Trump’s debate guests refused to wear masks, flouting rules

 

Trump’s debate guests refused to wear masks, flouting rules

 

By 

Aaron C. Davis, 

Shawn Boburg and 

Josh Dawsey

Oct. 2, 2020 at 6:22 p.m. CDT

A little more than two days before she reported testing positive for the coronavirus, first lady Melania Trump — as well as the president’s sons, daughters and several guests — violated safety protocols at the first presidential debate by taking off their masks after being seated in a live studio audience in Cleveland.

 

Several in the president’s entourage continued without masks after an official from the Cleveland Clinic, which co-hosted the debate, offered them masks in case they didn’t have any, according to debate moderator Chris Wallace. “They waved them away,” Wallace said on Fox News on Friday morning.

 

It was a violation of rules that both campaigns agreed to, Frank Fahrenkopf, head of the Commission on Presidential Debates, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

“The first family came in wearing masks, but they took them off. The rules said you had to wear a mask,” Fahrenkopf said. “Everyone in that hall was supposed to keep the mask on, other than the president, Biden and Chris Wallace.”

 

In a statement, the Cleveland Clinic, the health adviser to the debate commission, confirmed that some unidentified members of the audience did not follow the rules during the 90-minute debate.

 

“Individuals entering the debate hall were masked and in some cases removed their masks once seated,” the statement said. “A Cleveland Clinic physician did offer audience members masks, but some did not adhere to the requirement.”

 

The confluence of the two major party candidates, their staffs and guests — all indoors in the same room for an extended period of time — has put a spotlight on the president’s disregard for virus precautions two days before he, his wife and close aide Hope Hicks would test positive. All three attended the debate.

 

Former vice president Joe Biden and his wife underwent testing Friday morning and reported the tests were negative. The Cleveland Clinic said Friday that it believes the risk for transmission at the event was low, but the clinic has begun reaching out to all attendees to offer testing.

 

Democrats on Friday raised questions about the coronavirus safety protocols around the debate and even whether the debate should have been allowed to begin while audience members openly flouted safety protocols. Some said future debates, if they go on, will need even stricter guidelines and enforcement.

 

On Tuesday, there were essentially two sets of protocols for debate attendees — one for campaigns and their guests, and one for everyone else.

 

University officials, journalists and others in the roughly 80-member audience were required to arrive early and submit to nasal swab testing before the debate.

 

A Post reporter credentialed for the debate arrived Monday, submitted to a test and was told to return to her hotel and await results. Within four hours, she and other reporters were notified by email or text. They were then fitted with bracelets showing they were negative, which granted them access to a press building blocks away from the debate venue.

 

By contrast, campaigns were responsible for testing candidates and their guests, the Cleveland Clinic confirmed in a statement Friday.

 

“Individuals traveling with both candidates, including the candidates themselves, had been tested and tested negative by their respective campaigns,” the statement said.

 

The clinic added that it believes there was “low risk of exposure to our guests” during the debate because of safety protocols, which also included social distancing, hand sanitizing and temperature checks.

 

The president and his guests at the debate received rapid coronavirus tests on Tuesday, White House officials said. Rapid tests differ from the PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests that are considered the gold standard for diagnosis of acute coronavirus infection.

 

The White House in March began using rapid tests made by Abbott Laboratories. The tests produce results in five to 13 minutes, but in a study earlier this year they missed a third of the positive samples identified by another brand. Some more recent academic studies have said Abbott’s tests miss infections 20 to 30 percent of the time. The company says they perform far more accurately than that when used as intended.

 

Fahrenkopf said the debate commission was told of no positive tests in advance of the event.

 

According to White House officials, neither the president, nor Hicks nor other aides wore masks on the trip to Cleveland.

 

At the debate hall Tuesday, roughly 80 chairs were spaced apart with antibacterial wipes set on each, and signs were posted reminding guests to social distance, according to dispatches filed by Anita Kumar, a Politico reporter who was the designated pool reporter for the White House Correspondents’ Association and was allowed to enter the venue ahead of most guests.

The campaigns had each been allotted 15 tickets, and Kumar found most of those on Trump’s side had chairs reserved by name: first lady Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Tiffany Trump, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Phoebe Meadows and Blake Meadows.

