[Discussion] Hope to Remember The Trump Administration Thread as being 'transparent and honest'

Let's follow and discuss what our newest presidential administration gets up to, the good, the bad, the lawsuits, and the many many indictments.

Trump has been attacking Woodward for not releasing the interviews earlier.

Which has lead me to conclude two things:
1. I don't care about arguing about when he should have released the interviews at this point: play it as it lies. Re-litigating March isn't going to reverse what has happened so far, and regardless of how I feel about it the country is literally on fire right now in addition to the usual metaphorically on fire.
2. For whatever reason, this one is sticking right now.

Malor wrote:

Only if they like pineapple on pizza.

Yes, especially when toasted almonds and banana peppers are also involved.

Gremlin wrote:

Trump has been attacking Woodward for not releasing the interviews earlier.

Which has lead me to conclude two things:
1. I don't care about arguing about when he should have released the interviews at this point: play it as it lies. Re-litigating March isn't going to reverse what has happened so far, and regardless of how I feel about it the country is literally on fire right now in addition to the usual metaphorically on fire.
2. For whatever reason, this one is sticking right now.

Donald wrote:

I'm the leader of the country, I can't be jumping up and down and scaring people.

Also Donald wrote:

The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That’s where they are coming from. If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, “Friendly Protesters".

Yes, but remember Donald earlier this year (or some other year that wasn't one of the years in this year) the Noble [sic] prize. Can we arrange for him to win a Noble prize, and have him attend the month-long award ceremony in the far north of Finland?

Amoebic wrote:
Malor wrote:

Only if they like pineapple on pizza.

Yes, especially when toasted almonds and banana peppers are also involved.

Toasted almonds on pizza? What kind of Canadian novelty is this?

As always, Letters From an American does a great job of laying things out.

Back in April, when America had reached the unthinkable level of 50,000 dead from Covid-19, news broke that Trump had been briefed way back in January on how deadly the coronavirus was but had not acted on that information. Trump defended his lack of action by saying he had been misled by the CIA briefer, who had, he tweeted, “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner….”

Trump lied. He knew.

On January 28, at a top secret intelligence briefing, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told Trump that the coronavirus would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. It registered. Trump’s head popped up as O’Brien’s deputy, Matt Pottinger, told Trump it could be as bad as the 1918 pandemic, and that it was spread fast by people who showed no symptoms.

On February 7, just two days after his acquittal in the Senate on the charges of impeachment, Trump picked up the phone and called journalist Bob Woodward, who was surprised to hear the president talk not about the acquittal, but about the new virus. Trump told Woodward: “This is deadly stuff.” He explained that the virus is transmitted by air, and that it was five times more dangerous than “even your strenuous flus.”

And yet, on February 2, Trump had said in a Fox News Channel interview before the Super Bowl that “we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” Trump continued to hold large indoor rallies where he insisted the coronavirus was similar to the flu and that it would soon disappear. Twenty days after his call to Woodward, he was still telling Americans not to worry and he refused to prepare for the coming crisis. Trump told Woodward that he was not telling Americans the truth because he didn’t want “to create a panic.”

By March 19, Trump told Woodward that Covid-19 was killing young people as well as older folks, although throughout the summer he continued to insist that children should go back to school because they were “almost immune” from the virus. On April 3, Trump said at a briefing: “I said it was going away and it is going away.” On April 5, he told Woodward “It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable.” On April 13, as he dismissed the need for masks, the president told Woodward “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

Over the course of 18 interviews, Trump spoke for nine hours to journalist Bob Woodward. He had apparently been angry at his aides for shielding him from Woodward before the journalist published his book Fury in 2018, thinking he could charm Woodward into presenting him in a better light, as he had shaped coverage of himself in the tabloids in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Trump also urged senior staff and officials to talk to Woodward, who ended up getting interviews with senior adviser Jared Kushner, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, and former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, among others.

Apparently, White House aides warned Trump against talking to Woodward, but not only did he do so, he permitted Woodward to record the conversations. So when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany today tried to say that Trump had never tried to downplay the virus, a reporter retorted: “It’s on tape, Kayleigh.”

When this story broke, Trump immediately tried to reassure his base by releasing yet more names of people he would consider for any new Supreme Court seats (the list is now more than 40 people long), and told reporters that perhaps he had misled Americans because he is “a cheerleader for this country.” Trump defenders were left trying to find someone to blame for the recorded interviews. Apparently, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham helped to persuade Trump to talk to the famous journalist and tonight, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson blamed Graham for the debacle, implying he had deliberately undercut the president.

In his final interview with Woodward on July 21, Trump told him, “The virus has nothing to do with me…. It's not my fault. It's — China let the damn virus out."

Amoebic wrote:
Malor wrote:

Only if they like pineapple on pizza.

