Where to begin?
Well…
I haven’t thought that any of the events of the last few days are particularly Shakespearean.
This has classical Greek tragedy written all over it.
And complete with... furies.
Issac Chotnier and Maggie Haberman/The New Yorker
What have you been able to learn about the President’s state of mind?
His friend Stanley Chera, who was a real-estate magnate in New York, died [of the coronavirus, in April]. Chera was older than Trump is and was in worse physical shape than Trump is, and Chera got very, very sick, very quickly, and basically went into the hospital and never came out. Trump was very spooked by that, and I think that has stayed with him. And he is—I don’t want to say hypochondriacal, because that is not the right word—but he gets very agitated when he is not feeling great. And I think all of this contributed to how they were dealing with him [on Friday].
Whole lot more furies out there aiming for this bum.
And then the ENTIRE chorus will have its say, as it must.
But still...no telling how this is going to turn out; we are only at the beginning of this part, the catastrophe.
So let’s read pundits.
Let me report then all the god declared.
King Phoebus bids us straitly extirpate
A fell pollution that infests the land,
And no more harbor an inveterate sore.
Oedipus the King
Robert Costa and Josh Dawsey of Washington Post write that now there are some in the GOP that fear that a steep political price will be paid for following...a Damn Fool.
After months in which Trump and others in his party questioned the danger of the virus and refused to take precautions such as wearing masks, the Republican Party is now coming face to face with the scientific realities of the pandemic.
The drip-drip-drip of positive tests, coupled with the specter of a president who as of Saturday was “not on a clear path to a full recovery,” as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows put it, has prompted some Republicans to question whether the party is responsible for its own potential undoing.
And it has left them wondering how to wage a strong closing campaign when the judgment, actions and competence of its leaders were so squarely at issue just as voting is getting underway across the country.
“There was a panic before this started, but now we’re sort of the stupid party,” said Edward J. Rollins, co-chairman of the pro-Trump super PAC Great America. “Candidates are being forced to defend themselves every day on whether they agree with this or that, in terms of what the president did on the virus.”
(I have to say that I have read some of these memorial postings that postdate The Damn Fool’s diagnosis and there is a very detectable uptick in...anger in some of the postings; just an observation.)
While a lot of eyes are rightly, perhaps, looking at the Amy Coney Barrett nomination held in the Rose Garden last Saturday as a “superspreader event,” Andrew Joseph of STATnews reports that there were a lot more opportunities for Trump and others to contract COVID-19.
The actual announcement of Barrett took place outside in the Rose Garden, but there were also gatherings inside the White House that day. It’s not clear who was inside with whom and for how long. And while experts say that staying outdoors or at least in well-ventilated areas is safer than packing into stuffy rooms, other precautions — like masks and distancing and limiting the size of gatherings — are emphasized as ways to reduce the risk of transmission.
“If you’re outdoors and you’re sitting next to people for an hour, and you’re hugging people and kissing people — like we saw video of Mike Lee, one of our senators, hugging people — the fact that you’re outdoors is not like you have some magical powers,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to pinpoint the exact source of someone’s infection, particularly for someone like the president who interacts with hundreds of people at different events over many days. As of now, there’s no certainty that anyone was infected or that there was a superspreading event at the Barrett announcement.
There were plenty of other chances for Trump to contract the virus, or spread it to others, in the past week as well. Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said on “Good Morning America” Friday that “no one was wearing a mask in the room” during the president’s preparations Tuesday ahead of the debate against former Vice President Joe Biden. On Saturday, Christie, who had also been at the Barrett event, said he had tested positive for Covid-19.
Reading Susan B. Glasser’s essay in the New Yorker, I was reminded that frequently, those that sat in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens 2,500 years ago knew how the story would end; it was the subject of myths and bits and pieces of it could be found in, say, the Iliad or the Odyssey and other works. Many times, the creativity of the tragedians was in how they got to that end and what would get added to the myth.
The truth is, this is probably the least surprising national shock ever. For months, Trump has made coronavirus denialism his signature, at great cost to millions of Americans, more than two hundred thousand of whom are now dead. He courted personal as well as political disaster by refusing to wear a mask publicly and by encouraging others not to do so, either. His positive coronavirus test always had the feel of an inevitable plot twist. But the President of the United States getting diagnosed with a potentially lethal illness for which there is no cure a month before a national election is no less monumental for being fully anticipated. Will Trump recover? Will we believe him, or his discredited White House, if he claims that he has?
By Friday, nothing was clear except that Washington was trapped in a new waiting game, wondering about the health of an obese seventy-four-year-old with a penchant for not telling the truth about his health. Wondering how it would affect the election thirty-two days from now; wondering how 2020 could once again deal us such a hand. History is so much less exhausting when it happens to other people.
