Trump's Lies since COVID-19

[_Icarus]

The forum was down during most of this so there could be a list of literally dozens of lies, but just today he denied saying something he clearly said and then went off on his usual "I'm a victim of the fake news" rant: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/29/politics ... index.html

What drove me nuts was when a journalist asked him where he got his numbers on more people dying from an economic shutdown than the virus itself, and she asked if Dr. Fauci or any of the experts supported that claim and instead of answering that question he went off on a rant about how its common sense to know that suicides will skyrocket during a recession.

He also thinks so little of the American people that he said millions will also turn to drug abuse if we were to go just a few months with social distancing. Again, nothing to back this up and the question ultimately went unanswered.

And just when you thought his pressers couldn't get any crazier, Trump floats a conspiracy theory about "something's going on worse than hoarding" on the number of respirator masks being requested.

[_Icarus]

Dec. 31: China confirms existence of a new virus.

Jan 21: The first U.S. case is announced in Washington state

Jan 22: When asked is there are worries about a pandemic? Trump responded: "No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine."

Jan 24: Trump tweets, "It will all work out well."

Jan 30: The WHO declares a global health emergency.

Jan 30: Trump blocks most travel from China.

Jan 30: "We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. ... we think it’s going to have a very good ending for it."

Feb. 2: Trump tells Fox News host Sean Hannity, "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."

Feb 14: "We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It’s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good shape."

Feb 24: The virus "is very much under control" and the stock market "starting to look very good to me!"

Feb 25: “We’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb 26: The United States is "really prepared."

Feb 29: "We've taken the most aggressive actions to confront the coronavirus. They are the most aggressive taken by any country."

March 4: Trump falsely claims Obama for "doing nothing" about the Swine Flu epidemic.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... d-nothing/

March 6: "I would rather (Cruise ship passengers stay aboard) because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship."

March 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test."

March 7: "Very soon, we're going to come up [with a vaccine]."

March 9: Trump begins tweeting attacks on the media. "The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation"

March 9: ""Last year 37,000 Americans died from the common flu. Nothing is shut down, life and the economy go on... Think about that."

March 11: On the same day the WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic, Trump uses a prime-time Oval Office address to announce a ban on travel for non-Americans from most of Europe. He misstates a freeze on cargo and falsely said the health insurance industry has "agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments." In reality, getting tested would be free, but treatment would not be covered.

March 17: "I've always known this is a real, this is a pandemic. I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."

March 18: “We have tremendous numbers of ventilators, but there’s never been an instance like this where no matter what you have, it’s not enough. It sounds like a lot, but this is a very unforeseen thing. Nobody ever thought of these numbers.”

March 19: “nobody in their wildest dreams would have ever thought that we’d need tens of thousands of ventilators.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/don ... the-truth/

March 24: Having tweeted on the economic shutdown that "we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself," Trump says in a Fox News town hall he would "love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go by Easter."

March 24: Trump responds to a request from Cuomo for ventilators, reading from papers in his hand: "(He) rejected buying recommended 16,000 ventilators in 2015 for the pandemic, for a pandemic, established death panels and lotteries instead. So, he had a chance to buy, in 2015, 16,000 ventilators at a very low price, and he turned it down." False. A state study said that many might be needed in a crisis, but it also said there were immediate pressing health needs, and there was no money to buy that many ventilators.

March 24: “People get tremendous anxiety and depression and you have suicide over things like this, when you have a terrible economy, you have death, definitely would be in far greater numbers than we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”

March 25: "The United States has done far more 'testing' than any other nation, by far!"

March 27: Trump falsely claims NY governor wasn't aware of his own stockpile: “We delivered thousands, as you know, to New York, and they didn’t know they got them, and we also had thousands put in a warehouse and that was also for New York.”

March 27: "Thousand of Federal Government (delivered) Ventilators found in New York storage. N.Y. must distribute NOW!"

March 28: “We might not have to do it but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine — short-term, two weeks for New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut."

March 29: Trump said quarantining New York "will not be necessary", after the state's governor said doing so would be preposterous and illegal.

[_Icarus]

Heather Cox Richardson
22 hrs ·
March 28, 2020 (Saturday)

People are asking how it is that Trump’s approval ratings are higher than ever: an average of all the polls has him at 47%, a three-point increase. Two things: it is completely normal for a president to get an approval bump during a national crisis, and Trump’s is actually smaller than the bumps other presidents have gotten in crises. Leaving aside the extraordinary 39-point bump President George W. Bush got from 9-11 because it skews everything, President George H. W. Bush’s approval rating jumped 16 points at the start of the Gulf War, and that range is pretty typical. Trump’s bump still leaves him within the realm of his usual support levels, and, in any case it is unlikely to last.

