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Proof has finally emerged that President Donald Trump has actually put a mask on his face. Bizarrely, this proof came from a non-official photographer instead of from an official media or White House source. Because the one thing Trump wants to avoid at all costs is ever setting any kind of good example for anyone.
Today President Donald Trump returned to a favorite bugaboo of his, the continuation of a relentless smear job on absentee (or "mail-in") voting. This is part and parcel of his world view, which is both contradictory in the extreme as well as laughably hypocritical. Trump's basic position is that he doesn't like it when Democrats use absentee ballots, while it is just fine for Republicans (including, notably, himself) to do so. But the biggest danger for Trump isn't being ridiculed for such blatantly partisan contradictions, but rather that he might in fact motivate more people to vote against him and the Republican Party. Which would, of course, be deliciously ironic for Democrats.
For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began in the United States, things seem to be getting slightly better, at least on the national level. This is welcome news for everyone, of course, although it still may be too early to tell whether the positive trends now slowly developing will be sustained over the next month or so. But at any rate, things do seem to finally be headed in a more positive direction. So it's time for some very cautious optimism.
President Donald Trump seems unclear on a few basic scientific and medical concepts. This isn't really news, of course, since Trump seems unclear on a whole host of things each and every day. But this week's comments on coronavirus testing were more than just a little bit astonishing.
It's been quite a while since we did a "three-dot Thursday" here, but it seemed like the thing to do now that we've got a flood of news coming in that all seems to be variations on a similar theme. The media has woven together all the strands of incompetence from the Trump White House into a cohesive whole, showing how woefully inadequate President Donald Trump has been -- and continues to be -- throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Or, to put it more bluntly, the chickens are coming home to roost...
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi just led off with a rather large opening bid to start the negotiations for the next round of disaster aid in Congress. Her bill, which the House will vote for on Friday, contains $3 billion in federal spending, much of it to help state and local governments devastated by the economic crash get through the crisis. This is an opening bid, mind you, because the Senate will obviously have a say in the negotiations to follow.
New polls just out show that President Donald Trump is badly losing the battle to control the narrative over his response to the coronavirus pandemic. While Trump's public job approval rating is exactly where it has been for pretty much his entire term (43 percent approval), almost all of the state governors are doing much, much better. And the American public overwhelmingly -- by a 3-to-1 margin -- wants to see the economy reopen slower, not faster. All of this has led to Trump petulantly tweeting that he deserves all the credit, instead of the governors. This is pretty pathetic after Trump shoved all responsibility for the pandemic response onto those very same governors. But because he did so, the governors are now reaping all of the praise and thanks from the public, not Trump.
In recent days, President Donald Trump has been (as he calls it) "cheerleading" the American economy, for three basic reasons. First, to Trump everything is a P.R. problem, at absolute worst. Second, it's all he really knows how to do when it comes to the economy (or anything else, for that matter). And third (and most important to Trump), he knows full well his re-election is going to hinge on whether the voters are going to be feeling any better about the future in November. In particular, Trump has essentially bet all his chips on the third quarter of 2020.
Nothing shows that irony is dead in Trump's White House more than Donald Trump making a tour of an Arizona factory this week while refusing to wear a mask -- since the site he visited was actually a mask factory. They even presented him with his very own mask as a souvenir of the visit, which Trump (of course) failed to put on. He later tried to claim that he was indeed wearing a mask "backstage," but that nobody saw him do so. This wasn't even remotely believable, though.
Donald Trump's re-election campaign has hit upon what they consider a winning attack line against Joe Biden: "China, China, China!" Truly, that's about as sophisticated as their effort has been, to date, and the new ad they just unveiled doesn't really move that needle much at all. Their political equation rests on the fact that many Americans don't have a favorable opinion of China in general, and in specific Team Trump is trying to explain away his own massive coronavirus response failings by saying everything was China's fault, for lying to the world in January. Which adds up to (according to the Trump campaign): Joe Biden has said some polite things about China, therefore he is obviously some sort of pinko agent of the Chinese Communist Party. As I said, not exactly sophisticated campaign rhetoric or anything. But the problem with trying to paint with such a large brush is that the paint can slop back all over you.