On April 17, President Donald Trump launched his latest effort to deal with Coronavirus:

STAGE EIGHT: “RE-OPEN THE COUNTRY!”

He issued a series of tweets to his supporters, encouraging them to defy the stay-at-home laws of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia.

Trump saw the stay-at-home orders as a two-fold threat to himself:

1. He couldn’t return to his hate-filled rallies until these were lifted; and
2. The stock market wouldn’t start soaring again so long as the country was “locked down.”

Without his Nuremberg-style rallies and a roaring stock market, Trump faced the danger of being a one-term President. 

Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia all have Democratic governors. They had urged their residents to stay indoors, wear masks when they ventured outside, and keep a six-feet distance between themselves and others. 

As a result, those governors—especially Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer—were being targeted for abuse and even death threats. And their states were facing disruptive protests by large numbers of Right-wingers standing close together, with few of them wearing masks. The protesters claimed their rights were being infringed upon.  

Since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the Right has demanded that even women who are pregnant due to rape or incest carry the fetus to term. Yet now that Right-wingers are being asked to wear masks in public—to protect themselves and others from a deadly plague—they’ve suddenly discovered the mantra: “It’s my body!”

Writer Steven Pressfield summed up the immorality of these protests: “Why are we asked to wear surgical or face masks in public, to practice social distancing and to observe self-quarantining? Because these practices are not for the individual alone but for the protection of the whole [community].”

Washington Governor Jay Inslee tweeted: “The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19.

“His unhinged rantings and calls for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.”

STAGE NINE: IGNORE THE DANGER

Once states across the country began “reopening,” Trump scheduled his first 2020 re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

It was held on June 20 at the BOK Center. Scientists had learned that Coronavirus is more likely to be transmitted indoors than outdoors, when masses of people are packed together, and when people are loudly talking—or, worse, shouting.

Masks were available for those who wanted them, but Trump made it clear that his supporters shouldn’t wear masks, as a sign of support for him. Photos of the rally show men and women densely packed together, with none of them wearing masks.

The Trump campaign boasted that 100,000 people would turn up. To its embarrassment, fewer than 6,200 did. Even worse: At least eight event staff members, including two who were at the rally, later tested positive for COVID-19. 

A Trump rally

The Tulsa event was followed by another indoor rally in Phoenix on June 23. “Students for Trump” featured a packed crowd, with almost no one wearing masks. 

Then, to celebrate Independence Day, Trump scheduled yet another rally at Mount Rushmore, in Keystone, South Dakota, on July 3. 

Although health experts expressed fears about a large gathering during the Coronavirus pandemic, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said people would “not be social distancing” during the celebration:

“In South Dakota, we’ve told people to focus on personal responsibility….Those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we won’t be social distancing.” 

STAGE TEN: LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT 

Having tried Denial, Lies, Republican Subservience, Chaos, Extortion, Propaganda as News, Quackery as Medicine, “Re-open the Country!” and Ignoring the Danger, Trump has settled on one more: Learn to live with it.

According to a July 3 story by NBC News: “Eager to move forward and reopen the economy amid a recession and a looming presidential election, the White House is now pushing acceptance. ‘The virus is with us, but we need to live with it,’ is how one official said the administration plans to message on the pandemic.” 

Administration officials will promote a new study they say shows promising results on therapeutics. They will also emphasize high survival rates, particularly for Americans who are within certain age groups and don’t have underlying conditions.

Meanwhile, more than 135,000 Americans have died of the virus.

And on June 30, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before the U.S. Senate: “We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around.” 

Fauci warned that the infection surge across the South and West “puts the entire country at risk.” Much of that increase is being fueled by young adults testing positive for COVID-19. 

* * * * *

These have been the 10 ways—so far—that Donald Trump has chosen to “combat” the COVID-19 pandemic. Others may well follow.

All of those so far chosen share two commonalities:

1. Their goal has not been to protect American citizens but to ensure Trump’s re-election in November; and
2. They have all been failures, leaving the United States increasingly endangered.

On Twitter—the social media platform Trump routinely uses to attack everyone he hates—his suggestion that injecting disinfectants could treat Coronavirus drew scorn and ridicule.