 

Filling in a seat behind Guilfoyle was UFC fighter Colby Covington, and behind Ivanka Trump was Alice Johnson, a criminal justice reform advocate.

 

By the time Melania Trump entered, minutes before the debate began, all of the Trump guests had taken off their masks.

 

The Cleveland Clinic health safety official, wearing a white lab coat, soon approached the Trump group, according to Wallace.

 

The official “offered them masks in case they didn’t have them, and they were waved away,” Wallace, a Fox News anchor, said Friday morning in an interview on the network. “And people in the hall noticed.”

 

“That actually violated the rules of the Cleveland Clinic,” Wallace said.

 

Wallace’s account echoed that of NBC reporter Marianna Sotomayor, who tweeted: “I witnessed a Cleveland Clinic doctor remind Trump’s guests to wear a mask, even offering them surgical ones on the off chance they didn’t have one. None of them put on a mask. The doctor looked frustrated as she stepped away, prompting a staffer to say, ‘That’s all you can do.’ ”

 

In Cleveland, wearing a mask in nonresidential indoor spaces is required under an ordinance that has been in place since July. The event was held inside a pavilion on the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic.

 

The Cleveland Clinic is advising the Commission on Presidential Debates about health safety at all of this year’s presidential debates. “Debate precautions will be aligned with county, state and CDC guidelines for health, safety and physical distancing,” it says on its website.

 

Even before the news that Trump contracted the coronavirus, the Biden campaign had been pressing the Commission on Presidential Debates to change the format of the vice-presidential exchange and require the candidates to stand about 12 feet apart — as Biden and Trump did — rather than be seated about seven feet apart, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

 

Biden’s team believes the news about Trump will prompt the commission to agree, said the person, who is not authorized to publicly discuss internal campaign deliberations:

 

“The pressure is on the commission to err on the side of safety right now.”

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) was in the debate hall on Tuesday night, and on Friday morning went to get tested for the coronavirus. “I started my morning off with a cup of coffee, Maria Bartiromo, and then a Q-Tip down my nose,” he said. He expressed anger at the Trump family for not wearing masks during the debate, as they were instructed to do. “The rules don’t apply to them,” he said.

 

Anne Gearan, Annie Linskey and Paulina Villegas contributed to this report.

 

IT IS WHAT IT IS

 

Milbank - Let’s wish Trump good health — and a healthy realization that his actions have consequences

 

Let’s wish Trump good health — and a healthy realization that his actions have consequences

 

Opinion by 

Dana Milbank

Columnist

Oct. 2, 2020 at 12:24 p.m. CDT

Even as he awaited his coronavirus test results Thursday night, President Trump was looking for ways to blame others.

 

“It’s very hard when you’re with soldiers, when you are with airmen, when you’re with the Marines, and the police officers, I’m with them so much,” he said. “And when they come over to you, it’s hard to say, ‘Stay back, stay back.’ You know, it’s a tough kind of a situation, it’s a terrible thing.”

 

Of course, it likely wouldn’t have been a problem if he and they were wearing masks and respecting distancing. Many of the cops, and the military, had to be there, to escort him as he kept up heavy travel during the pandemic. But sure, blame the cops and the troops.

 

It was a classic example of a president unable to accept that his actions have consequences.

 

This is no time for schadenfreude or remarks about karma. I hope the president’s case is mild, and I wish him a quick recovery. I’m not interested in speculating about whether the illness will help him politically by generating a sympathy effect or hurt him by returning the focus to the pandemic.

 

But there is hope of a silver lining: that Trump’s experience could lead him, or at least his supporters, to take the virus more seriously. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson became more aggressive fighting the virus, and urged Britons to lose weight, after his touch-and-go struggle with covid-19. We could save tens or hundreds of thousands of American lives if Trump and his supporters reconsidered their aversion to masks and social distancing.

 

It has been eight months since Trump began to pooh-pooh the virus. We have seen more than 200,000 covid-19 deaths in the United States since he said it was a “flu” that would “go away in April.” At Tuesday’s debate (it’s possible Trump contracted the virus from aide Hope Hicks that evening or at a mass rally the next night), Trump defended his rallies and his cavalier thinking about masks, suggesting public health officials agree with him and mocking Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s assiduous mask-wearing.

