'The CDC has guidelines for this, but I don't trust the CDC anymore'

Julia Ioffe is a correspondent for GQ Magazine and, boy, is this ever telling:

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Here’s the text for those who don’t Twitter:

Last night when I was in the ER, I asked the absolutely wonderful doctor taking care of me if, five weeks into #COVID19, I were still contagious. He said he didn't know, adding, “The CDC has guidelines for this, but I don't trust the CDC anymore.”That's where we are, folks.

Ouch.

We’ve all been plumbed into progressively horrific levels of hell, and since we instinctively crave normalcy, we may not have the same reaction we used to our daily Trumpian outrages. 

But the fact that Trump has politicized the Centers for Disease Control — the goddamn CDC, of all things — to the point that health care professionals can no longer trust it shows you how far off the rails we are.

Most recently, Politico reported that Trump officials have been monkey-wrenching the CDC’s COVID-19 reports:

The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.

In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

So, yeah. Here we are. In the dark — because we (and by “we” I mean those other assholes) elected a guy who thinks scientific truths can be bullied into submission a la Lindsey Graham. 

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t feel much like America to me.

“This guy is a natural. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry.” — Bette Midler on Aldous J. Pennyfarthing, via Twitter. Find out what made dear Bette break up. Dear Fcking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump and its boffo sequels Dear Prsident A**clown: 101 More Rude Letters to Donald Trump and Dear F*cking Moron: 101 More Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing are now available for a song! Click those links, yo!