One tweet showed Trump as a doctor hovering over a patient and saying: “Once I’ve pumped you full of disinfectant, I’ll zap you with this UV torch until you’re cured.”

Another meme featured Trump as Marie Antoinette saying: “Let them eat Clorox.”

Medical experts found Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks no laughing matter. Several doctors warned the public against injecting disinfectant or using UV light.

“It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK,” said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics. “I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.”

Faced with public ridicule, Trump canceled a White House press briefing for the first time since Easter weekend. 

Instead, on April 25, he issued this tweet: “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately.”

STAGE EIGHT: “RE-OPEN THE COUNTRY!”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has urged Americans to keep at least six feet from their fellows. And most of the nation’s governors have issued stay-at-home orders that ban large gatherings—including visits to parks and beaches.

CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia

Yet President Trump has openly encouraged defiance of those orders.

On April 17, he issued a series of tweets to his supporters, encouraging them to defy the law:

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

“LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” 

“LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

All these states have Democratic governors. Their residents were being urged to stay indoors, wear masks when they ventured outside and keep a six-feet distance between themselves and others. 

These states have been targeted for Right-wing protests—featuring large numbers of men and women standing close together, with most of them not wearing masks. They claim their “freedoms” are being infringed upon.

Donald Trump has tried several coping mechanisms to deal with the raging Coronavirus pandemic. Those that have been discussed so far: Stage 1 (Denial), Stage 2 (Lies),  Stage 3 (Republican Subservience), Stage 4 (Chaos) and Stage 5 (Extortion).

STAGE FIVE: EXTORTION

On March 27, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer told a local radio station: “What I’ve gotten back is that vendors with whom we’ve procured contracts—they’re being told not to send stuff to Michigan. It’s really concerning. I reached out to the White House last night and asked for a phone call with the president, ironically at the time this stuff was going on.”

Gretchen Whitmer

A March 29 story in the Washington Monthly sheds light on what lay behind Whitmer’s inability to secure desperately-needed ventilators from her longtime vendors. Its headline ran: “What If Trump Decides to Save Republicans But Not Democrats?”

A sub-headline read: “He’s providing vital resources to red states and ignoring blue states.” 

Florida submitted a request to FEMA on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves—and received a shipment with everything three days later.

On Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, bluntly told governors: “Take the blame when you have to. When you play with your boss, sometimes it’s better when you don’t win the golf game. He’s the boss, he’s got all the resources.” 

Translation: Suck up to the capo’s ego if you want to survive.

The mentality of the Black Hand has come to the Oval Office.

The Black Hand

Trump isn’t simply refusing to provide states with vitally-needed medical supplies—he’s illegally seizing those supplies that states have ordered.

An April 20 Forbes story offers frightening insight into the tyrannical reach of the Trump administration.  Entitled, “Maryland Gov. Hogan Takes Extraordinary Steps to Keep Feds From Confiscating COVID Tests,” the story unfolds like a spy thriller.

Governor Larry Hogan had heard reports that the federal government had confiscated crucial medical supplies from other states—like Massachusetts. 

After obtaining 500,000 test kits from South Korea, Hogan ordered them flown into Baltimore–Washington International Airport rather than the larger Dulles International Airport in Virginia. From there they were escorted under guard to a secret location and constantly protected by the National Guard.

As they were sent out for distribution across the state, the tests remained under protection by the National Guard and state police.

The precautions were absolutely necessary. Hospitals in Florida and California reported that FEMA had seized their supplies without explanation.

Massachusetts ordered three million masks that were confiscated by the Federal Government at the Port of New York. This forced the state to ask New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft to use his team plane to fly in one million N95 masks from China. 

N95 mask

When Trump learned that Hogan had obtained test kits from South Korea, he said: “I don’t think he needed to go to South Korea. I think he needed to get a little knowledge.”

Hogan responded: “The president said the governors are on their own and they should really focus on getting their own tests, and that’s exactly what we did.”