“Are you not worried about the disease issue, sir?” moderator Chris Wallace asked.

“So far we have had no problem whatsoever,” Trump said of his rallies. “We’ve had no negative effect.” The death of Herman Cain six weeks after he attended Trump’s Tulsa rally, and some evidence of post-rally infections, apparently didn’t count.

 

For much of his life, Trump has lived as if there were “no negative effect” — no consequences — for his behavior.

 

He skipped Vietnam while “suckers” and “losers” died there, then joked that avoiding STDs was his “personal Vietnam.”

 

He had numerous business failures but was often bailed out, by his father or by creditors.

 

He engaged in adulterous behavior but paid for women’s silence.

 

He abused his power by threatening a vulnerable ally’s military aid if the ally didn’t help with his reelection, but Senate Republicans’ acquittal spared him.

 

He’s rescued friends from legal consequences while teeing up probes of his opponents, and his Justice Department has provided justification.

 

He has produced falsehood after fabrication, and the White House has tried to use the federal government to make whatever he said seem true.

 

He has avoided taxes and congressional oversight and directed public funds to his private business interests with impunity.

 

Two decades ago, another Republican president, George W. Bush, told us: “My hope is to change the culture from one that has said, ‘If it feels good, do it; if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to one in which every single American understands that he or she are responsible for the decisions that you make.”

 

Now we have a president who personifies the feel-good culture and blames his problems on just about everybody else — Democrats, governors, foreigners, immigrants, minorities, scientists, the media, you name it.

 

But the virus isn’t subject to bluster and blame, only scientific truths. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said we could have the pandemic under control within four to eight weeks “if we can get everyone to wear masks right now.”

 

Instead, Trump has modeled recklessness and relied on luck — and hydroxychloroquine, of course.

 

The Post reports that Trump was in close contact with dozens of people Thursday and didn’t wear a mask. He had traveled with Hicks, who had been seen without a mask, to Pennsylvania for a rally Sunday, to Cleveland for the debate Tuesday and to a campaign rally Wednesday in Minnesota, where Hicks began showing symptoms.

 

After Trump’s positive coronavirus test, White House spokesman Judd Deere said: “The president takes the health and safety of himself and everyone who works in support of him and the American people very seriously.”

 

That’s nice. But if there were any good to come out of this unfortunate situation, it would be that Trump and his supporters decided to take the health of all Americans seriously.

 

 

What a Positive Test Won’t Change About Trump and the Pandemic

 

What a Positive Test Won’t Change About Trump and the Pandemic

 

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

October 2, 2020

During the Presidential debate on Tuesday night, two days before Donald Trump and the First Lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for the coronavirus, Chris Wallace, the beleaguered moderator, asked the candidates how the pandemic had changed the way that each campaigned. He noted that Trump, unlike Joe Biden, his opponent, was holding big outdoor rallies—why? “Because people want to hear what I have to say,” Trump said, as if there were no other consideration. He claimed that as many as forty thousand people were waiting for him at airports—a wild exaggeration, though several thousand have regularly gathered for the mostly maskless hangar rallies—and that the only reason that Biden wasn’t holding rallies, too, was that “nobody will show up.”

“Are you not worried about the disease issues, sir?” Wallace asked.

“So far, we have had no problem whatsoever,” Trump said. “We’ve had no negative, no negative effect.” Hope Hicks, one of his senior campaign advisers and a former aide, whose symptoms and positive test triggered the President’s test, had travelled with him to a number of rallies. Perhaps if Trump had known about her diagnosis, and his own exposure, when Wallace asked the question his answer would have been different. But what does it say about the sense that only his own health, and not that of the people in the crowds, would register with him as a “negative”? That people travelling with him as he hopped, in the past week, from Florida to Minnesota—who would have followed him to a planned rally this weekend in Wisconsin, where cases are rising at alarming rates—might test positive is not an unexpected fluke. (Indeed, a number of Secret Service agents already have; Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, who often attends such events, announced on Friday that she had tested positive two days earlier.) There is a pandemic in this country, one that the President has failed to control. There are more than forty thousand new cases of covid-19 each day, and the average number of deaths per day is still above seven hundred.