Yes, especially when toasted almonds and banana peppers are also involved.

Ooooh... that sounds amazing!... What's a banana pepper?

Buzzrick wrote:
Amoebic wrote:
Malor wrote:

Only if they like pineapple on pizza.

Yes, especially when toasted almonds and banana peppers are also involved.

Ooooh... that sounds amazing!... What's a banana pepper?

Per Wikipedia: Banana Peppers

Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19

Politico wrote:

The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.

In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon.

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Caputo's team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that "the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks."

In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to "hurt the President" in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department and obtained by POLITICO.

"CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration," appointee Paul Alexander wrote, calling on Redfield to modify two already published reports that Alexander claimed wrongly inflated the risks of coronavirus to children and undermined Trump's push to reopen schools. "CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening . . . Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear."

Alexander also called on Redfield to halt all future MMWR reports until the agency modified its years-old publication process so he could personally review the entire report prior to publication, rather than a brief synopsis. Alexander, an assistant professor of health research at McMaster University near Toronto whom Caputo recruited this spring to be his scientific adviser, added that CDC needed to allow him to make line edits — and demanded an "immediate stop" to the reports in the meantime.

"The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy," Alexander told Redfield and other officials. "Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and 'complete.'"

CDC officials have fought the efforts to retroactively change reports but have increasingly allowed Caputo and his team to review them before publication, according to the three individuals with knowledge of the situation. Caputo also helped install CDC’s interim chief of staff last month, two individuals added, ensuring that Caputo himself would have more visibility into an agency that has often been at odds with HHS political officials during the pandemic.

...

The efforts to modify the CDC reports began in earnest after a May report authored by senior CDC official Anne Schuchat, which reviewed the spread of Covid-19 in the United States and caused significant strife within the health department. HHS officials, including Secretary Alex Azar, believed that Schuchat was implying that the Trump administration moved too slowly to respond to the outbreak, said two individuals familiar with the situation.

The HHS criticism was mystifying to CDC officials, who believed that Schuchat was merely recounting the state of affairs and not rendering judgment on the response, the individuals familiar with the situation said. Schuchat has made few public appearances since authoring the report.

CDC did not respond to a request for comment about Schuchat’s report and the response within the department.

The close scrutiny continued across the summer with numerous flashpoints, the individuals added, with Caputo and other HHS officials particularly bristling about a CDC report that found the coronavirus spread among young attendees at an overnight camp in Georgia. Caputo, Alexander and others claimed that the timing of the August report was a deliberate effort to undermine the president's push on children returning to schools in the fall.

This story should be setting off alarm klaxons everywhere.

The MMWRs have been a staple in public health and epidemiology for just shy of a century. Having the Trump administration trying to 1984 them to better fit Dear Leader's statements is terrifying, doubly so now that we know Trump understood how bad COVID-19 was.

MMWRs reported the first cases of what would become the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. It reported the first cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia found in gay men in 1981, making it the first public report of AIDS in America.

The very last thing we need are political hacks altering public health reports because we've reached the point where the "reality" that conservatives live in is so out of whack with actual reality that they need to literally change history so the cognitive dissonance they're experiencing doesn't make their ears bleed.

That's terrifying.

Caputo did this under the guise of fighting the deep state. Of course, that's Trump's favorite scape goat and Fox News has accused it of any number of things, like recently the arrest of Steve Bannon. Where did that term come from? Does anyone know of a good explainer for the origin of the deep state conspiracy theory?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Caputo did this under the guise of fighting the deep state. Of course, that's Trump's favorite scape goat and Fox News has accused it of any number of things, like recently the arrest of Steve Bannon. Where did that term come from? Does anyone know of a good explainer for the origin of the deep state conspiracy theory?

Apparently the term migrated here from Turkey.

I'm sure the concept has a much, much older provenance.

Nixon didn't call it the deep state, but his Plumbers broke into the DNC's Watergate office because they were looking for evidence of a "counter government." After the Pentagon Papers leaked Nixon yelled at his Cabinet, saying "We’ve checked and found out that 96 percent of the bureaucracy are [sic] against us; they’re bastards and they’re here to screw us.…"

Sounds like "Deep State" equals "Your conscience" in a manner of speaking. That those that "oppose you" are actually trying to do what's right?

OG_slinger wrote:
Politico wrote:

In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

Par for the course for this administration, sadly... If the truth would undermine your message, change the truth.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

That's terrifying.

Caputo did this under the guise of fighting the deep state. Of course, that's Trump's favorite scape goat and Fox News has accused it of any number of things, like recently the arrest of Steve Bannon. Where did that term come from? Does anyone know of a good explainer for the origin of the deep state conspiracy theory?

A lot of fuel for the idea came from Snowden's revelations, the mealy-mouthed denials by the NSA of accusations that weren't actually made, and then the brazen continued violations of our laws and norms by those same agencies.

