- White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro has published an op-ed attacking Dr. Fauci. I’m not sure we have seen anything like this in modern US history – a White House official is publicly attacking a top government scientist. Before diving into the details, I want to compare their credentials. Dr. Fauci has been the lead infectious disease expert in the US for thirty six years. Before that he was a research scientist and a director of multiple government medical science organizations. Fauci has been heavily involved with, if not directly overseen, every major outbreak in the country across four decades. He is arguably the most experienced infectious disease expert on the entire planet. Peter Navarro has an economics degree. He ran for mayor of San Diego and lost, ran for city council and lost, ran for the board of supervisors and lost, ran for congress and lost, then finally ran for city council again… and lost. He has otherwise been a professor and author, but before joining the Trump campaign, was most known as a political pundit. He has zero medical, public health, or scientific experience. I’ll dive into his op-ed in the next bullet point.
- Navarro said Fauci fought against closing the borders to China. This is a lie. Navarro attacked Fauci for saying the virus was low-risk in January was Navarro was privately warning the government about a pandemic. What he leaves out is that Navarro at the time was PUBLICLY downplaying the virus. Navarro goes after Fauci for “flip flopping” on masks when Fauci initially stated it was more important for first responders to have masks. That remains true. Navarro complains that Fauci was not on board with promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. Navarro must be unaware that the FDA itself revoked its provisional approval for using HCQ as its effectiveness has not been shown. Navarro finally blasts Fauci for downplaying a falling mortality rate. The Republican narrative on the virus has been that there are two options – death or you’re fine. That isn’t the case. A large percentage of people are having severe health issues even months after infection. It’s those issues Fauci was referring to. This entire op-ed is full of vicious lies meant to discredit Fauci so that Trump can push the narrative that everything is fine and the economy needs to be fully reopen. Of note, the entire essay is less than 300 words long.
- Ivanka Trump posted a picture of herself promoting Goya. Without getting into why Goya Foods is currently a darling of the right wing, White House employees promoting private companies violates their own ethics rules. This one has largely been ignored by the Trump administration.
- The president retweeted fellow game show host Chuck Woolery saying that the CDC and other government officials are lying about the virus to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. It goes without saying that Mr. Woolery has no scientific experience whatsoever. The president is undermining the government’s own scientists so that he can continue to insist it is safe to re-open schools in a few weeks.
- Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino (he runs all of Trump’s social media) posted a cartoon from anti-Semite Ben Garrison attacking Fauci for urging caution regarding re-opening the economy. We have multiple White House officials publicly attacking Fauci this week.
- Sebastian Gorka has been nominated to return to the Trump administration after being fired by former Chief of Staff John Kelly. Kelly removed Gorka as Gorka wasn’t able to secure a security clearance and Kelly couldn’t determine what Gorka actually DID in his White House job. Gorka’s new role will be in determining scholarship allocation for students in the national security field.
- ICE issued a new rule that international students at schools switching to online learning must leave the country or be deported. There was no non-racist reason for this rule. Harvard, MIT, and a handful of other schools sued over the change. This morning, ICE agreed to rescind the rule entirely rather than fight the lawsuit.
- The president has once again said that if we reduced testing in the country there would be fewer Covid-19 cases. In fact, he said it in two different settings today.
- Trump complained about a privately built section of border wall, saying they had done it to make him look bad. Not only was this project undertaken by a huge Trump supporter, but the government has rewarded him with a contract for building more wall. Trump is now attacking the group because the section of wall they built is on the verge of falling into the Rio Grande River. Real actual engineers would not put wall where this group built this one as they understood the most likely outcome would be the wall falling into the Rio Grande River.
- In an interview on CBS, Trump was asked about police killing black people. He responded that police kill white people too and called it a horrible question, his go-to response when he can’t actually answer a question. In the same interview, he said in areas where officials are canceling in-person schooling, those officials should be replaced for making a “terrible decision.” He went on to say that schools are being kept closed to harm him politically.
- In a separate interview, Trump defended the St. Louis couple who threatened a group of protesters with a handgun and AR-15, saying that the protesters would have attacked the couple, ransacked their house, and burned it to the ground. The peaceful protesters were marching to the mayor’s house to protest her announcing the home addresses of people who had written her regarding police funding.
- The president turned what was supposed to be a press conference about Hong Kong into a campaign speech, speaking for nearly an hour and taking only three questions at the end, one of which was the softball “Do you see yourself as an underdog?” This was a particularly abnormal event, as you are not legally allowed to use White House resources to campaign. While talking about trade with China, Trump said the country was “taking money from the treasury.” In Bob Woodward’s book, he described economic adviser Gary Cohn trying to explain to Trump that trade deficits do not cost anything, but Trump insisted a trade deficit meant money was being taken from the US government. This is absolute nonsense. The president still believes it after several years in office. In the rest of his long incoherent rant, the president said the Paris Climate Accords required the country to close 25% of businesses, a lie, that Biden supported carbon regulations that would result in banning windows, a lie, and asked why Biden didn’t fix our highways while vice-president. Congress appropriates infrastructure spending. The president still does not have a basic grasp of how the government works. He threw in the typical attacks on Hunter Biden and mail-in voting. This was an event about Hong Kong.
- CDC Director Redfield has blamed the southern spikes in Covid-19 cases on vacationing northerners rather than reopening businesses before being ready to. This is absolute garbage.
- The Trump administration is moving to bypass the CDC in reporting Covid-19 data and is considering enlisting The National Guard to handle the data. They want to militarize the statistics on how many people have the disease to make it easier to manipulate.
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