Trump’s negligence about the coronavirus is of a piece with who he is. By the end of Tuesday night’s debate, it was easy to wonder just how many forms of violence Trump might be willing to inflict on the country, from heedlessly telling quasi-militarized white supremacists to “stand back and stand by” to urging supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.” When Wallace asked if he was telling people to take to the streets, he didn’t deny it. He was ready to expose Americans to another source of physical harm: the unmanaged pandemic. “You got to open these states up. It’s not fair!” Trump said—meaning, presumably, that not doing so was inconsiderate of his electoral prospects and his vanity. The reality that, with children returning to school and cold weather on its way, the next weeks will require vigilance and delicate coördination to head off a truly devastating winter, seems lost on him. Instead, he complained that Democratic governors were deliberately waiting until the week after the election to reopen, for no reason other than that “they think they’re hurting us.”

On Friday morning, Biden tweeted, “Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery. We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.” That message, with its kindness, is a reminder of how the pandemic has made the contrast between Trump and Biden particularly clear. It has thrown into relief some of the most basic things about each of them as people and as politicians—how much each of them cares, their honesty, and their willingness to work, among other things. Both decency and competency are required. When Trump, in explaining during the debate why he had backed shutdowns earlier in the year but would not do so again, said, “We’ve found that elderly people with heart problems and diabetes and different problems are very, very vulnerable” and that “younger people aren’t,” he made it sound not as if the vulnerable and elderly had to be protected but as if they could be written off. Remarkably, he did not seem to place himself in either category, even though he is seventy-four and overweight. That might serve as a broader reminder to Americans about our curious national narcissism, which can dull not only empathy but self-preservation. Of course, Trump’s statement about the basic medical facts was wrong, too; younger people can die or experience debilitating cases of covid-19. (And, as a groundbreaking, large-scale study from India confirmed this week, even young children can play a significant role in spreading the virus; earlier studies had reached similar conclusions.)

Biden, during the debate, looked directly at the camera and asked people watching, “How many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of covid? How many of you are in a situation where you lost your mom or dad, and you couldn’t even speak to them, you had a nurse holding the phone up so you could, in fact, say goodbye?” Early on, in the opening exchange about the Supreme Court, he connected the pandemic to the Trump Administration’s backing of a case, soon to be heard by a Court that will probably include Amy Coney Barrett, that was brought to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. “The deal is that this is going to wipe out preëxisting conditions,” Biden said. And that matters to a new cohort of Americans. “Over seven million people have contracted covid,” he said, and added, “What does it mean for them going forward, if you strike down the Affordable Care Act?” It’s a question that should resonate in both red and blue states—and even among some staffers in the White House.

When Wallace asked each man to speak for two minutes about why he would do a better job than his opponent in managing the pandemic, Biden said something that even many of the President’s supporters must suspect is the case: “The President has no plan.” Indeed, until now, Trump’s only pandemic plan, such as it is, has been to talk his way around the crisis long enough to get reëlected—furiously concocting excuses, making up numbers, pushing conspiracy theories involving China or Democratic governors, overpromising on a vaccine, disparaging anyone who disagrees, and, when all else fails, boasting that two hundred thousand dead is still less than the two million dead that some models had suggested could be the death toll in the United States, if no measures at all had been taken. He also mocked masks.

It’s not news that Trump has told corrosive lies about covid-19; according to a new Cornell study, Trump is the single greatest source of false information about the pandemic. The tally includes both conspiracy theories and quackery, such as Trump’s suggestion that the White House coronavirus task force explore the internal consumption by people of household cleaners, such as bleach. (“That was said sarcastically,” Trump claimed in the debate; a review of the video indicates otherwise.) Clearly, this is not what White House doctors will recommend: Trump will no doubt have the best care in the world. The best scenario for the country would be that a healthy Trump is voted out of office by an equally healthy margin—to have the Trump era end because Americans reject Trumpism, and not because the virus gets more of a say than they do. It may be too optimistic to suppose that, meanwhile, his coronavirus experience could make Trump an even marginally more prudent President. But it could prove to be an education, if not a revelation, both for him and for his supporters.

