Virginia, and
emitting particle pollution (which increases the chance of heart
attacks) in Indiana.
And
the Department of Justice filed a brief in support of repealing the
entire Affordable Care Act, for the Texas v.
California case before the Supreme Court.
Immigration
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE),
forced migrant families to choose between indefinite detention or
family separation. The White House
moved to restrict visas for skilled workers to preserve jobs for
citizens during the pandemic.
Israel Annexation
The State Department said Palestine
had to discuss annexation of the West Bank with Israel
as part of its peace plan, while the Israeli
ambassador to the US lobbied to immediately approve annexation.
Social Media
Twitter fact checked the President
when he claimed mail in ballots would lead to a fraudulent election.
They flagged
his tweet that said, “When the looting starts, the shooting
starts,” for glorifying violence. In
response the
President threatened to shut down Twitter, and
then proposed
changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
which protects internet platforms from things third parties say or do
on them.
Voting
The Coronavirus, Parts I and II
While I've stressed in the introduction
about the importance of the President's words, I've separated the
section on the Coronavirus into two parts. One follows the mostly
stupid things said by the President. This doesn't mean they are
unimportant. If I thought they were, I wouldn't list them at all.
The second part describes the actions of the Administration, White
House, and Officials. This includes direct policy actions taken by
the President.
Part I – Trump's idiocies, Twitter
Meltdowns, Lies, and Conspiracies
Trump began the month by claiming
the United States would have a vaccine for the coronavirus by the end
of the year, a claim
he repeated.
Though the number of deaths in the
United States would eventually surpass 100,000 in the United States
in May, the
President claimed on May 2nd
that 66,000 deaths was an achievement (though,
as of June 21st, no country has reported more than 49,000
deaths), when considered per capita.
Early in May, VP
Pence prepared to disband the coronavirus task force,
but didn't follow through, as cases surged.
In a public meeting in the Oval Office,
the President contradicted a nurse when she said she didn't have
access to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
The President underwent multiple public
meltdowns, both on Twitter, and in person. He began by accusing
President Obama of Obamagate, an imaginary,
conspiratorial crime, with an unimaginative name. When the President
rage tweeted about OBAMAGATE, reporters asked
him about it. He responded by
petulantly refusing to name one crime Obama committed,
because there was none to name. A day later the
President accused, without evidence, former Republican Rep, and
current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of committing murder in 2001.
This was particularly ironic because Scarborough repeatedly praised
and promoted Trump during the 2016 Republican primary. The President
inflamed the Obamagate issue by having his partisan, acting
Director of National Intelligence release a list of Obama officials
who knew Flynn lied to the FBI. This list
included Vice President Joe Biden. Then the President
demanded Obama testify to the Senate about his conspiratorial claim,
but Republicans demurred.
More directly related to the
coronavirus, Trump
claimed he was taking hydroxychloroquine, the
controversial anti-malarial medication he had promoted. Studies had
shown that at best HC didn't improve most patients, while less
positive studies demonstrated that HC lead to an increased risk of
heart problems. When a specific study criticized the use of HC to
alleviate the coronavirus, the President called it a, “Trump
enemy statement.”
The President
tweeted lies about the success of testing in the United States,
while his son, Eric,
claimed during an interview that Democrats manufactured the COVID
crisis, even though he offered no evidence, as
the disease spread worldwide.
The President
refused to wear a mask as he toured a plant in Michigan making masks.
When asked what the country would do if it
experienced a second wave of coronavirus cases, the President said,
“we're not closing our country,” again.
Which implied that the first wave ever ended. According to the New
York Times, after daily cases peaked in April at 35,000, cases
dropped to 20,000 in mid May, before beginning to rise again in late June.
The day before Memorial
Day,
as Trump went golfing for the first time since March, the country
neared 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus.
On Memorial
Day itself, the President of the United States again accused Joe
Scarborough of murdering an intern,
and lied about the coronavirus and mail in ballots. He said his
former
AG, Jeff Sessions had been not “mentally qualified” for his
position,
which is something the President should have thought of before hiring
him. And a White
House Advisor called workers, “Human capital stock.”
Coronavirus
Part II – Policies: Deceptions and Inaction
In the previous months the House and
Senate passed three coronavirus relief bills. While the Democrats
wrote and passed a fourth bill in the House, the
Senate and the President said they had no plans to pursue any
additional aid. Senate Majority Leader, Mitch
McConnell told the President that the next bill needed to be under $1
trillion. Trump said no
relief bill should be considered until at least June at the earliest,
and that states
which made it easier to vote would see their funding cut.
Trump spread lies and conspiracy
theories about the coronavirus. He privately
questioned coronavirus numbers, while
lying about who could get tested.
Even other members of the
administration spread wild conspiracy theories. Secretary of State,
Mike
Pompeo claimed without evidence, and against the analysis of the
intelligence agencies, that the coronavirus was released from a
Chinese laboratory.
The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention was not immune to political pressure. The Administration
forced the CDC to withhold a document about how to reopen safely.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases,
was blocked by the White House from testifying about the coronavirus
to the House. While the White
House was busy pushing to reopen schools, Fauci
warned of reopening too soon, and the potential
for a second deadly wave. Trump pressured
the CDC to alter how it counted coronavirus deaths,
and it agreed to
revise reopening guidelines as well. Then
Trump
tried to pressure the World Health Organization,
by threatening its funding. When the organization refused to be held
hostage to the White House's outrageous demands Trump
withdrew from the WHO.
Trump also increased the likelihood of
coronavirus deaths by framing
the pandemic as part of a scam or culture war.
He even dismissed
his own CDC's recommendations about masks as political correctness.
The Department of Justice joined the culture war, ordering
California to reopen churches, and insisting
the
Supreme Court determine whether states overstepped their power in
issuing stay at home orders (even as federal
guidelines approved the same stay at home orders).
But the greatest danger of the
administration, was that it was simply uninterested and inept at
doing anything about the coronavirus. The White House wasted
the month of April by not implementing the policies needed to end
lockdown; a massive expansion of testing,
contact tracing, and an investment in PPE. While the public,
Republican and Democrat alike, would like to end the isolation, the
President has not presented a solution to the pandemic.
The United States can't stay in lockdown until the vaccine is ready.
And it shouldn't. But the President's actions are forcing the
United States to live in permanent seclusion, trapped with 25,000 new
cases a day since early May. Many countries, and some states, have
succeeded at reducing their cases to less than a hundred per day, but
the White House rolls along doing nothing. On top of it all, the
White House mismanaged the distribution of remdesivir, a drug to
alleviate the coronavirus.
Protests
Finally, the month of May witnessed the
beginning of protests in support of Black Lives Matter and against
police brutality. As expected the President made it about himself.
After the
federal government flew a Predator drone over the protesters in
Minneapolis, it was remembered that Trump's
administration reduced transparency, and encouraged violent policing.
After protesters gathered peacefully outside the White House,
Trump threatened them with “vicious dogs,”
and lashed
out at all his usual bogeymen (antifa, the
Democrats, and the media). As the month ended AG
William Barr threatened “far-left extremist groups,” even though
there was no evidence any such organized groups
engaged in crimes during the protests.
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