Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

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Trump Was Warned About the Coronavirus More Than a Dozen Times In Daily Intel Briefings
Too bad the president doesn’t like to actually pay attention to those.

Since the coronavirus outbreak exploded in the U.S., President Donald Trump has liked to portray the surging pandemic as a totally shocking problem that no one could have seen coming. “It snuck up on us,” Trump said on March 18, calling the virus “a very unforeseen thing.” It has now become very clear, of course, that the president and his administration were not in any way caught off-guard by the pandemic, receiving multiple heads-up about the looming catastrophe as the virus starting its spread from such sources as the World Health Organization, multiple federal agencies, and even Trump’s own economic adviser. (The administration also decided to ignore a literal step-by-step guide on how to deal with a pandemic from the outgoing Obama administration, along with a September report from White House economists warning about the toll a potential pandemic could take, and urging them to start preparing now.) Now, the Washington Post reports that warnings about the coronavirus even made their way directly to the Oval Office as part of the president’s daily intelligence briefing—you know, the one that he famously likes to totally ignore.


Per the Post, intelligence agencies warned Trump about the novel coronavirus in “more than a dozen classified briefings” in January and February, which traced the virus’s spread, China’s downplaying of the threat, and “raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.” The warnings came via the President’s Daily Briefing, a daily report controlled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that informs the president about significant geopolitical developments and potential security threats. The virus was mentioned in the PDB both through in-depth articles and smaller updates on the latest coronavirus news, and mentions of the coronavirus in the PDB became more frequent by mid-to-late January. Given its prominence in the written briefings, a version of which is also made available to high-ranking officials, the coronavirus “was almost certainly called to Trump’s attention orally” through the oral briefings the president prefers over having to actually read the intel documents himself, the Post reports. (The DNI Office said in a statement to the Post that “the detail of this is not true” in response to their reporting, and the White House “disputed the characterization that Trump was slow to respond to the virus threat.”)


As the president was receiving these intelligence briefings chock-full of alarms about the impending global pandemic, however, Trump was publicly downplaying the virus as an actual threat. The president claimed in late February that coronavirus cases would soon “be down to close to zero,” and predicted, “like a miracle, it will disappear.” By the time the president told Americans on March 10, “Just stay calm. It will go away,” the Post reports that warnings about the coronavirus in the PDB had “taken on the aspect of a dire drumbeat.” It wasn’t until one day later on March 11 that the president finally changed his tune and announced a European travel ban in an address from the Oval Office—after more than two months of repeated warnings from the intelligence community.



The issue with the coronavirus warnings coming via Trump’s daily intel briefing, of course, is the president’s long-reported penchant for disregarding those briefings completely. The PDB has reportedly been altered to fit Trump’s minuscule attention span and distaste for reading—eschewing written words for oral briefings and easy-to-understand graphics—and briefings have reportedly been tailored around the topics that Trump actually wants to hear about like trade and the economy, the New York Timesreported in March 2019. Trump’s intelligence briefing “is often structured to avoid upsetting him,” the Postnoted in December 2017, with issues like Russia—a topic that would “[take] the PDB off the rails,” one former senior U.S. intelligence official said—often relegated to the written briefing and left out of the oral one that the president actually pays attention to.

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Trump is blaming Obama for leaving him with “broken tests” for a virus that didn’t exist. Yes, really.

Time to retire Baby TRUMP

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With 62,800+ Dead, Trump Calls U.S. Govt. Response 'Spectacular

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Coronavirus gets a promising drug. MAGA world isn’t buying it.
On the heels of positive early signs for remdesivir, several prominent Trump boosters are downplaying the results and continuing to promote hydroxychloroquine.

Over three weeks ago, hydroxychloroquine was all the rage in MAGA world, despite flawed and scattered evidence about whether the drug could help cure coronavirus. Now there is another drug, remdesivir, with positive early scientific data.


Much of MAGA world wants little to do with it.


At first, it may seem like a head-scratching response. President Donald Trump’s base has been quick to trumpet any potential solutions to the coronavirus pandemic — especially those Trump himself promotes — regardless of the red flags from medical experts. But with remdesivir, it’s the Trump-boosting pundits who are raising the red flags, even as the president expresses optimism.


Indeed, the same segment of the right that claimed scientists and the media were deliberately downplaying hydroxychloroquine in order to hurt Trump’s standing are now the ones downplaying remdesivir. On Fox News, Laura Ingraham suggested that remdesivir, as a newer drug being produced by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, could be unsafe and expensive. Those who initially helped raise the profile of hydroxychloroquine raised doubts about the remdesivir studies.


The unexpected reaction appears to stem from the differences in how the two drugs came into the public spotlight. Hydroxychloroquine bubbled up through the MAGA grassroots — little-known investors promoted it online, got on Fox News and suddenly the president was talking about it from the White House. Remdesivir’s progress came through a government-funded trial that had the blessing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the bête noire of Trump hardliners who blame the government’s top infectious disease expert for undermining the president and causing unnecessary economic damage with his social-distancing guidelines.


Remdesivir’s connection to a pharmaceutical company also taps into suspicions on the right that corporate executives are trying to rake in huge profits from the coronavirus. Hydroxychloroquine, on the other hand, is already widely available in generic form.


These factors were likely enough to turn off people who had been using hydroxychloroquine as a political rallying cry, said David Rapp, a psychology professor at Northwestern University who studies how misinformation shapes beliefs and memory.