The Federal Government has seized vitally-needed medical supplies in at least seven states. FEMA is not publicly reporting the thefts, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Nor has the administration explained how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.

The Federal Government has not informed states whose supplies it seized if they will receive the materials they ordered and paid for. That has fueled concerns about whether the Trump administration is fairly distributing scarce medical supplies.

“We can’t get any answers,” said a California hospital official who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from the White House.

Trump has said it’s the states’ responsibility to obtain critically-needed medical supplies. But when they aren’t outbid by the Federal Government, hospital systems and states find their shipments of medical supplies seized with no explanation.

Where are those supplies going?

To China?

To Trump’s private warehouses?

To Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, for sale on the black market?

No one as yet knows.

The Washington Monthly story concludes ominously: “What if the White House simply gives all the masks and ventilators to red states and counties, leaving blue ones to struggle? What mechanisms of accountability are left?

“U.S. democracy wasn’t set up to deal with a president openly behaving like a James Bond villain while being protected by a political party behaving more like a mafia than a civic institution.”     

STAGE SIX: PROPAGANDA DISGUISED AS NEWS

Since Easter weekend, President Donald Trump held almost 50 daily press briefings at the White House. 

Their official purpose: To update the country on the administration’s ongoing response to the Coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 132,000 Americans.

Their real purpose: To serve as a substitute for Trump’s hate-filled political rallies, which have been likened to those staged by Germany’s Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, at Nuremberg.

These had been temporarily cancelled due to demands for social distancing to stem the rising tide of the COVID-19 pandemic. That has been Trump’s primary reason for seeking to end social distancing.

Donald Trump has tried several coping mechanisms to deal with the raging Coronavirus pandemic. Three of these have already been discussed: Stage 1 (Denial), Stage 2 (Lies) and  Stage 3 (Republican Subservience).

STAGE THREE: REPUBLICAN SUBSERVIENCE

During the vital months of January and February, Republicans refused to challenge Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously—before it gained a foothold in the United States.

The reason: They had utterly tied themselves to him since the 2018 mid-term elections, where many moderate Republicans lost their seats.

According to Toluse Olorunnipa, White House reporter for The Washington Post: “They have realized that if they’re going to keep their seats, if they’re going to be able to have any future in the party, they have to be completely tied to President Trump and really wait for his call in terms of what exactly they’re going to do.”

One of these defenders is Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. 

On April 9, appearing on the Fox News network’s “Sean Hannity” show, Graham said: “The first thing I want to do is get the United States Senate on the record where we don’t blame Trump. We blame China.

“The Chinese government is responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed. It’s the Chinese government and the way they behave that led to this pandemic. This is the third one to come out of China.

Lindsey Graham

“I want to make our response to this so overwhelming that China will change its behavior. I want to get the medical supply chain back into the United States, and I want to stop cancelling some debt that we owe to China because they should be paying us, not us paying China.”

Graham said that the “wet markets” in China should be shut down, because they have been the source of three pandemics that originated in China.  

“So, I think you’re going to see a bipartisan push back against China to punish them so severely to deter them in the future.”   

STAGE FOUR: CHAOS  

Like Adolf Hitler, Trump likes to pit individuals and organizations against each other. Hitler, for example, would assign several agencies to tackle the same problem: “That way, the stronger one gets the job done,” he told his architect, Albert Speer.  

Adolf Hitler

This creates needless duplication of efforts and wasted resources. But it ensures that Trump—like Hitler—remains the final voice of authority, since so many others are competing for his favor and direction. 

This has not, however, worked out well for the 50 states that make up the United States of America.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt intervened powerfully to ensure that all Americans received the help they needed.

Trump has made it clear that each state is responsible for securing its needed supply of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) for its doctors and nurses aiding Coronavirus patients. This has resulted in a dog-eat-dog atmosphere of cutthroat competition and scarcity, with Americans not only fighting the virus but each other. 

Donald Trump

STAGE FIVE: EXTORTION

Even worse: Trump and Republicans are using a deadly plague as a weapon against those Americans they hate.  

On March 26, during an interview on Fox News, Trump blamed the failures of his administration’s response to Coronavirus on Democratic state governors like Andrew Cuomo (NY), Jay Inslee (WA), and Gretchen Whitmer (MI).