NEW YORKER - ERIC LACH - What Trump’s Positive Coronavirus Test Means for the Presidential Campaign

 

What Trump’s Positive Coronavirus Test Means for the Presidential Campaign

 

By Eric Lach

October 2, 2020

In 1981, after Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, gave an infamous press conference at the White House in which, to a roomful of clamoring reporters and a television audience of millions, he shakily, and erroneously, declared himself the acting President. “I am in control here,” Haig said. In the early hours of Friday morning, after Donald Trump tweeted out that he and his wife had tested positive for the coronavirus, there was no singular Haig-like figure, but, in keeping with our atomized age, Twitter exploded, people suddenly channelling their own inner Haig, trying to meet a dangerous, destabilizing national situation with whatever personal reaction they believed the moment demanded. “Holy shit” was a popular choice. The reality is that for as much as the country’s circumstances before Thursday night were unprecedented—a pandemic raging, hundreds of thousands dead, tens of millions out of work, family and friends isolated from one another, protests and political violence in the streets, businesses big and small bleeding cash, wildfires and hurricanes battering towns and cities, and the integrity of the upcoming election under attack by the President—there is even less precedent for them now.

On Friday morning, reporters were beginning to fill in some details. According to the Times, Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s closest advisers, began experiencing symptoms of covid-19 while at a Trump campaign rally in Minnesota, on Wednesday. (A day earlier, Hicks had accompanied Trump to his debate with Joe Biden, in Ohio.) After Trump gave a shorter-than-usual speech, Hicks quarantined in a cabin separate from the rest of the passengers on the flight home on Air Force One. “She exited from the back of the plane,” the Times noted, “as opposed to the front.”

On Thursday, she tested positive, but the White House made no public announcement about Hicks’s situation. Instead, Trump flew to New Jersey to attend a fund-raiser and give a speech, in which he said, “The end of the pandemic is in sight.” He had a full day of public events scheduled for Friday, too, including a rally in Florida. But, on Thursday evening, Bloomberg News reported on Hicks’s diagnosis; by the end of the night, Trump was acknowledging, in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, that he was waiting on test results. Shortly after 1 a.m., Trump tweeted that both he and the First Lady, Melania Trump, had tested positive. It’s not clear how or where or when the Trumps were infected, or how widespread the virus may be in the White House. “He’ll be O.K., the doctor’s optimistic,” a White House official told NPR. “He’ll get treatment. We’re in a pretty good place to treat this.” The official added, perhaps remembering Haig, “From a continuity standpoint—listen, we’ll be fine, we’ll figure out a way to do it.” According to NPR, the White House is planning for Trump to be under quarantine for as long as fourteen days. For now, the President’s in-person Friday events have been cancelled, although he is still scheduled to host a phone call on “covid-19 support to vulnerable seniors.”

If the White House sticks to that timeline, it means that, at least for half the time remaining before Election Day, Trump will have to suspend the campaign rallies that he had been holding regularly. For the past five years, these rallies have been where Trump demonstrates his mythic connection with his base. Lately, they were also often held over the protests of local officials in various states, who viewed them as potential public-health risks. Have we seen the last of them? Trump’s quarantine may also mean the cancellation or postponement of the second debate between Trump and Biden, which is scheduled for October 15th.

The larger question is what this development means for Trump’s hopes for reëlection, or at least his ability to control and influence what chances he has left, as he is trailing Biden in both the polls and in fund-raising. In recent weeks, as the election models all started to suggest the overwhelming probability of a Biden victory, one common caution has been that unforeseen events are just that, unforeseen, and that elections tend to turn near their end. Just this week, we’ve had what feels like a decade’s worth of “October surprises”: the Times’ bombshell exposé on Trump’s taxes; Trump’s belligerent debate performance, in which he declined to denounce white supremacy; audio tapes of Melania Trump bemoaning as personal headaches the facts of separated migrant families and White House Christmas decorations; the former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s detention by law enforcement after an altercation with his wife; and revelations about the Trump campaign aide Kimberly Guilfoyle’s alleged harassment of an assistant during her time at Fox News. Trump’s positive test is an enormous unforeseen event, but to the extent that his reëlection campaign has had a strategy these past few months, it has been to insist that the coronavirus crisis was ending; that he had done a great job in combating it; and that, in any case, it was not (or had not been) a big deal. His refusal to acknowledge the scale of the pain and suffering in the country had left him unable to muster patriotic praise for the victims, or for the doctors, nurses, and other essential workers who have risked their lives since March to help others. It was a campaign of negation—and now he’s tested positive.