The hydroxychloroquine boosters, he said, “might find the alternative idea as not being pure, in the sense that it doesn't come from Trump. It's coming from other sources that they might not trust.”


The MAGA base’s suspicions about remdesivir began shortly after Fauci on Wednesday announced the results of a government-sponsored clinical trial that showed that the drug shortened recovery time for coronavirus patients, calling it a “clear-cut, positive” development in the fight against the coronavirus. Fauci also made clear that this is a first step; more research needs to be done into this and other potential treatments.


That night, Ingraham devoted a segment of her show that night arguing on behalf of hydroxychloroquine. Ingraham first suggested that remdesivir could present dangers, urging restraint until government regulators like the Food and Drug Administration could thoroughly review the treatment.


“It hasn’t been approved by the FDA,” she said. “They might do emergency authorization. Hydroxychloroquine was approved decades ago.”


The FDA — which Fauci does not run — in fact did move swiftly. On Friday it issued an emergency-use authorization to help patients get quicker access to remdesivir, the first antiviral to show promise against Covid-19 infection.


Ingraham added that remdesivir, as a new drug, could be expensive, whereas “hydroxychloroquine is obviously cheap and already readily available.” She then brought out a doctor who defended hydroxychloroquine as “safe” and expressed worries that remdesivir, originally developed to fight Ebola, could be dangerous.


The original promoters of hydroxychloroquine also chimed in with their concerns about remdesivir after Fauci’s announcement. James Todaro, a bitcoin investor who cobbled together a Google Doc pitching hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment that was widely circulated in conservative circles and caught the attention of Fox News, noted that several members on the government panel making treatment recommendations for coronavirus were affiliated with Gilead.


The controversial French doctor Didier Raoult, who was behind a disputed and scientifically flawed study about hydroxychloroquine’s benefits for coronavirus patients, was similarly dismissive of the remdesivir results.


“Two trials focused on remdesivir delivered their findings: one published in the Lancet, that concluded to an absence of clinical improvement, one another announced by Gilead then by Dr Fauci, that did not have any significative result concerning mortality,” Raoult tweeted.


Shiva Ayyudurai, a prominent proponent of the #FireFauci movement who advocates for unproven vitamin therapy to treat the coronavirus, claimed that presenting remdesivir as a “save-all, be-all cure” to coronavirus had the benefit of boosting Gilead’s stock.


“On the economic side, you have a situation where this is being moved in a fast track way and it is supporting their stock price,” he said in an interview. “On the health side, this is not about enhancing the immune health of the individual. It is a very, very short term solution.”


Officials, including Trump, have been careful to note that remdesivir is not a coronavirus cure-all. Trump on Friday called it “an important treatment for hospitalized coronavirus patients."


But the early success has come on the heels of several studies warning that hydroxychloroquine, or the related drug chloroquine, has little provable effect on treating coronavirus patients. One study in Brazil was halted after several patients began experiencing cardiac problems while on the drug, while an analysis of U.S. veterans’ hospitals suggested that patients who received hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than those who did not. And earlier this week, the FDA published a warning that doctors should not prescribe either hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to patients outside of a clinical trial.


To the remdesivir detractors, these developments were merely a sign that the elites were, once again, at work behind the scenes.


“Fauci loves insanely expensive drugs and hates cheap plentiful ones or any hint of preventative supplementation. You see how quickly he praised #remdesivir and has only scorn for #hydroxychroloquine?” tweeted commentator Bill Mitchell, who Trump has been retweeting this week.


Mitchell was initially one of the loudest voices on the right dismissing the coronavirus threat and has attacked Fauci in the past. His reasoning? Fauci is “a big pharma puppet.”


Fauci has been at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades. He receives a government salary and does not profit when a drug company makes money.


Rapp said that attacks in this vein have a clear, non-medical goal in mind.


“They're using rhetoric that allows them to not just think about which potential solutions might be useful for Covid, but also to push their political agenda,” he said, referencing the disease that develops from the coronavirus.


Another factor, he added, was that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine had entered the conversation first.


“From a psychological perspective, thinking about how memory works, the first things that people mention are the ones that people hold on to, and they stick around longest,” he said.


The best analogy, he said, could be found in the origins of the anti-vaccine movement, which continues to cite a widely-discredited medical study from the late 1990s. That study was so flawed that the journal that published it later retracted it — but it had lasting influence.


“Anti-vaxxers read something about autism being caused by vaccinations, and they won't let that go even though there've been refutations of the original claims,” he said. “That information has been floating out there and either it's become part of their argument, or it's become part of their identity, part of who they are, part of how they make claims.”


“Maybe,” he added, “hydroxy has a similar kind of effect on these particular audiences.”

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Trump Moves to Replace Watchdog Who Identified Critical Medical Shortages
The president announced the nomination of an inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, who, if confirmed, would replace an acting official whose report embarrassed Mr. Trump.

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Three months in: A timeline of how COVID-19 has unfolded in the US
Here's a look back on how the coronavirus outbreak began, and how it has unfolded in the U.S. so far.



Coronavirus updates: How COVID-19 unfolded in the U.S., a timeline

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The Lying KING!

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Some Democrats say charges against Biden merit independent investigation

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Trump will urge Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare
Attorney General Bill Barr had urged the White House to soften its attack on the law during the pandemic.


Time to Fire this guy