Live Blog: 6pm ET Daily COVID Briefing a.k.a. Trump mini-campaign rally
UPDATE press holding for daily COVID taskforce briefing following CARES act signing ceremony.
5pm ET will supposedly feature the daily WH COVID-19 briefing, featuring a Trump stand-up warm-up.
Trump's “jack-(w)hole of government”approach means he’ll be doing the relief act signing because he wants to pretend he’s in charge of those corporate giveaways. Trump will likely attend the daily COVID briefing to get maximum media exposure to pretend he’s in charge. It will likely start late, as usual, sometimes as late as 90 minutes after the announced start time.
There will be a live blog below to cover the usual bifurcation of fiction and fact where the latter half of the briefing will have something resembling actual data.
From the oligarch (Len) Blavatnik School of Government, giving us hope that there will be a Trump School of Business at Liberty U.
Moron finally decided to actually use the DPA:
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, critics of Donald Trump have repeatedly referenced his profound and outrageous narcissism. It was partly this pathology that led Trump to downplay the threat and resist widespread testing for weeks. An honest acknowledgement of the mounting problem and a rising number of positive tests would inconvenience his reelection prospects. For a narcissist, the most immediate personal need is the most important one. So Trump viewed the burgeoning crisis as a threat to him, not the nation, and he took the steps he usually does in so many circumstances: He denied the threat, claimed he knew better than the experts, and relied on bluster and BS. He did all that instead of adopting early measures that could have slowed the transmission of the virus.
But beyond the narcissism, two other fundamental elements of Trump’s character are likely shaping his response: his obsession with revenge and his sense of fatalism. And both are exceedingly dangerous for the American public.
Trump has long acknowledged his love affair with revenge. Before Trump ran for president, he often gave speeches sharing the supposed secrets to his success. At the top of that list was his devotion to retribution. In 2011, he told the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, that there were several lessons not taught in business school that successful people must know. And one of those lessons was this: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe that.”
[…]
Over the years, Trump has also exhibited a troubling fatalism. This has primarily been in regard to the possibility of nuclear war. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he was asked to describe his “longer-term views of the future.” Trump replied, “I think of the future, but I refuse to paint it. Anything can happen. But I often think of nuclear war.” He then explained that he thought nuclear war was inevitable: “I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen…What bullshit.” In other interviews, Trump has indicated nuclear war was likely to occur. On one occasion, he noted that because of this he preferred to “really live very much for the present.”
In a 2004 interview—again with Playboy—Trump was asked, “Do you think Trump Tower and your other buildings will bear your name a hundred years from now?” Trump’s answer was chilling: “No, I don’t think so…I don’t think any building will be here—and unless we have some very smart people ruling it, the world will not be the same place in a hundred years. The weapons are too powerful, too strong.” The odds are, Trump was saying, that the world would be destroyed.