Much could change in the next few days. Trump could experience a relatively mild course of infection—easily carrying out his duties in quarantine—or his case may quickly take a turn for the worse. “We will get through this TOGETHER!” Trump tweeted on Friday morning. This is the kind of perfunctory sentiment you might have expected from a President in March. Trump could only think to deploy it now, when he himself was a victim. Which “this” was he referring to?

There are questions for Biden, too. The former Vice-President spent ninety minutes on Tuesday night standing a few feet from Trump as he ranted and raved during the debate. Was Trump contagious then? Biden’s team has already asked a reporter who travelled on Air Force One on Wednesday not to travel with the Democratic campaign on a planned swing through Michigan on Friday, and reports indicate that Biden plans to take a coronavirus test. Meanwhile, election-law professors—the kinds of people who have lately been discussing the possibilities of a drawn-out or contested election next month—are bringing up the murky rules that would govern a scenario in which either of the major parties was forced to replace a Presidential candidate at the last minute. Voting has already begun in a number of states, and millions of Americans have already cast their ballots. The election is already here. The President has contracted the life-threatening virus he has spent the better part of a year downplaying, lying about, and stoking division over. The questions will likely outnumber the answers for some time to come.

RUMP'S PRE-SPIN - Trump’s pre-spin seems to blame military, police interactions for coronavirus diagnosis

 

Trump’s pre-spin seems to blame military, police interactions for coronavirus diagnosis

 

By 

Aaron Blake

Oct. 2, 2020 at 8:37 a.m. CDT

A couple of weeks ago, President Trump was fending off a brutal, anonymously sourced story in the Atlantic about comments he had allegedly made disparaging military veterans and the nation’s war dead. The comments sounded like things Trump had said publicly before, particularly about the late senator John McCain, yet he denied he would ever be so insensitive.

 

But in the hours after we learned that counselor to the president Hope Hicks had tested positive for the novel coronavirus and before we learned Trump himself had it, he offered some strange comments that seemed to lay the groundwork for how he could explain his impending diagnosis: It might have come from the military or law enforcement.

 

“You know, it’s very hard, when you’re with soldiers, when you’re with airmen, when you’re with Marines, and I’m with — and the police officers,” Trump said. “I’m with them so much. And when they come over here, it’s very hard to say, stay back, stay back. It’s a tough kind of a situation.”

 

Trump then turned to his own test and to Hicks. “So, I just went for a test, and we’ll see what happens. I mean, who knows? But you know her very well. She’s fantastic. And she’s done a great job.”

 

And then he again returned to the alleged potential spreaders.

 

“But it’s very, very hard when you are with people from the military or … law enforcement, and they come over to you, and they want to hug you, and they want to kiss you, because we really have done a good job for them,” Trump said. “And you get close, and things happen.”

 

The confluence of circumstances Thursday night led to plenty of speculation. The White House has access to rapid-response tests, so how could Trump not know at that point whether he had tested positive? Hicks reportedly fell ill Wednesday and was quarantined on Air Force One. But by Thursday night, Trump still didn’t have a final word? (Trump’s White House has rarely been forthcoming with his health information.)

It was also an odd way to explain Hicks’s positive test. However much military members and law enforcement appreciate what the Trump White House has done for them, are they really going up to Trump’s low-profile senior counselor, who rarely speaks publicly, to hug her and try to kiss her?

 

It’s clear Trump was setting the stage for how he would explain either Hicks’s positive test or his own. His and the White House’s cavalier posture toward mask-wearing and continuing to hold large public rallies and events was suddenly looking more foolhardy than ever, and Trump sought to pre-blame it on something else — something that, conveniently, reflected a deep affection for Donald Trump.

