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Sunday, May 31, 2020

Trump is imploding in real time. The damage may be unrecoverable



If you didn't know better, you could easily have concluded that Donald Trump spent the week campaigning for his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.

For most Americans, it was a heart-rending week marked by two tragedies that seemed brutal, senseless, and maddening all at the same time: the cresting of 100,000 American deaths due to coronavirus and the very public murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers.

Both of these events were avoidable. One seemed previously unimaginable while the other tragically repeats itself on an endless loop with no end in sight. Honest to god, how many more times do we have to watch white police officers kill people of color in broad daylight before this systemic violence stops? But both events also cried out for leadership and compassion at the highest levels of government.

Instead what America got was Trump's self-obsessed parade of the grotesque. He spewed unfounded conspiracy theories about a former congressional staffer to Joe Scarborough, prompting the woman's widower to plead with Twitter take down the tweets. "I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” Timothy Klausutis wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a letter that was excerpted Tuesday in a New York Times op-ed by Kara Swisher.

Trump then went to war with Twitter, declaring himself the victim of unfair censorship after the company flagged a couple of his tweets about mail-in voting as untrue—a first for Twitter. Trump blew a gasket, issuing an executive order designed to hobble the liability protections for tech companies. And in a clear admission of the authoritarian leader he would become in a second term, Trump said he would shut Twitter down "if it were legal." It’s not, yet. But given a second term, Trump would clearly use the force of law discriminately to satisfy himself, just like dictators do. 
 Trump also pressed forward with his war on wearing masks in public—a position so ludicrously out of step with public opinion that even Senate Republicans tried to tiptoe away from him.

You may have noticed that none Trump's three main initiatives this week had anything to do with the nation's grim coronavirus milestone or the senseless killing of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or countless other people of color. That's because Trump hid from the 100,000 pandemic deaths on his watch while promoting state-sponsored violence against the Minneapolis protesters. One instance was a vacuum of leadership, the other was a clear call to arms against noncompliant people of color and anyone supporting them. As Florida Rep. Val Demings told MSNBC Friday, "America is on fire and the president of the United States is walking around with gasoline."

Both instances teed up Joe Biden to do what anyone capable of real leadership would do: console the country, grieve with it, and light the way to a better future for everyone. In particular, Black Americans and other people of color who have suffered systemic racism since the nation's founding needed to hear a voice of authority grapple with bringing justice to centuries of persecution.

"The pain is too immense for one community to bear alone," Biden said in an online address Friday afternoon, calling on "every American" to take up the cause of justice for people of color. "With our complacence, our silence, we are complicit in perpetuating these cycles of violence."

Biden also stepped up where Trump wouldn't on the pandemic, promising heartbroken Americans the day would come "when the memory of your loved one will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes." As my Daily Kos colleague Jen Hayden wrote, "If you've forgotten what presidential looks like, watch Joe Biden's heartfelt tribute to 100,000 lives lost."

America has forgotten what presidential looks like because Trump has bombarded the country with nothing but minute-by-minute reminders of how utterly unfit he is for office and just how dreadfully low humanity can sink. Biden offered the polar opposite this week, starting with the simple act of showing up to do the job when times got tough.

The obvious contrast between the two men could be one reason that Trump's approvals are taking a beating, that independents and older voters are souring him, and that he's falling behind in nearly every battleground state. Just take a look.

As of Wednesday, according to Civiqs data, Trump is now at a 17-point deficit in approvals with indies after being at only a 5-point deficit around mid-March.

Political strategists often say that voters' attitudes about the economy are baked in by the end of the second quarter. It's possible that Trump is baking in attitudes about his unfitness for office right now that will be nearly impossible for him to shake in the lead up to the election. Let's just say, it going to take one hell of a third quarter to undo the damage Trump is doing to himself and the Republican party right now. 


Saturday, May 30, 2020

As Republicans try to save themselves, Trump embarks on an anti-mask crusade to nowhere



TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump, alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), Republican of Kentucky, and US Senator John Barrasso, (C), Republican of Kentucky, speaks to the media following the weekly Republican Senate policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, May 19, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump, alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), Republican of Kentucky, and Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming (C), speaks following the weekly Republican Senate policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on May 19.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas shared a masked photo of himself on Instagram Monday. “We all have to do our part. Maintain social distancing but if you can’t, do this,” wrote Cornyn, who's up for reelection in November in a seat that would normally be a gimme. “Easy peasy. Go for it.”

