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Beast around the corner
Remember when President Donald Trump said nobody would hear about “COVID, COVID, COVID” after Election Day? He was half right.
Trump himself rarely talks about it, concerned as he is about making unsubstantiated claims that Joe Biden stole the election. For the rest of us, the coronavirus becomes even more difficult to ignore. When Trump said in October that we were “turning the corner” of the pandemic, he was once again tragically wrong.
In a pair of sobering appearances on Sunday talk shows, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the United States could see “a surge” of the coronavirus in the weeks after Thanksgiving, Newsday’s Rachelle Blidner reports. He said the rising level of infection in the United States would not “suddenly change.” In the past two weeks, COVID-19 cases increased 12%, deaths 29% and hospitalizations 38%, according to The New York Times.
Other federal officials who have led the fight against the coronavirus echoed Fauci’s comments. “It’s going to get worse in the coming weeks, but the actions we take in the next few days will determine how serious it is,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “Fox News Sunday.”
“For all Americans, this is the time to protect yourself and your family,” said Dr. Deborah Birx. Fauci said that following public health guidelines could help “mitigate these surges” to avoid lockdowns and school closures. That means wearing masks, staying away from others and avoiding large groups of people, he said. That’s advice that Trump was reluctant to endorse.
Sunday’s appearances, especially from Fauci, a frequent target of Trump’s spikes, suggested waning interest from the White House in controlling coronavirus messages.
The exception has been Trump’s rare change of subject from the voter fraud allegations to a victory lap for vaccines that will be available to the general public early next year. “I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we would have in five years,” Trump said during an interview Sunday on Fox News. He complained that some people would try to give Biden credit for the vaccines.
Biden’s own league
The president-elect plans to appoint Neera Tanden, who leads a center-left think tank, to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Cecilia Rouse, a labor economist at Princeton University, to chair the Council of Economic Advisors. The Wall Street Journal reported.
On Sunday, Biden announced an all-female White House communications team. Jen Psaki, a veteran of the Obama administration, will be the most visible to the public as a press secretary. Kate Bedingfield, a longtime aide to Biden who served as his campaign communications director and will hold the same title in his White House.
Among the positions Biden still has to fill are attorney general, secretary of defense and director of the CIA. The New York Times reports that the task is complicated, especially for jobs that require Senate confirmation, because of the need for nominees who can win some Republican support but do not elicit opposition from progressives.
Separately, the Times reports that ethical scrutiny is expected for some of Biden’s picks, including Antony Blinken, his pick for secretary of state; Michèle A. Flournoy, a prospect for the defense; Avril Haines, Biden’s selection for director of national intelligence; and Psaki, for private sector ties to a consulting firm with undisclosed corporate clients and an investment fund with an interest in government contractors.
Janison: Give ‘deep state’ a good name
The Oxford dictionary defines “deep state” as “a body of people, typically influential members of government or military agencies, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy.”
The term is still useful for a fabulist president hell-bent on making implausible excuses for his failures, writes Dan Janison of Newsday. By falsely yelling about electoral fraud, Trump is trying against reality to turn his electoral defeat into a plot within the government. For Trump, the pernicious “clique” of officials always involves public servants doing their jobs. Even Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican more loyal to his party than the president, is hit with McCarthyism slanders from the Trump camp.
Government careerists over the decades helped engulf the United States in deadly fiascos in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere, and abbreviate civil liberties at home. The danger is that Trump will have discouraged intelligent skepticism from the institutions because he screamed “wolf” for selfish reasons.
Trump: Where is the justice?
After failing to give interviews in the weeks after the election, Trump telephoned Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” though his exchange with host Maria Bartiromo was a commiseration for the mutually shared conspiracy theories of a “rigged” election, not a question mark.
Trump’s disjointed tirade, which lasted nearly an hour, was primarily a recitation of false claims of massive voter fraud that have not received traction in court with the judges of either party, including their appointees. There was something new: He suggested that the forces aligned against him include the FBI and the Department of Justice.
“This is total fraud,” Trump said, adding: “And how the FBI and the Department of Justice, I don’t know, maybe they are involved, but how people get away with these things, it’s amazing.” He continued, “You’d think if you’re in the FBI or the Justice Department, this is the most important thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I haven’t seen anything, just go ahead and move on to the next president.”
For more information on the call, see Scott Eidler’s Newsday story.
Also on Sunday, Wisconsin completed a tally that the Trump campaign paid $ 3 million to perform in two Democratic-leaning counties. The result: a net win for Biden of 87 votes.
Trump’s surreality show
Trump has relied on loyalists who tell him what he wants to hear to keep eating are delusions that his election was stolen, according to a fascinating Washington Post story based on interviews with 32 top administration officials, campaign aides and other advisers. of the president. .
Trump said, in the account of a close adviser, as “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.” Attendees who indulge him are “happy to scratch their itch,” the consultant said. “If you think you won, it’s like, ‘Shh … we won’t tell you.’
In the days after the election, Trump struggled to escape reality, according to the report. He largely ignored his campaign staff and the professional lawyers who had guided him through the Russia investigation and impeachment, as well as the army of lawyers who were ready to present legitimate legal challenges.
Instead, he empowered people like Rudy Giuliani, who told him that he would have won overwhelmingly had the election not been rigged and stolen in a diabolical plot. One fixation is a false conspiracy theory that voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and used in Georgia and other states had been programmed to count Trump’s votes as Biden’s votes. Other Trump attorneys said Giuliani seemed “upset.”
Trump has turned against Republican officials in swing states like Georgia, who defended the integrity of the election results and refused to intervene to help Trump. In the Fox interview on Sunday, Trump said of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp: “He has done absolutely nothing. I am ashamed to have supported him.”
Call it Slippy Joe
Biden slipped and suffered small fractures to his right foot on Saturday while playing with Major, one of his two German shepherds, the president-elect’s office said. The 78-year-old will likely require a walking boot for several weeks, said his physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor.
The diagnosis after a CT scan during a visit to an orthopedist on Sunday. Here is a video from NBC News of Biden walking cautiously from the orthopedist’s office.
More news on coronavirus
See a roundup of the latest regional pandemic developments from Long Island and beyond, written by Jesse Coburn and David M. Schwartz of Newsday. For a full list of Newsday’s coronavirus stories, click here.
What else is going on?
- Once Trump gives up trying To overturn the election result, his plan B is to announce a race to try and win back the White House in 2024. To that end, one option he is considering is a campaign event on January 20, the day Biden takes office. , the Daily Beast reports, citing two well-informed sources.
- The Bidens plan adopt a cat after moving into the White House to join his two German Shepherds, Major and Champ, CBS Sunday Morning reported. The last feline at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. was a black cat named India, who belonged to the George W. Bush family.
- Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano, part of a group Trump invited to the White House last week in an effort to get the legislature to undo Biden’s victory in Keystone state, had to leave the meeting early. While in the Oval Office, she learned that she had tested positive for COVID-19, The Associated Press reported.
- Trump’s fraud allegations have some of his fans in Georgia talk about boycotting the January playoffs in which Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will try to save their seats. Some on the margins of MAGA think the two senators were complicit in manipulating the results against Trump, Politico reported. If both lost, Democrats would win control of the Senate.
- Independents have become The second-largest group of registered voters in New York State, outnumbering Republicans, reports Newsday’s Michael Gormley.
- A pro-Trump North Carolina The businessman who gave $ 2.5 million to a group that vowed to expose voter fraud has filed a lawsuit to get his money back, Bloomberg News reported. Fred Eshelman said it became obvious that the group, True the Vote, would not be able to execute the plan it agreed to support to help Trump.
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