(At least Oedipus acknowledged that the plague existed and tried to help all of his people.)
According to a Washington Post reporting team, there’s been very little effort at contact tracing by the White House. Indeed, all it seems that they do at the White House is test. Lev Facher of STATnews describes the extremely severe limitations of the White House strategy to rely solely on COVID-19 testing.
Trump’s positive test is just the latest in a string of infections throughout his administration and the federal workforce dedicated to serving the president. Katie Miller, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, tested positive for the virus in May. Numerous agents on Trump’s and Pence’s Secret Service details have also tested positive for Covid-19, in addition to an 11-agent outbreak reported this week at a training facility in Maryland.
Beyond highlighting the limitations of testing as a sole preventive strategy, Trump’s positive test also calls attention to the unreliability of the diagnostic tests themselves. For months, the White House has relied on Abbott’s ID Now Covid-19 tests, which return results within five to 15 minutes of sample collection.
Those tests have been criticized for their high detection limit — in other words, they only return positive results if individuals tested submit samples with large amounts of viral material. As a result, it’s possible that early in the course of an infection, or as an infection is waning, the test could return a “false negative” result even if its subject is still contagious.
Joan Vennochi of Boston Globe writes about...America, the living and very real Thebes.
Trump’s positive COVID-19 test may be a political October surprise. But you don’t have to be an epidemiologist to know that, medically speaking, it’s not all that shocking. There are more than 7 million cases in America and more than 207,000 confirmed deaths in America from COVID-19. Medical experts have warned of the insidious nature of this virus and predicted a surge in the fall. No one is immune. Everyone should be on guard.
Yet Trump infamously played down the risks for Americans, and for himself, too. This is a president who just the other night, on the presidential debate stage in Cleveland, mocked Democratic challenger Joe Biden for always wearing a mask. He said there were no negative effects from indoor rallies — somehow forgetting Republican presidential nominee Herman Cain, who attended a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., and died weeks later, in July, of COVID-19. After Hope Hicks, Trump’s close aide, tested positive for COVID-19, Trump and his entourage still flew to New Jersey on Thursday, where he attended a fund-raiser at his golf club and delivered a speech. He was in close contact with dozens of other people, The Washington Post reported.
(Yes, I did post a FacesofCOVID tweet about the passing of Dr. Betty Jean McBride a few weeks ago.)
I guess that DJT biographer, Timothy L. O’Brien, fits right in here; writing for Bloomberg and noting multiple layers of that most Sophoclean element of tragedy in The Damn Fool’s COVID-19 diagnosis: irony.
“It's going to disappear one day. It’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump, Feb. 27
One of the many ironies of Trump’s tenure in the Covid era is that he’s a self-described germaphobe. He avoids shaking hands and is easily alarmed — and often disgusted — by anyone showing the slightest symptoms of common colds. He steered clear of his son Barron when he was a toddler for fear of catching one of his illnesses. Long before Covid-19 began accompanying him on the global stage, he routinely invited aides to squirt shots of sanitizer into his palms. Hope Hicks, a White House aide, was often in charge of Trump’s Purell bottle when they traveled together.
“This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.” — Trump, March 15
On Thursday evening, Bloomberg News disclosed that Hicks had tested positive for Covid-19. She had traveled with Trump to his Tuesday debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland and joined him for a rally in Minnesota the following day. Team Trump paraded into the debate forum without masks and refused offers from a local doctor to give them face coverings. Hicks was spotted, maskless, in a campaign van on Tuesday riding alongside other Trump advisers, including Stephen Miller and Jason Miller. Trump suggested in a TV interview that Hicks may have been infected by contact with overzealous members of the military and law enforcement who wanted to hug and kiss her.
And then...there’s that one loud section of the Greek chorus; a part that can hopefully be drowned out and ultimately ignored...or something...
Anthony L. Fisher/Business Insider
Whether he was mocking a disabled reporter's affliction and delighting in Hillary Clinton's health travails on the 2016 campaign trail or separating migrant children with Down syndrome from their parents and ridiculing Joe Biden's son's struggle with drug addiction during his time in office — Trump supporters can't get enough of the Dear Leader triggering the libs, or really anyone with a conscience.
To his fervent supporters, Trump's callous viciousness is funny. It's the humorless politically correct scolds and loser Never Trumper conservatives who need to lighten up, they say.
Now that President Trump and first lady Melania have tested positive for COVID-19, Trumpworld has discovered the value of empathy. And they are shocked — shocked! — that some of Trump's critics have delighted in the irony of Trump's coronavirus denialism contributing to his own infection.
Trump supporters downplayed the seriousness of his condition and its potential impact on the election, likening his diagnosis to the risk anyone faces when they leave their house during a global pandemic.