When Donald Trump has lost go-along-to-get-along John Cornyn, that's a problem. Even GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, also seeking reelection, weighed in on the side of masking up. "There's no stigma attached to wearing a mask.

There's no stigma attached to staying six feet apart," McConnell told Kentuckians Thursday at a local event, adding, "you have an obligation to others."

What we're witnessing here is Senate Republicans, who occupy relatively safe seats in any other electoral environment, putting a little extra piece of insulation between themselves and Donald Trump. And it might not be as notable as it is but for two factors.

First, a huge part of the reason Trump behaves as ludicrously as he does today is precisely because Senate Republicans barely made so much as a peep while Trump ran roughshod over the Constitution and tried to steal the upcoming election with foreign assistance. So even these tiny ripples of dissent from McConnell and Cornyn suggest that three years of the Senate Republican “let Trump be Trump” modus operandi might be coming home to roost.

Second, what the two senators along with some other GOP politicians (such as red-state governors) are signaling about wearing masks is just grossly out of step with Trump, who is on an all-out anti-mask tear. After absolutely refusing to wear a mask in any public appearances for weeks because he reportedly thinks it makes him look bad, Trump turned his fire on presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden this week for daring to do what Trump couldn't while memorializing veterans on Monday.

Pictures of the mask-clad Biden in aviators drew derision from conservative commentator and Trump toadie Brit Hume, who mockingly tweeted, "This might help explain why Trump doesn’t like to wear a mask in public."

Trump, deathly afraid that someone might say the same of him if he actually wore a mask, piled on, tweeting Wednesday, "He looks better!"

By Thursday, the Trump campaign was debuting new Facebook ads featuring a maskless Trump against the backdrop of an American flag next to Biden wearing a mask with "Sleepy Joe" lettering and a Chinese flag behind him. Apparently, trying to stop the spread of a global pandemic is a slippery slope to communism.

In case it isn't perfectly clear, Trump has jumped off the deep end on this issue, not to mention the fact that he started escalating this fight right as the nation was on the precipice of reaching 100,000 American deaths due to coronavirus on his watch.

Additionally, one of the reasons some GOP senators are inching away from Trump's crusade is that the polling is indisputably against his position. As the Washington Post noted, "three recent public polls have found that between 64 and 72 percent of the public says Trump should wear a mask," including between 38% and 48% of Republicans.

On top of that, multiple polls this month have shown that anywhere between 72% and 84% of Americans say they have worn masks in public either regularly or all of the time, including at least 60%-plus of Republicans/Trump supporters in each poll.

Trump's mask posture is just incredibly stupid on so many levels. It's only playing to a fringe group of Trump’s loyalists within the Republican party and it's setting him up to take the blame if a second coronavirus wave spikes after he pushed the country to reopen. Even Senate Republicans like Cornyn and McConnell don't want any piece of that, and one has to wonder if more fissures will emerge.

So keep an eye on this tiny schism between Trump and the Senate GOP caucus.

Senate Republicans will never publicly upbraid Trump. But this is the first public divergence between the two camps since Trump's approvals started dipping (particularly among the key voting blocs of independents and older voters) and Senate Republicans have truly begun to wonder whether Trump will sink them all in November.
Even Lady Liberty is covering her face these days.

Trump campaign isn't about winning, but setting the stage for whatever happens after he loses

Look at this ridiculous bullshit:

We as liberals and Democrats are supposed to be upset at that. It’s their entire strategy: to troll liberals. But really, it’s just another sign that this isn’t a campaign built on a winning strategy and that’s nothing but good for us.

The polling has been clear: Joe Biden is winning. I know that makes liberals cringe, dredging up horror memories from November 2016. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the current reality, and that current reality is that in the polls of polls, this is the state of the game:
  • WI: +2.7 Biden
  • FL: +3.3 Biden
  • AZ: +4.0 Biden
  • MI: +5.5 Biden
  • PA: +6.5 Biden
  • NC: +1.0 Trump
And that doesn’t include Georgia, which is also in play.

Let’s just take those states in which presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden leads by a big four points, and we have this:

ScreenShot2020-05-28at11.37.01AM.png
Biden already has an Electoral College victory, and he’s leading in the other four gray tossup states! And as I showed several days ago, Trump is losing ground with independents on a critical issue: jobs.

