by Heather Digby Parton | March 31, 2020 - 7:41am | permalink
Here's an example of what President Trump thought was important to share with his millions of Twitter followers this past weekend as we watched the nation's coronavirus numbers climb into the tens of thousands:
“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise..."
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.On Monday, nearly 12.2 million people watched Mr. Trump’s briefing on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to Nielsen — ‘Monday Night Football’ numbers. Millions more are watching on ABC, CBS, NBC and online streaming sites, and the audience is expanding. "
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Excerpt:
Here's an example of what President Trump thought was important to share with his millions of Twitter followers this past weekend as we watched the nation's coronavirus numbers climb into the tens of thousands:
“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise..."
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.On Monday, nearly 12.2 million people watched Mr. Trump’s briefing on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to Nielsen — ‘Monday Night Football’ numbers. Millions more are watching on ABC, CBS, NBC and online streaming sites, and the audience is expanding. "
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As historian Kevin Kruse tweeted in response: "People stop to look at really bad highway accidents too." Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it. Trump's friends at OAN brought up both his Nielsen ratings and his approval ratings at the White House coronavirus campaign rally on Sunday as well. Twice:
The OAN reporter helps the President turn the press briefing into an attack on the media as other correspondents glare at her
At least Trump agreed to extend the federal social distancing guidelines through the end of April, ruefully conceding that his stated goal of having millions of Americans crowded into churches on Easter Sunday was "aspirational." He said "people" had all told him he should open the nation for business right away ("They said just ride it, ride it like a cowboy, ride that sucker all the way through"), but when he was told on Sunday that more than 2.2 million people could die he decided not to. He said that if we keep the death toll down to 100,000 to 200,000 it will show that his team has done "a very good job."
Last month Trump was assuring us that the U.S. only had 15 cases and they would be down to zero in no time — and now pretty much any number below 2.2 million is proof that his genius leadership saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
He also insulted reporters and claimed the hospitals don't really need all those masks, insinuating several times that he thinks doctors and nurses are either hoarding them or selling them on the black market. These rallies have to have some good old-fashioned Trumpian red meat, after all. Just because we're dealing with an unprecedented global crisis doesn't mean his followers shouldn't be entertained.
His "ratings" are understandable. He schedules them for the usual news hour on the East Coast, most people are off work and sitting at home, and everyone's anxious for news. But he shouldn't be too sure that everyone is tuning in because they think he's so terrific. Plenty of people are watching his incoherent antics with shock and dismay.
These are not press conferences and they convey very little useful information. He is performing a bizarre ritual, modeled on his campaign rallies but with the specter of mass death hanging over them. He reads from written remarks which contain almost normal-sounding talking points, randomly punctuated by weird, mind-boggling digressions, lies and conspiracy theories.
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Even the late great Charles Dickens, who churned out copy for 19th-century daily London rags like the Morning Chronicle before he went super long-form, would have struggled to keep up with the best of times and worst of times hitting America’s (and the world’s) newsrooms in the earth-shattering year of 2020.
On the upside, the public’s craving for accurate, real-time information about the coronavirus — what’s open or closed, how to stay safe, or how quickly is the global pandemic spreading — has sent internet traffic to news websites skyrocketing to once unthinkable levels. After several years when the New York Times was becoming Home Depot with its digital subscriptions while local papers were becoming your dying Main Street hardware store, people now desperately need news about their home town. Many local sites say online readership has more than doubled. What could go wrong?
A lot. Even as most newsrooms push for a new business model around digital subscriptions, the old model — heavily dependent on advertising — had helped keep U.S. journalism barely afloat...until now. With nearly half the nation on near-total lockdown and the rest reeling, most of the businesses that buy ads in local papers, especially in smaller towns or for youth-oriented alt-weeklies — like restaurants, nightclubs or boutiques — are closed and have nothing to advertise. Scores of layoffs are already happening.
Consider New Orleans. I’ve written in the past about the struggle of journalism to survive near the mouth of the Mighty Mississippi, where a perfect storm of lots of news (from climate change in our lowest-lying state and a swatch of chemical plants called “Cancer Alley” to a tradition of crooked government) and poverty — with fewer folks than average having digital access — had roiled the market. But with the city, on a per capita basis, now rivaling New York as a coronavirus epicenter, things have really hit the fan...
Even the huge increase in web traffic has been somewhat negated by some advertisers demanding their digital ads not run next to stories about coronavirus, even though there’s little other news. Most newsrooms have seen upticks in digital subscribers — even after many news orgs moved coronavirus stories in front of the paywall that’s meant to drive subscriptions — but so far it’s not enough to offset the ad-loss tsunami.
This has all been a plot twist in the wider war for the future of journalism that escalated when President Trump was elected on a media-bashing platform in 2016. But even as the 45th POTUS attacked “fake news” and called journalists “enemies of the people," while news orgs like the Post argued back that “democracy dies in darkness,” to many everyday readers this was often an abstract kind of cold war. Not anymore. The coronavirus has made it clear that access to accurate information can be a matter of life and death.
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Coronavirus is reshaping our world in nearly every conceivable way — from shutting down borders to making handshaking verboten — and we need to be prepared for more changes coming down the pike. With enough foresight, we might be able to mitigate the damage of some of the costlier developments before they arise.
That’s why David Daley, a senior fellow for Fair Vote and author the new book “UNRIGGED: How Americans Are Battling to Save Democracy,” is sounding the alarm about the prospects for the 2020 election.
“The biggest fear is that this public health crisis explodes into a constitutional crisis,” Daley told me.