The underlying idea is not entirely crazy. The top secret services are literally lying to their supposed bosses, Congress, and in one case actually physically broke into Dianne Feinstein's office and removed material from her computers they didn't want her to be able to see.

I don't know if they count as the Deep State, but they have enormous power, and that have that power in secret. They are actively sabotaging attempts at oversight.

The whole thing about pedophiles and probably everything that the Qanon guy has ever said is bullsh*t, though.

I’ve gotta think that “They’re changing the CDC’s reports to make it seem like things are better than they actually are” would fall neatly into the Deep State conspiracy if it wasn’t, you know, true and documented. Stupid Watergate continues, and is apparently actually healthier because they can’t keep a secret.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson [...]

Fun fact: Caputo is an old friend of Roger Stone and was formerly employed by a Russian media group to launder Vladimir Putin's public image in the US.

ICE flew detainees to Virginia so the planes could transport agents to D.C. protests. A huge coronavirus outbreak followed.

WaPo wrote:

The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official.

After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of whom died.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency moved the detainees on “ICE Air” charter flights to avoid overcrowding at detention facilities in Arizona and Florida, a precaution they said was taken because of the pandemic.

But a Department of Homeland Security official with direct knowledge of the operation, and a former ICE official who learned about it from other personnel, said the primary reason for the June 2 transfers was to skirt rules that bar ICE employees from traveling on the charter flights unless detainees are also aboard.

The transfers took place over the objections of ICE officials in the Washington field office, according to testimony at a Farmville town council meeting in August, and at a time when immigration jails elsewhere in the country had plenty of beds available because of a dramatic decrease in border crossings and in-country arrests.

“They needed to justify the movement of SRT,” said the DHS official, referring to the special response teams. The official and the former ICE official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal decisions. They and another DHS official briefed on the operation characterized the tactical teams’ travel on ICE Air as a misuse of the charter flights.

Trump on climate change today...

"I don't think science knows, actually," Trump said at a Monday briefing with officials in McClellan Park, California, with a laugh.
He told Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California's Natural Resources Agency: "It'll start getting cooler. You just watch."

It'll disappear. Just like covid.

You forgot the part about exploding trees and how, with good forest sweeping, it is not a problem in other countries.

Well in all fairness it will start to get cooler here within a month or so. /s

One wonders if Woodward's got tapes of Trump saying similar things about Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman.

Trump glibly dismisses the concerns of California's Secretary of Natural Resources during a wildfire briefing today with the climate change version of "It'll just disappear."

So I was thinking about how old videos relate to present day, and I came to the startling conclusion that Trump reminds me more than a little bit of Leeroy Jenkins.

Get a team in place with a well-defined goal. Members of the team strategize and come up with an absolutely terrible plan of how to accomplish that goal. Suddenly one person, who has failed to actually hear anything that anyone else has said, just rushes heedlessly onward and proceeds to do his own thing, disrupting most of the terrible plans that have been laid by doing even more terrible things. Everyone else follows him, trying to improvise and salvage what they can of their plan, which somehow makes things even worse. Despite all evidence, said person claims everything is going great, and that they've got this. In very short order everything falls apart, the operation is a complete disaster, and he denies any responsibility, then pointing out that at least he did something constructive (in Leeroy's case, getting chicken) while they were wasting their time making their plan that didn't work partially because of him.

OG_slinger wrote:

Trump glibly dismisses the concerns of California's Secretary of Natural Resources during a wildfire briefing today with the climate change version of "It'll just disappear."

Now let's see if Woodward's got a tape on climate change.

Trump: "America is respected again!"

Pew Research: "Hate to break it to you, but..."

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/35A7Rn2.png)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/0zkLpro.png)

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Fake news!

I still like you

That matches my observations here in Germany. There's rarely a positive word uttered about the Trump administration.

In my experience, people here have watched the developments in the US during the past four years with a mixture of train wreck curiosity, disbelief and downright pity for the most part. Some horror as well.

Germans 'more worried about Trump than coronavirus'

Surprising results

Despite the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic, the 2020 ‘fear index’ (ie. the average level of German worries) stood at just 37 points, the lowest level since the survey began almost 30 years ago.

In 2016, on the other hand, growing concerns about the migrant crisis, political extremism and terrorism caused the index to rocket to 52 points, the highest value seen in the past decade.

This year, US President Donald Trump took the top spot for the second time since 2018. A total of 53 percent of those surveyed believed his policies make the world a more dangerous place.

The impact of Trump’s hostile foreign, trade and security policies on international relations are among the biggest concerns shared by Germans. The survey did not question respondents about other heads of state, however.

Heck, I don't even think trumpists would argue that wasn't true. They would just say that he is making the world more dangerous for the others, not his cult.