So we’re at 100,000 dead, 40 million have lost their jobs just in the last two months, people are losing faith in Trump’s ability to create jobs, and this is how his campaign responds?

ScreenShot2020-05-28at11.42.10AM.png
Whose mind is going to be changed by this? Who is going to say: “Aunt Susan died and I have no job, but hey, Joe Biden wore a mask and he’s ‘sleepy’ and something about China and now I’m going to vote Trump!”

Literally no one.

The reality is that when it comes to presidential politics, it is very hard to move numbers. Just look at how stable Trump’s favorabilities have been ever since he was inaugurated:

Those numbers come from almost a quarter million responses. So think minuscule margin of error and in that time frame, we’re talking about a spread of maybe four net points between his most favorable and least favorable days. And yes, he is currently matching the most unpopular ratings of his presidency at 42-55 favorable-unfavorable, but numbers just don’t move that much!

So you have polarized public opinion. You have a mass death event currently underway. You have an economic cataclysm currently underway. You have the most noncontroversial nominee the Democrats could’ve nominated. (Yeah, he’s boring and problematic to base liberal activists, but the fact that he’s “blah” means there is little for the broader nonpolitically engaged public to dislike about him. He’s just a boring white guy.)

And Trump’s campaign response? It isn’t to highlight Trump’s work or make substantive policy distinctions or in any way try to persuade Biden supporters or fence-sitters that Trump is the smarter choice.

No, they double down on the divisive “us vs them” strategy that gets their deplorable base all whipped up into a frothy frenzy, but does nothing to actually help Trump win the election.

So what’s going on here? Do they really think this is a path to victory? It’s not as if Trump has a strategic bone in his body. He’s 100% lizard brain, always reacting to either whatever is triggering him at the moment, or whatever gets the biggest cheers from his worst supporters. So they hate masks? Okay! Let’s make fun of Biden for wearing a mask, even though 72% of Americans think it’s smart and important to wear a mask. That’s not a campaign decision based on winning votes, that’s a campaign decision meant to get cheers from his existing supporters.

Which, again, would make some sense if he was winning. But he’s not. He’s losing.

So no, this can’t be a tactic predicated on winning votes. Rather, it’s predicated on selling his band of deplorables on the idea that any Democratic victory couldn’t possibly be legitimate, that it would be stolen, that it would be manipulated, that it would be rigged.

Thus, vote-by-mail is now a plot to rig the ballot box. Social media is now plotting to censor conservative voices. The media is the enemy of the people, biasing people against Trump. People dying aren’t a national tragedy, but a plot to make Trump look bad. China created the coronavirus to defeat Trump. Democrats want to give more generous unemployment benefits to those affected by the coronavirus so that they don’t go back to work, since high unemployment rates, again, make Trump look bad.

Everything is a plot against Trump. Everything. And if enough people believe that the world conspired against their weak Dear Leader to rob him of his reelection, then ... something. This is where we can start engaging in our own paranoid fears.

Except that maybe they’re not so paranoid as Trump follows the despot’s playbook to a “T”. There’s a nonzero chance that he refuses to leave office if and when he’s defeated. And if 30% of his paranoid and armed base stands by him, we can imagine the sorts of horrors that might ensue.

So if nothing else, we can dispense with the idea that Trump is trying to persuade anyone to vote for him. He’s already decided that anyone who opposes him is illegitimate. He says it daily. Like when the Department of Veterans Affairs found that hydroxychloroquine was not an effective COVID-19 treatment, he called the study a “Trump enemy statement.” Or when he retweeted video yesterday saying that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

Nah, Trump doesn’t have any interest in or desire to persuade anyone to vote for him. His only tactic is to delegitimize the opposition in the eyes of his supporters, thus having an able and willing army to back him when and if he is defeated at the ballot box.

Friday, May 29, 2020

Trump's Plan: Break Internet to Suppress Vote

Donald Trump's Twitter page. (photo: Getty)
Donald Trump's Twitter page. (photo: Getty)



By Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast

29 May 20

Trump will never leave Twitter. He loves it too much. Now he’s trying to browbeat it into helping him win re-election.

he internet, and Twitter in particular, is central to President Donald Trump’s power. His tweets move everything from Pentagon policy on Syria and transgender service to how Republican lawmakers vote on surveillance law.

