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The White House has methodically concealed information about Donald Trump’s health and the scope of the coronavirus outbreak he caused, but we do finally have an answer to that classic hypothetical, “What happens if the president is in a state of steroid-induced mania and no one can take his phone away because he’s a biohazard?”
- White House physician/struggling actor Sean Conley’s official statement on Trump’s condition began thusly: “The president this morning says, ‘I feel great!’” It gets dumber from there. After claiming that Trump remains completely symptom-free, Conley continued, “Of note today, the President’s labs demonstrated detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies from labs drawn Monday, October 5th.” Regeneron, the maker of the experimental antibody cocktail Trump received on Friday, pointed out that those detected antibodies are probably from—wait for it—the experimental antibody cocktail Trump received on Friday, not an immune system response. Everything Is Insane, part I.
- Conley made no mention of what treatment(s) Trump is still receiving, or what the chest X-rays he received at Walter Reed revealed. A White House spokesperson once again refused to say when Trump last tested negative: “We're not asking to go back through a bunch of records and look backwards.” Trump’s test records (and also, apparently his doctor’s personal memories) are famously buried in a locked vault five miles beneath the Rose Garden, so this makes sense. The real answer is almost certainly “unacceptably long ago”: Trump has reportedly not been getting tested every day, and the White House has not stated that he tested negative on the day of last week’s debate. Everything Is Insane, part II.
- Trump has reportedly broken free of the White House residence to shed coronavirus around the Oval Office, continuing his streak of well-reasoned leadership decisions. The leader of the free world spent much of Tuesday night and Wednesday in a worse-than-usual Twitter meltdown, at one point firing off nearly 40 tweets and retweets in the span of two hours. Trump sent out conflicting messages on coronavirus stimulus, called for the arrests of his political enemies, announced he would/already had declassified all documents related to the Russia probe, and did whatever this is. Everything Is Insane, part XCVIII.
- And finally, Everything Is Insane, part ????@^*x.
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The White House outbreak and Donald Trump’s subsequent bragging about punching the virus into submission have done nothing to help him politically, and we may not yet know the full fallout.
- On October 2, the same day that Trump announced his diagnosis, the White House quietly notified a veterans group that its members may have been exposed to coronavirus at a September 27 event honoring Gold Star families. That event was held the day after the Amy Coney Barrett-nomination superspreading event, and took place indoors with few attendees wearing masks or social distancing. Expose More Families of Losers and Suckers Fallen Service Members to a Deadly Virus: Another solid closing argument from the incumbent.
- As the White House is subsumed in a cloud of infectious chaos, the vice presidential candidates are about to participate in the most terrifying debate in history. After much pushback, the Pence team finally agreed to place plexiglass dividers on stage—which turn out to have been sized for a coronavirus dollhouse. Why are they so little? Why isn’t this debate outside? Why does anyone trust that Mike Pence has tested negative? Why did CDC Director Robert Redfield write him a doctor’s note? Why is any of this happening? We have no answers, but we will be watching through our fingers and yelling about it on the Groupthread starting at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT. Join us here.
It’s insane enough that the White House’s consistent disregard for safety precautions led to a coronavirus outbreak that’s infected lawmakers, reporters, support staff, and the city of Washington, DC. It’s both completely predictable and an unprecedented scandal that the White House would then try to cover it up. We have 27 days to bring this fever nightmare to an end.
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The final episode of Missing America dropped on Tuesday. In the season finale, Ben talks to Jake Sullivan (Biden’s top foreign policy advisor) about how the U.S. can begin the work of restoring our standing and addressing the political plagues discussed in this podcast series. With the election fast approaching, this series is a great window into just how high the stakes are—not only for U.S. foreign policy, but for the makeup of international relations as a whole. All episodes are out now, so catch up or binge all of Missing America wherever you get your podcasts →
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The Justice Department has freed up prosecutors to take public investigative steps that could interfere with elections, which you do not love to see. A DOJ policy that has been in place since the 1980s has barred prosecutors from publicly announcing voting-related investigations or making arrests close to elections, to avoid publicity that could change election outcomes. An internal Friday email gave prosecutors “an exception” to the rule, which specifically cites investigations involving postal workers and military employees (two groups Trump has singled out in his fraud conspiracy theories), but is written broadly enough to interpret freely. The loophole retroactively permits what the Justice Department already did when it announced an investigation into nine “discarded” ballots in Pennsylvania, and the fact that it’s now official policy should make everyone productively queasy → votesaveamerica.com/homestretch.
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- A federal appeals court has ruled against President Trump’s latest attempt to hide his tax returns from Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, so it’s on to the Supreme Court again to waste some more time.
- More than 44,000 meatpacking workers have tested positive for coronavirus, and more than 200 have died. Several families of victims from at least one plant were denied compensation, and have been forced to take those claims to court. A good time to recall that Trump signed an executive order aimed at forcing meatpacking employees back to work in dangerous conditions.
- Boston has suspended the reopening of its public schools after the city’s coronavirus positivity rate spiked past four percent. Wisconsin has activated a field hospital after coronavirus hospitalizations more than doubled in the last month. But remember, don’t let this thing dominate your life!
- Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) appears to have transmitted coronavirus to Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-CA), in today’s edition of Mike Lee Should Not Have Hugged All Those People.
- The conservative Texas Supreme Court has blocked the clerk of Harris County from sending ballot applications to all 2.4 million registered voters.
- House Democrats have unveiled their Big Tech antitrust report, with the conclusion that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have become oil-baron-esque monopolies, and antitrust laws require an overhaul.
- Please enjoy Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) in the Arizona Senate debate, trying to steamroll right over the question of whether she’s proud of her support for Trump.
- Ruby Tuesday has filed for bankruptcy and permanently closed 185 restaurants. It made it longer than TGI Friday’s, though, which has to mean something in the restaurants-named-after-days industry.
- Florida officials said that misconfigured computer servers were to blame for the registration website crashing, not a cyberattack. It’s a sign of a great year when “the huge mess was actually a total accident” comes as a refreshing relief.
- The Trump administration demanded that art submissions for the annual duck stamp design contest feature hunting paraphernalia, presumably after Don Jr. took an unspecified stimulant and demanded to be in charge of something.
- The White House raccoons sense instability; opportunity; their moment to strike.
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Top Justice Department officials were a driving force behind President Trump’s child separation policy, according to a draft report by the department’s internal watchdog. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told uncomfortable prosecutors at the border that “We need to take away children,” contrary to his later claims that “we never really intended” to separate children. Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the same prosecutors that it didn’t matter how young the children were—adults should be prosecuted even if it meant taking away children barely older than infants. Officials both understood and encouraged the separation of children as an aspect of the “zero tolerance” immigration policy, hoping it would deter future migrants from crossing the border. Indefensible, irreparable, and straight up evil. We’ve never had a clearer choice.
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A new Columbia University study found that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s plans could cut poverty in half.
A federal judge has rejected the Trump campaign’s effort to block provisions of New Jersey’s vote-by-mail plan.
A federal appeals court has rejected another Trump administration attempt to stop the Census count early. Seems like there's a (sorry) conCensus (really just so sorry).
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on the Crispr tool, marking the first time the award has gone to two women.
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