The Presidential Events: May 2020

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




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


China and Hong Kong

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

Israel Annexation

Social Media

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

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.


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 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.
 
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.


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.

Recent:

Relevant:

Comments