Their frequent falsity is beside the point. It’s the influence that matters.

Now Trump is trying to push a lasting structural change upon the internet, one that internet-freedom advocates fear will entrench a disincentive for any social media company to block disinformation on their platform. And it comes after Twitter, an open sewer for disinformation, took a very meager step to stop Trump from suppressing the vote in November.

In signing an executive order on Thursday, Trump called for “new regulations” with respect to the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act permitting internet companies to remove or restrict content they host “that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” The provision, Section 230, establishes that social-media and other internet content hosts are platforms, not publishers, and therefore not legally liable for what users say, do, or experience online.

Trump’s proposal declared that “a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield” of Section 230 if it’s found to “silence viewpoints that they dislike.” As a means for determining that, it called for “all executive departments and agencies” to review how they were applying the provision and for a rule-making petition to be filed to the Federal Communications Commission within 60 days. Trump’s order also instructed loyalist Attorney General Bill Barr to propose legislation “useful to promote the policy objectives of this order” and advised heads of various government agencies to review the advertising dollars that they were spending on social media platforms.

Collectively, the order suggests social media companies may face penalties—real or potential—for attempting to police misinformation on their platforms. Either, according to longtime observers, is likely to be enough to prompt those companies to revert to their resting state: opening the sluice-gate of misinformation.

For the president’s critics, it all amounts to a jarring sequence: To stay in power, Trump has taken a step toward erasing the already blurred line between what is and isn’t true online.

“Donald Trump is so committed to preventing Americans from voting that he spent weeks lying about vote by mail, and now he is trying to twist Section 230 and the First Amendment to force Twitter to spread these lies,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the provision’s co-author.

For years, President Trump has viewed his relationship with social-media giants—particularly Twitter, his favorite online medium—as both adversarial and mutually beneficial. Much in the same way that the president has routinely assailed the credibility and perceived disloyalty of Fox News, but won’t actually ditch the network, he takes a similar attitude toward a major online platform like Twitter, according to two people close to him. He often will complain. But he is extremely unlikely to take the ultimate step and personally abandon his own Twitter account.

Trump sees Twitter as one of his best communications assets. Though he insisted on Thursday that there was “nothing” more he “rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account,” he claimed he simply could not do so because it was his medium for going around the press corps. He credits the platform, in part, for how he was able to dominate the national conversation during his successful 2016 presidential run. He “does not want to give up something he thinks helps him win,” one of those sources said. That commitment hasn’t stopped him from threatening the company to score political points or because he feels personally aggrieved.

Indeed, Thursday’s executive order has been conceptually in the works for many months. According to two individuals familiar with the process, the Trump White House convened multiple meetings in the summer of 2019, inviting officials from the Justice Department, the FCC, the FTC, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to the White House to discuss crafting an executive order that similarly would have targeted social media giants’ legal liability.

Those efforts were largely managed by White House domestic-policy aide James Sherk, a former labor economics analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who had the unenviable task of organizing a protracted drafting process demanded by an irked Trump. The intra-administration sessions caused predictable headaches, with officials unsure of how to reconcile the legal technicalities of the directive with Trump’s demands and fits.

“We didn’t know if this was busy-work to satisfy one of the president’s mood swings, or if we were actually getting something done,” said one former senior Trump administration official.

In one of the early meetings that summer, the White House proposed language to agency officials that read as if the president was, for instance, ordering the FCC to redefine the liability shield of Section 230, the sources recounted. White House officials had to be reminded by agency envoys that Trump wasn’t allowed to do that (though he can ask the NTIA to petition the FCC to conduct an independent review on the matter), and that such language would be quickly, and likely successfully, challenged. Still, many of the agency officials played along, for fear of upsetting the White House.

“Nobody in the room wanted to kill this,” one of the sources familiar with the discussions said. “[But] very few, if any, wanted anything to do with it.”

Thursday’s action is a culmination of that pent up frustration along with years’ worth of right-wing objections that social media “shadowbans” right-wing content.

That objection was dismissed by a federal appeals court on Wednesday, which found that conservatives suing Twitter and Facebook could not demonstrate that account deactivation for terms-of-service violations amounted to political suppression.

But the specific issue prompting Trump to act was not any generic grievance. It was his false assertion that voting by mail—an expansion of which is under consideration because of the novel coronavirus that has killed 100,000 Americans in three months—will lead to systematic voter fraud.