We’ve already seen signs that something like this might be coming. As the country remains under guidelines to practice strict social distancing — avoiding crowds, limiting unnecessary travel outside the home, standing at least six feet away from others if possible — it gets harder and harder to imagine how a normal election might take place. As the crisis was ramping up, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that he was canceling the March 17 election, in which Democratic primary voters were primed to go to the polls. He made this announcement the day before in-person voting was to take place, citing the danger posed by the outbreak, only to be ordered by a judge to proceed with the vote. He defied that order and kept the polls closed anyway.
This disturbing precedent is an ominous warning for November 2020, when the stakes will be much higher, Daley argued. Ohio, after all, could be a swing state in the presidential election. What happens if we’re in the midst of another outbreak of the virus by then, and a governor in similar position to DeWine chooses — even for good reasons — to cancel voting? We could wake up Wednesday morning on Nov. 4 and find we haven’t elected any president at all.
A failure to hold a real statewide election on voting day could leave the task of selecting electors for the electoral college to state legislatures. Since many state legislatures in potentially blue states are held by Republicans, this could be a catastrophe for democracy.
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With more than 150,000 confirmed positive COVID-19 cases, more than 2,800 deaths (as of the moment I am writing this sentence), and at least triple-digit numbers in nearly every state, you'd think even Republicans would realize now is the time to preserve the nation's health care system, such as it is. You'd be wrong. None of the 18 Republican state attorneys general suing to overturn the Affordable Care Act are relenting. Neither is Donald Trump nor Attorney General William Barr.
"Representatives for five of those attorneys general—from the states of Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee—confirmed to The Daily Beast that the coronavirus outbreak has not changed their plans to try and kill the health care law as parties to the case of Texas v. California," that outlet reports. The other 13 either declined to comment or just ignored the request for comment from reporter Sam Brodey. As of publication of Brodey's story, Georgia had more than 1,700 cases and Tennessee about 1,000. They are echoing their dear leader Trump, who said last week that "what we want to do is get rid of the bad health care and put in a great health care."
Spoiler alert—there is no plan for "great health care" in the Trump administration. Or in any of those states. Or in the Republican U.S. Senate or among Republicans in the House. Still. It's quite possible that the Supreme Court, and specifically Chief Justice John Roberts, sees what's happening around the country and gives a damn. But, as always, that's a thin reed on which to rest all our hopes.
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Stirring oratory from the president of the United States — real FDR, John Kennedy stuff:
"The Americans of every background are uniting to help our nation in this hour of need. It’s up to 151 countries, so when we say our nation, our nation and the world, when you think. Think of it, 151 countries. Somebody said to me today that wasn’t in this particular world, they didn’t know that we had that many countries. 151 countries. That’s something."
Not that a U.S. president who must deal with global issues should know that there are in fact 48 more countries than this president is aware of, but think of it, 195 countries. That's something. As somebody said to me today that was in this particular world, they knew that. (And Trump makes fun of Joe Biden?)
He also noted that we’ve been doing more tests than any other country anywhere in the world…. It’s also one of the reasons that we’re just about the lowest in terms of mortality rate.
Yet already noted by USA Today about his first claim: "Trump [omits] a huge piece of context: The United States population is more than six times the size of South Korea’s. On a per capita basis, South Korea is testing far more of its citizens than the U.S." As to his second claim, of 42 countries with known mortality rates, 19 others have lower rates than ours.
To correct every one of Trump's lies and airborne droplets of contagious disinformation in his Propaganda Hours and Two-Minute Hates would require Sisyphean heaves of determination that I simply don't have. But God bless 'em, three Washington Post reporters offer, this morning, a pithy survey of Trump's long-running snakeshit in their lede to "11 to 100,000: What went wrong with coronavirus testing in the U.S.":
We have it totally under control.
— Trump, in an interview, on Jan. 22
— Trump, in an interview, on Jan. 22
We're in great shape in our country. We have 11 [cases], and the 11 are getting better.
— Trump, in remarks, on Feb. 10
— Trump, in remarks, on Feb. 10
You may ask about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country.
— Trump, in a news conference, on Feb. 25
— Trump, in a news conference, on Feb. 25
It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.
— Trump, in remarks, on Feb. 27
— Trump, in remarks, on Feb. 27
Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.
Paul Krugman (NY Times, today)
This Land of Denial and Death
"Among advanced countries, the United States has long stood out as the land of denial and death. It’s just that we’re now seeing these national character flaws play out at a vastly accelerated rate.
About denial: Epidemiologists trying to get a handle on the coronavirus threat appear to have been caught off guard by the immediate politicization of their work, the claims that they were perpetrating a hoax designed to hurt Trump, or promote socialism, or something. But they should have expected that reaction, since climate scientists have faced the same accusations for years.
And while climate-change denial is a worldwide phenomenon, its epicenter is clearly here in America: Republicans are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Nor is climate science the only thing they reject; not one of the candidates contending for the G.O.P.’s 2016 nomination was willing to endorse the theory of evolution.
What lies behind Republican science denial? The answer seems to be a combination of fealty to special interests and fealty to evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., who dismissed the coronavirus as a plot against Trump, then reopened his university despite health officials’ warnings, and seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot.
The point, in any case, is that decades of science denial on multiple fronts set the stage for the virus denial that paralyzed U.S. policy during the crucial early weeks of the current pandemic.
About death: I still sometimes encounter people convinced that America has the world’s highest life expectancy. After all, aren’t we the world’s greatest nation? In fact, we have the lowest life expectancy among advanced countries, and the gap has been steadily widening for decades.
This widening gap, in turn, surely reflects both America’s unique lack of universal health insurance and its equally unique surge in “deaths of despair” — deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide — among working-class whites who have seen economic opportunities disappear.
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