The second point is more interesting. Why are some ordinary people supporting Trump more and more fervently, when most observers think his presidency has been, at best, troubled?

Over the course of today, a story began to emerge that illustrates the answer to that question. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas,* began to argue that the reason the novel coronavirus is spreading rapidly in Florida is not because he refused to close the beaches, which are still crowded, (but not as crowded as they were during spring break, when masses of young revelers flocked to the state), or because he has refused to issue a statewide lockdown, as other governors have done.

Instead, DeSantis is blaming Florida’s troubles on New Yorkers flying to Florida and “seeding” the virus there. “How is it fair to them to just be air dropping in people from the hot zones, bringing infections with them and seeding the communities with new infections that they’re trying to stamp out?” DeSantis said. DeSantis has deployed the National Guard to seven major Florida airports to identify New Yorkers who fly in, and has ordered travelers from New York City to “self-declare” and to agree to a 14-day quarantine when they arrive. Now he is apparently setting up a checkpoint on I-95 to screen for New Yorkers.

Later in the day, Trump also began to talk of a quarantine over the entire New York area, tweeting, “I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE of developing ‘hot spots’, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A decision will be made, one way or another, shortly.” He later said: “We might not have to do it, but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine, short-term, two weeks on New York. Probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut. This would be an enforceable quarantine. I’d rather not do it, but maybe we need it.”

This was news to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who pointed out the move would paralyze the nation’s financial sector, was likely illegal, and that it “would be a federal declaration of war on states.” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe tweeted that it is legal only to quarantine “any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease,” not states, and that the president has no power to do so. Shortly afterward, Trump backed off and said that “a quarantine will not be necessary.”

This attempt to blame New Yorkers for the crisis when, in fact, it is unclear that there is any great exodus to Florida from New York as few people want to fly, contrasts strikingly with the approach of Maine’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills, whose state is indeed facing an influx of people. She has closed all nonessential businesses and restaurants, and simply asked all of the summer people jumping the gun on the season to self-quarantine.

The attempt to blame New Yorkers for the rapid spread of the coronavirus in Florida illustrates the political rhetoric that has kept Trump’s ordinary supporters so fiercely loyal to him.

Key to Trump’s popularity has been a rhetorical strategy identified in 1951 by political philosopher Eric Hoffer in a book called The True Believer. Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.

Trump has mastered this technique. He has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings in office by blaming these groups for undermining him. But the coronavirus crisis is making it hard to do. Immigration stories are running against Trump as his own acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said that immigration authorities will stop most of their enforcement efforts during the crisis. The media is pushing back hard against his lies and Americans seem to be on the media’s side as the administration’s response to the coronavirus has been scattershot.

But New Yorkers represent Democrats and the urban life so many of Trump’s supporters distrust. Identifying them as the cause of Florida's troubles both deflects attention from DeSantis and Trump's missteps and reinforces loyalty to the president.

According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned like they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.

According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only get stronger as his behavior gets more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.

It was learning about Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower that introduced me to Hoffer. Eisenhower, who had battled both fascism and communism, passed out copies of The True Believer to friends, including to a former veteran, Robert J. Biggs, who begged Eisenhower to stop “hedging” and tell people firmly what to think. Eisenhower warned Biggs that while such authoritarian leadership was important for the military, it was fatal to a democracy in which “debate is the breath of life. This,” Eisenhower wrote, “is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”

Lincoln also made an appearance in Hoffer’s book. Not all who rose to lead a mass movement were dangerous, Hoffer said. “[R]are leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, even FDR, Churchill, and Nehru… do not hesitate to harness man’s hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler [or] a Stalin…" they did not demonize their opponents. "They know," Hoffer said, "that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.”

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*I’m totally not making this up.

[_Icarus]

This is gold: https://threadreaderapp.com/user/atrupar

[_Icarus]

March 30: Trump Again Accuses Health Care Workers Of Squandering Masks

March 30: Trump Tells Governors He Hasn’t Heard About Lack Of Testing Kits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq4rYc ... w-X13UcfRc

Trump promised Illinois 300,000 N95 masks. What Illinois received were surgical masks, which aren't remotely as effective. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/politics ... H1FDHfNbJc