Twitter told CNN that the president’s tweets promoted “potentially misleading information about voting processes.” And, indeed, there’s no evidence of meaningful voter-fraud related to mail-in balloting. In fact, five states, including Republican-run Utah, already vote entirely by mail.

“To be absolutely clear, absentee and mail voting in America is secure and election officials are confident in the security measures they have in place. It is critical this year that election officials ensure every American citizen has the option to vote absentee if they want to, and have safe polling place options,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “This is critical for public health and critical for the health of our democracy. The president’s actions are making it harder for public officials to take the steps that they need to ensure a safe, secure, and healthy election this November.”

Twitter’s solution, however, was not to take down the erroneous tweets or ban Trump’s account for a terms-of-service violation. Rather, it appended a hypertext alert below the tweet urging users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots.”

To Trump, this was “Big Tech... doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 election,” as he (naturally) tweeted Wednesday night. And he insisted that rectifying it by executive order would be tantamount to “a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!

It’s a familiar distortion for those who dealt with the aftermath of Russia’s disinformation campaign on social media during the 2016 election. One of them, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) pushed for internet companies to provide greater transparency around political ads on their platforms. Warner’s measure sought to bolster the integrity of hosted content while sidestepping suggestions that the companies ought to determine what on their platforms is and isn’t true. He expressed alarm at the “baseless” claim Trump made about censorship and its implications for voter suppression.

“While many of us have raised concerns for several years now about the opaque and inconsistent content moderation practices of large platforms and the ways that Section 230 has been unjustly invoked to protect platforms that facilitate fraud, widespread consumer harms, and civil rights violations, it’s strange to see the president mimic some of those legitimate concerns in support of a baseless claim that he and fellow conservatives are being disadvantaged or censored online,” Warner told The Daily Beast in advance of the executive order’s release.

“The president has openly boasted about his prominence on social media, even while routinely violating the policies of each platform,” Warner continued. “This latest effort to cow platforms into allowing Trump, dark money groups, and right-wing militias to exploit their tools to sow disinformation, engage in targeted harassment, and suppress voter participation is a sad distraction from the legitimate efforts to establish common sense regulations for dominant social media platforms.”

The irony is that Twitter’s tentative step toward confronting deceit on its platform is a departure from social-media firms’ economic logic, in which what matters is the mass collection and commodification of user data, not hosting truthful discourse.

That logic explains why Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg criticized Twitter for playing the “arbiter of truth.” That position was also captured in a recently leaked memo from Facebook executive Andy Bosworth that compared ensuring veracity on Facebook to the temptations of JRR Tolkein’s One Ring, a dark power that corrupts the ringbearer.

"That 'dark power' notion is a rationalization meant to deflect attention from the economic imperatives central to the tech firms’ business model," said Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and a professor emerita at Harvard Business School.

“Their algorithms are tuned to maximize behavioral data intake into their supply chains for computation into behavioral predictions. They are compelled to extract data at scale and scope… that means volumes of as many kinds of data as possible. In this economic logic, there is no room for judging data content. The corporations are radically indifferent to whether data are true or false—it’s all the same to their revenue flows.” Zuboff explained.

Section 230 was written before that economic logic took hold, when the model of the internet was a bulletin board rather than the “bloodstream” of contemporary life, Zuboff continued. And however content-agnostic social media companies portray their algorithms to be, those algorithms do push content on to users, as NBC’s Ben Collins has documented with the spread on Facebook of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

“Mr. Trump wants to confront the power of these companies and how they operate, but instead of fighting for truth, he’s fighting for the right to lie, to inject poison into the body politic,” Zuboff said. “The tech companies and the government are in a larger existential battle right now, like two Death Stars battling each other. Both want to operate outside the rule of law and democratic norms.”

Thursday, May 28, 2020

CONTRAST IN STYLES: Trump's non-reaction, Biden's reaction to 100,000 death milestone


Donald Trump has been throwing around coronavirus statistics for months. In late February, it was "15 people" infected that Trump mused would soon be "down to close to zero." By late March, the White House task force warned that 100,000 to 240,000 Americans might die in the pandemic. Another month later in late April, Trump played up the idea that "if you lose 65,000 people," it might not be that bad compared to worst-case scenarios. By May, Trump just started shooting off casualty stats like a Gatling gun, often contradicting himself within a 24-hour span. "We'll be at 100,000, a hundred and ten," he said the morning of May 8, only to revise downward later that day to "95,000 people, ultimately."