“This was totally random. Anybody could have gotten it. This time it was him,” said David Graham, a 66-year-old Johnstown Republican and a member of The Inquirer’s Election 2020 Roundtable of Pennsylvania voters.
Lauren Jessop, of Easton in Northampton County, said it’s not fair to blame Trump for getting sick. As president, he doesn’t have the option of “staying locked in his office all day,” she said.
***
Jonathan Taylor of Gettysburg said Trump has handled the coronavirus well. The only thing that would change his mind on that, Taylor said, is if the president acted with “total disregard” for safety precautions. (Trump often eschews mask-wearing and routinely holds large political rallies in defiance of public health guidelines.)
Chile...it is what it is.
Peter Nicholas/The Atlantic
When I visited the White House in August, no one checked to see if I was running a fever or suppressing a hacking cough as I passed through the security booth. The ritual was the same today: I showed up hours after we’d learned that President Donald Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus, yet no one asked about my health. Instead, I was simply searched for weapons and allowed in.
I’ve written twice in recent months about the dangerous conditions around the president—about lax testing of journalists flying with him on Air Force One, about troubling working arrangements inside the executive mansion itself. Trump’s illness seems an outgrowth of the administration’s flagrant disregard for public-health precautions. And yet, there’s no sign of a real course correction: The practices today seemed every bit as lax. When Trump walked deliberately toward Marine One tonight, in a dark suit and matching mask, he waved to reporters who all day had been trying to find out information about his condition.
But he left a White House that, even though he’s been stricken with a potentially fatal disease, seemed no safer than at any other point in the pandemic. Officials don’t appear to have learned much from the nightmare.
As far as I could tell, the White House’s lone concession to the catastrophe unfolding before our eyes was that a few junior aides working in the suite of offices accessible to the press corps sat at their desks in masks. During my August trip, none of the aides breathing the same air in this cramped warren of offices had seen fit to wear one.
Henry Olsen reports for the Washington Post that the job numbers aren’t rosy at all.
More than 660,000 jobs were added last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employer survey. The BLS’s household survey confirms this rise and furthermore shows the employment-population ratio — the share of the working-age people who hold a job — ticked up to 56.6 percent. That’s the highest rate since the pandemic struck in March, up significantly from the all-time low of 51.3 percent recorded in April.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of reasons to believe further improvements will be slow. The labor force participation rate — the share of the working-age population working or looking for work — has barely budged since June. Roughly 4.4 million people have simply stopped looking for work since February. People who aren’t looking for work aren’t counted in the headline unemployment rate. If they were, it would be significantly higher than September’s 7.9 percent.
The employer survey also shows that there are still 10.7 million fewer people employed than there were in February. These declines are concentrated in industries that are impacted by government regulations banning or limiting people from congregating indoors, such as the restaurant and leisure segment where there are 2.3 million fewer jobs than in February. Other disproportionally hard-hit segments of the economy include those associated with travel and accommodation (about 1 million fewer jobs); indoor entertainment aside from restaurants and bars (nearly 800,000 fewer jobs); and employment and other support services for businesses (roughly 950,000 lost jobs). Combined, that’s more than 5.2 million lost jobs from these sectors, or nearly half of the total hit to pre-pandemic employment levels.
There was a United States Senate debate in South Carolina last night between Republican incumbent Lindsay Graham and Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison; a race which the polls indicate is a toss-up.
There was also a debate in the Iowa Senate race between Republican incumbent Joni Ernst and Democratic challenger Teresa Greenfield. Recent polls show that Ms. Greenfield probably has a slight lead.
Inger Burnett-Ziegler, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, writes for the Chicago Tribune on the continued traumatization of black women as a result of the decision of a Kentucky grand jury not to charge the police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor.
As a clinical psychologist who studies trauma among Black women, I know the data is clear. Black women experience the highest number of cumulative traumatic events in their lifetime. Black women are more likely than white women to experience childhood abuse or neglect, sexual violence and exposure to gun violence.
Just by existing, Black women are vulnerable to racial trauma. This is the trauma from everyday microaggressions such as being treated with less respect, being presumed to not belong somewhere you have every right to be or being racially profiled by the police.
Racial trauma can also result from the persistent institutional racism and discrimination that leads to fewer opportunities for economic advancement, higher rates of unemployment and poverty. Further, Black women have higher rates of involvement with the criminal justice system and are twice as likely to be imprisoned as white women. Black people in general are five times as likely as white people to say that they have been unfairly stopped by the police. Since 2015, more than 250 Black women have been killed at the hands of police.
Combined, these traumatic experiences harm the physical and emotional wellness of Black women. While approximately 8% of adults in the United States have a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, rates among Black women are estimated to be as high as 20%.
Everyone have a good morning.