On March 27, during his press briefing, Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence—who’s officially in charge of the White House’s response effort—to not call Inslee and Whitmer because they weren’t “appreciative” enough of his efforts.

Trump said this even as hospitals in each of their states were being overwhelmed with Coronavirus patients:

“I tell him—I mean I’m a different type of person—I say, ‘Mike, don’t call the governor in Washington, you’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan. If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”

At his March 27 press briefing, Trump echoed French King Louis X1V’s infamous remark—“I am the State”: “When they’re [governors] not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps, they’re not appreciative to FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]. It’s not right.” 

On that same day, Trump attacked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Right-wing Fox News’ “Sean Hannity Show”: “I don’t know if she knows what’s going on, but all she does is sit there and blame the Federal Government.”

On March 27, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer told a local radio station: “What I’ve gotten back is that vendors with whom we’ve procured contracts—they’re being told not to send stuff to Michigan. It’s really concerning. I reached out to the White House last night and asked for a phone call with the president, ironically at the time this stuff was going on.”

Gretchen Whitmer

A March 29 story in the Washington Monthly sheds light on what lay behind Whitmer’s inability to secure desperately-needed ventilators from her longtime vendors. Its headline ran: “What If Trump Decides to Save Republicans But Not Democrats?”

A sub-headline read: “He’s providing vital resources to red states and ignoring blue states.” 

“O happy posterity, who will look upon our testimony as a fable. Will posterity believe that there was a time when, with no deluge from heaven, no worldwide conflagration, no wars….but almost the whole earth was depopulated? Was such a disaster ever seen, even heard of?”
—Francesco Petrach, poet and witness to The Black Death

The virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019.  Its first reported victim became ill on December 1.

By December 31, the outbreak was traced to a novel strain of Coronavirus.

Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that affect birds and mammals. In humans, Coronaviruses can cause pneumonia and may cause bronchitis.

Coronavirus

On February 29, the first American died of Coronavirus. 

According to the March 21 edition of Rolling Stone magazine: “The United States intelligence community has been warning the president since January and February about the dire consequences that would occur when coronavirus reached America, but the president seemed determined to play down the threat, leaving the country largely unaware and unprepared.”

An anonymous Intelligence official cited by the Washington Post said: “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.”

STAGE ONE: DENIAL

Trump first learned of the virus on January 3, 2020. This did not prevent him from playing golf on January 4, 5, 18 and 19.

On January 19, the first Coronavirus case appeared in the United States.

On January 27, then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to get the President to act. But, according to officials who spoke with the Washington Post, Trump was “dismissive” of early briefings “because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.”

Trump fired Mulvaney one month later. 

Then, for Trump, it was back to the golf course—on February 1, 2 and 15.

STAGE TWO: LIES

From January to early March, 2020, Trump and his allies within the Republican party and Fox News Network repeatedly assured Americans they had nothing to fear. 

Donald Trump

Barnstorming the country in a series of hate-filled political rallies, Trump told his supporters:

• January 22:“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
• February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China. It’s going to be fine.”
• February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
• February 25: “CDC & my administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
• February 25: “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away. They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
• February 26: “The 15 cases within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” 
• February 26: “We’re going very substantially down, not up.”
• February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” 
• February 28: “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
• February 28: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”
• March 4: “If we have thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work—some of them go to work, but they get better.” 
• March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country of keeping it down. A tremendous job of keeping it down.”
• March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. And the tests are beautiful.”
• March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.”
• March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus.”
• March 9: “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, The risk is low to the average American.” 
• March 10: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” 

STAGE THREE: REPUBLICAN SUBSERVIENCE

Actually, with the virus spreading quickly throughout at least 33 states, it was not going away. It was not the news that was fake—but the lies and ignorance that Trump and his followers were spewing. 

During the vital months of January and February, Republicans refused to challenge Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously—before it gained a foothold in the United States.

The reason: They had utterly tied themselves to him since the 2018 mid-term elections, where many moderate Republicans lost their seats.