But on the day most of America finally mourned the 100,000 milestone, Trump was nowhere to be found. Nothing from his infamous rapid-fire Twitter feed. No events planned, no moment of silence, nothing to honor the dead.

Around 5:30 PM ET Wednesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden sent out a missive to America, promising the heartbroken that "the day will come when the memory of your loved one will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes."

A little over an hour later, Trump tweeted out segments from Lou Dobbs Tonight in which Dobbs declared Trump "arguably the greatest president in our history."

By Wednesday evening, the digital version of most of America's mainstream newspapers shared in the nation's heartbreak.

But not Trump. As of around 9 PM ET on Wednesday, the nation had heard nothing from its commander in chief. And by 9 AM ET on Thursday, Trump had retweeted an article comparing the wearing of masks to slavery. Still, in terms of acknowledging the massive loss of life, nothing other than his prebuttal to the milestone. 

“For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number,” Trump tweeted out Tuesday. "I acted very quickly, and made the right decisions." 

Shorter Trump: It could have been worse.

And the reality is, it is indeed going to get worse.  



Joe Biden addresses the nation on the 100,000 COVID death

On Wednesday, the United States officially passed the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths from the COVID-19 virus. While Donald Trump marked the occasion by attacking members of the media and floating conspiracy theories on Twitter, Joe Biden released a somber, heartfelt message to the families of the 100,000 Americans who fell victim to this deadly virus, as well as a message to Americans as a whole.

Although he never mentions his own family, it is clear he taps his own journey with grief after the deaths of his first wife, Neila, his daughter, Naomi, and his son, Beau.

Please take a moment to watch (or read via the transcript below) Biden’s message. Let’s all take a moment to hold those 100,000 families in our hearts and minds today.

My fellow Americans, there are moments in our history that are so grim, so heart-rending that they’re forever fixed in each of our hearts as shared grief. Today is one of those moments. 100,000 lives have now been lost to this virus here in the United States alone. Each one leaving behind a family that will never again be whole.
I think I know what you’re feeling. You feel like you’re being sucked in a black hole in the middle of your chest. It’s suffocating. Your heart is broken, there is nothing but a feeling of emptiness right now.
For most of you, you were unable to be there when you lost your beloved family member or best friend. For most of you, you were unable to be there when they died alone.
With the pain, the anger and the frustration you’ll wonder whether or not you’ll be able to get anywhere from here. It’s made all the worse by knowing that this is a fateful milestone that should’ve never reached—that could have been avoided. 
According to a study done by Columbia University, if the administration had acted just one week earlier to implement social-distancing and do what it had to do just one week sooner, as many as 36,000 of these deaths might have been averted.
To all of you who are hurting so badly, I’m so sorry for your loss. I know there is nothing I or anyone else can say or do to dull the sharpness of the pain you feel right now, but I can promise you from experience, the day will come when the memory of your loved one will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes.
My prayer for all of you is that that day will come sooner rather than later. But I promise you it will come and when it does you know you can make it.
God bless each and every one of you and the blessed memory of the one you lost. This nation grieves with you. Take some solace from the fact we all grieve with you.
Somber leadership. Wasn’t that a refreshing change?

Why wear a mask in public?


When I wear a mask in public:
 
🔵 I want you to know that I am educated enough to know that I could be asymptomatic and still give you the virus.
 
🔵 No, I don’t “live in fear” of the virus; I just want to be part of the solution, not the problem.
 
🔵 I don’t feel like the “government is controlling me;” I feel like I’m being a contributing adult to society and I want to teach others the same.
 
🔵 The world doesn’t revolve around me. It’s not all about me and my comfort.

🔵 If we all could live with other people's consideration in mind, this whole world would be a much better place.

🔵 Wearing a mask doesn’t make me weak, scared, stupid, or even “controlled.” It makes me considerate.

🔵 When you think about how you look, how uncomfortable it is, or what others think of you, just imagine someone close to you - a child, a father, a mother, grandparent, aunt, or uncle - choking on a respirator , alone without you or any family member allowed at bedside.

🔵 Ask yourself if you could have sucked it up a little for them.