Thursday, March 12, 2020

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Donald Trump addressed the nation last night, and it did not go well, but a speech written by Jared Kushner and Racist-in-Chief Stephen Miller was never going to be anything other than a call for racist isolationism and a promise to use the executive branch to harm the most vulnerable.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was "marshaling the full power of the federal government" to confront a growing public health crisis, including a month-long halt in travel from Europe to the United States. 
Trump said he was overseeing "the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history." 
Trump was speaking during a rare Oval Office address to the nation after facing harsh criticism for his response to the pandemic. 
Earlier Wednesday, Trump would not say whether the US would issue additional travel restrictions on Europe, nor would he answer whether he would issue a national disaster declaration. 
"We'll be talking about that later. All those things we're making a decision on," he added.
Trump's top advisers had discussed potential new travel advisories on Europe during meetings at the White House on Wednesday, according to two officials familiar with the matter. The advisers are considering raising travel alerts on Europe to recommend against all non-essential travel to the continent, which administration officials view as a new epicenter for the pandemic.

Nowhere in his latest hissy fit did he say anything about testing or health solutions and barely mentioned social distancing.  Instead, Trump blew up yesterday behind closed doors in a tirade at Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, who is almost certainly the next White House firing after stocks tanked again and have now fallen 20% since Feb 12.

President Trump, in an explosive tirade Monday, urged Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to encourage Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell to do more to stimulate the economy, two officials familiar with the exchange said, revealing the president’s mounting fury as his administration struggles to corral economic fallout from the novel coronavirus.

Trump has frequently complained about the Fed in public for at least two years, but his latest effort to pressure Mnuchin to privately push for action has not been previously reported.

During that tense Monday meeting in the Oval Office, Trump fumed that Powell never should have been appointed and is damaging the nation and his presidency

He then told Mnuchin, who had encouraged Trump to nominate Powell in 2017, to engage with the chair and ask him to take more dramatic steps to arrest the stock market’s plummet, according to three White House officials and a senior Republican.
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to reveal the exchange.

Mnuchin has not commented publicly on this meeting, but he has said recently that he is in daily contact with Powell during the coronavirus crisis. Trump initially tried to brush aside concerns about the coronavirus’s impact on the economy, saying it would be short-lived, but the Oval Office meeting struck some of his advisers because it showed how furious he had become.

If Mnuchin wanted to arrest the stock market plunge, he'd convince Pence and the cabinet to oust Trump under the 25th Amendment.

Meanwhile, Republicans are doing their best to lose the Senate in November.

Democrats hoping to pass an emergency paid sick leave bill to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus were stymied by Senate Republicans on Wednesday.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) tried to speed the measure up for a vote on the Senate floor through a procedural maneuver, but an objection from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) prevented the bill from bypassing the Republican-controlled health committee.

Murray noted that many people who don’t have paid leave through their jobs will inevitably miss work due to being sick or quarantined in the coming weeks. She argued that guaranteed paid leave was important both for public health and the good of the broader economy.

“For many of our workers ― restaurant workers, truck drivers, service industry workers ― they may not have an option to take a day off without losing their pay or losing their job,” Murray said. “That’s not a choice we should be asking anyone to make in the United States in the 21st century.”

Alexander said that paid sick leave is a “good idea.” But if lawmakers want to require employers to provide it, then the federal government should have to foot the bill, he argued.

“Employees are struggling, our employers are struggling, and it’s not a cure for the coronavirus to put a big new expensive federal mandate on employers who are struggling in the middle of this matter,” Alexander said.

And when legislation that actually does do what Alexander wants is also blocked by the Senate GOP and never gets a vote, I'm sure all the folks who do have to choose between keeping their job and contracting a potentially lethal virus and spreading it will be fine.

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