 

His explanation also tracks with his often questionable stories about just how much affection supporters show him in private. Just this week, he cited a construction worker who he said was crying in gratitude when they met. He has told very similar stories about a coal miner, a steelworker, a farmer and a man who looked like a football player, as CNN’s Daniel Dale noted Wednesday, often with plenty of “sirs” interspersed. There is no doubt supporters will be in awe and perhaps become emotional when meeting a president, but Trump’s history of fabulism looms over his descriptions.

 

Whether there’s some truth to it, here was the president effectively blaming military members and law enforcement for not being more careful when meeting their country’s leaders; there’s no other way to read it. It also didn’t allow for the idea that there should have been precautions to prevent these alleged scenes, which the Secret Service is more than capable of providing.

 

But Trump has never been interested in all of that, and he clearly set the tone for the coronavirus being allowed to spread — whether it’s in how the White House or his campaign has handled precautions such as masks and social distancing, or in how he has downplayed the severity of the virus, which has led his supporters to eschew such basic precautions, much like Trump has.

 

This is unquestionably a sad moment in U.S. history; any president coming down with a serious illness can be destabilizing, not just for the country but for the world. But Trump’s effort to pre-spin this one is a thoroughly odd one, and it’s one that glosses over so much of what probably contributed to an outcome that health officials and his critics have long warned about — and has now happened.

 

NY TIMES BROOKS - At His Core, Trump Is an Immoralist

 

At His Core, Trump Is an Immoralist

Will we let this man and his felons drag us to moral chaos?

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

·         Oct. 1, 2020

So far, the 21st century has been a century of menace and insecurity. The threats have come in rapid succession: terrorism, financial collapse, plague, climate change, the quaking of our democracy. For good reasons, a tone of heightened alarm has become the default setting across the media.

People on the right and the left see threats coming from different places. In his new book, “The Securitarian Personality,” the political scientist John R. Hibbing argues that people on the right tend to react to threats coming from outside America, while people on the left see threats coming from the powerful financial and political spheres inside America.

Hibbing’s book, based on reporting, focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most enthusiastic Trump supporters. The most ardent ones, he notes, are not economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting.

They feel that core America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders: immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color. They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred homeland from alien menace.

People who feel themselves under threat have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend the homeland might be a good thing. But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.

In this presidential campaign, Trump’s nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while his immoral nature has taken center stage. Compared to 2016, it’s more pure Trump and less Pat Buchanan.

The key events of the campaign have been moral events: Trump reportedly calling military veterans and the war dead suckers and losers; Trump downplaying a deadly pandemic to the American people; Trump failing to pay fair taxes; Trump sidling up to white supremacists, resorting to racist and QAnon dog whistles.

The debate was an important moment. You and I can give sermons about how cruel, dishonest behavior shreds the norms of a decent society. But moral degradation is an invisible process. It happens subtly over time.

During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible. Debate watchers were confronted with a core truth: What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a second term.

On Tuesday we got see that immorality isn’t just a vague thing people talk about in Sunday school. It is a Howitzer that blows through walls and leaves rubble. It is an attempt to serve yourself by breaking things and making other people suffer.

Biden should continue to talk about his economic recovery and pandemic control plans and all that stuff, but this election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?

As a temperament and philosophy, conservatism has one central premise: Humans are fallen beings, and the crust of civilization is thin. We are able to live sweetly because over centuries we have constructed a moral and social order, which is fragile and requires constant tending.

With his conduct, Trump assaults this core conservative instinct. He is separating the nationalists from some temperamental conservatives. The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot.

You can see this separation in the polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016 battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16 percent of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28 percent now support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.

In 2016, Trump won noncollege-educated white women in Wisconsin by 16 percentage points. Now he is losing them by 9 points. In 2016 Trump tied Clinton among college educated whites in Pennsylvania. Now they are going for Biden, 61 percent to 38 percent. In 2016 in Ohio, Trump carried union households by 13 points. Now he is losing them by 8 points.

Some Republicans see Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.

My intuition tells me, as does the polling data, that more people are paying attention, have recognized what’s before them and will make the right decision. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward made the essential point: “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”