“With Winter Coming and Trump Still in Charge, Virus Experts Fear the Worst” (New York Times):
Regardless of the election’s outcome this week, President Trump will be the one steering the country through what is likely to be the darkest and potentially deadliest period of the coronavirus pandemic, and he has largely excluded the nation’s leading health experts from his inner circle.
Mr. Trump will still have control of the nation’s health apparatus and the bully pulpit that comes with the Oval Office until Jan. 20, as infections approach 100,000 a day and death rates begin to rise as hospitals are strained to their breaking points.
The article goes on to note Donald Trump’s many deficiencies when it comes to coronapanic and listening to scientists (listening to the Swedish MD/PhDs or the heretics who wrote and signed the Great Barrington Declaration does not count!).
Why is it obvious, though, that Trump needs to deal with this at all? Whether truth, justice, love, and #science win the election or not, Trump has the power to appoint Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to executive positions tomorrow, right? Since Biden and Harris say that they know how to keep Americans safe from coronavirus, why not let them start keeping us safe tomorrow? Trump and the courts, perhaps, can limit Biden and Harris to doing stuff that is within the bounds of the Constitution, but otherwise let them do whatever they want. (Example: Biden and Harris wouldn’t be able to order a state shut down or reopened because those powers are thought to belong to states (though maybe not! If the First Amendment doesn’t prevent governors from locking down a state, maybe the Constitution does not prevent a president from locking down the country?))
I’ve read that Wilson planned to resign early if he lost the 1916 election so that Hughes would be the one to take the USA into World War I (the “he kept us out of war” slogan was a lie, the USA was declaring war on Germany no matter what at that point). The arrangement was to appoint and confirm Hughes as Secretary of State, and then Wilson and the Vice President, Marshall, would resign, since according to the Presidential Succession Act then in force, the Secretary of State would be the acting president if both the presidency and vice presidency was vacant. The 25th Amendment allows Trump to appoint Biden Vice President again and then resign. In both cases the Vice President would need to co-operate to make the scheme work.
Always figured Biden would call off all the bullshit after he won. Manely, he’d ditch the mask & claim the virus wasn’t a big deal anymore. The media would similarly drop the whole story & go back to covering how the economic boom is never going to end.
I think this is a fantastic idea. He should offer it to both of them, regardless of the outcome. They will never do it, but he should offer it to them nonetheless.
The more I think about it the better it is, Philip, it’s genius: He should say to them, point-blank: “If you have better ideas for how we should be handling the Coronavirus in America, I implore you as the President to help my Administration manage our response in the coming weeks and months.”
At one point last night, when it was looking bleak for Biden, I thought to myself, let Trump and the republicans have it. With the inevitable pending economic doom they’ve set the country up for, let them own it. Stock market is a bubble, unemployment is up, interest rates can’t get any lower so that lever is useless. But, the fact is that most republicans will just blame whomever the cult leader tells them to. This is just another ticking time bomb, a poison pill from the republican administration, for democrats, just like the last Bush term was. Covid deaths will mount, there is a looming stock market crash, and all the economic damage that entails, not to mention yet another republican lead deficit expansion(in the midst of the “greatest economy in history,” no less). First week Biden is in office, there will be half a dozen clips of republican congress members, on Fox news, who are fuming mad about the deficit!
November 6, 2020 1:45 PM:
Now that it’s much clearer that President Harris is going to win, the Baker Administration has altered the “high risk” guidelines to get more kids back to in-person learning. Looks like they’re already working to solve the problem. #Science!
https://patch.com/massachusetts/medford/s/hazym/ma-changes-weekly-coronavirus-map-to-get-kids-back-in-school
The changes mean there are only 16 high-risk communities — down from 121 last week. There are 79 green, 91 yellow and 165 gray (lowest-risk) communities.
They announce the COVID-19 Task Force on Monday.
“The picture: The task force will be led by three co-chairs: former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith from Yale University.”
https://www.axios.com/biden-to-announce-covid-19-task-force-monday-23b353bd-863b-4e0f-bb64-c6da4a5758b2.html
“Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research focuses on promoting health and healthcare equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on supporting healthcare workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of healthcare quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases.”
https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/marcella_nunez-smith/
Looks like the head of Trump’s Covid task force (Pence) is going on vacation, but Trump’s appointee at GSA is blocking the transition from proceeding. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-gsa-letter-biden-transition/2020/11/08/07093acc-21e9-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html
Twitter thread on the national security risk: https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1326170736994766852?s=20
Russil: Thanks for the link. The headline is “A little-known Trump appointee is in charge of handing transition resources to Biden — and SHE isn’t budging”. The article body mentions “GSA Administrator Emily Murphy”. We are informed by the NYT and the Washington Post that Trump is hostile to women. Why did this proven woman-hater appoint so many apparently female-identifying people to top government jobs? The theory is that Donald Trump is not smart enough to have determined that someone named “Emily” might identify as a “woman”?
One benefit of the ongoing US political crisis is educational. Anne Caprara on Twitter:
Today I learned what the apparently contradictory “self-coup” means. The font of all knowledge:
Most of the Republican Party (Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, etc.) appears to be backing Trump Nation.
@Russil: Illinois is in worse fiscal shape than any other state in this country. Why should anyone listen to the Pritzker family?
@Russil: I mean, I assume that you come from Canada, which is comparatively well-managed fiscally versus Illinois. But if you were in Illinois, wouldn’t you recommend they do a better job than having $180 billion dollars of unfunded pension obligations? With no end in sight?
Why would anyone do to their own state what Democrats in Illinois have done to theirs?
If you’d like to point out someone from Prizker’s administration as a sage, you should try walking up to them some time and asking for a dime of their own money. You won’t get any, buddy.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/203-billion-and-counting-total-debt-for-state-and-local-retirement-benefits-in-illinois/