Don The Con Has Blood On His Hands

The numbers tell the basic story. Donald John Trump — the name of the impeached president that should deservedly appear on indictments once his criminal regime is ended — learned from U.S. intelligence channels the threat posed by China's coronavirus on Jan. 3, with a more thorough briefing on Jan. 22.

He thwarted testing and other health safety preparations. That way, he could fool the public and help bolster the stock market and jobs reports that are vital to his re-election campaign.

As of March 1, meanwhile, the United States reported just 89 cases of coronavirus because of the difficulties of testing and other lack of federal action to warn the public.

One month later, on April 1, some 211,000 cases were reported in the United States.

By the end of this week, the New York Times was reporting that figure as more than 300,000 U.S. cases, causing more than 8,000 deaths. More than 3,500 of those deaths have occurred in New York State amidst a crisis in the availability of vital medical and protective equipment, the Times reported.

By Monday, April 6, it was nearly 11,000, with experts saying failure to test suggested even higher totals that will never be known!

A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.

Update: The New York Times reported on April 6 more specifically, that Trump's trade adviser Petter Navarro advised him in January that the U.S. death toll could be a half-million Americans: Risk of Worst-Case Scenario ‘Should Not Be Overlooked,’ Memo Warned by Maggie Haberman.

The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.

Mr. Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.

But he went on to emphasize that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” given the information coming from China.

In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.

The withheld medical equipment, part of a pattern whereby Trump suggested that federal stockpiles would be allocated on the basis which state governors were "appreciative" and otherwise nice to him.

That raises well-founded suspicions that Trump and his team led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner are once again using federal resources to benefit his re-election campaign, financial cronies and foreign dictator allies.

In Trump to Governors: I’d Like You to Do Us a Favor, Though, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, right, drew an apt parallel to the Trump crime gang's use of $400 million in congressionally allocated military aid approved for Ukraine's defense last summer.

The purpose of witholding the life-saving military aid in violation of law and government policy?

To try to extort the announcement of a seeming bogus "investigation" by Ukraine of front-running Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, the latter accused of obtaining directors' fees from a board of a Ukrainian energy company, according to many courageous impeachment witnesses. They testified before the House despite threats against them that deterred more craven administration witnesses who refused to cooperate.

“There are a lot of parallels between the president’s behavior now and during the whole Ukraine scandal,” she quoted Representative Adam Schiff, left, the California Democrat who led Trump’s impeachment prosecution, as telling her. “Certainly the most apparent is his demand that the governors basically pay fealty to him, praise him, or they’ll suffer consequences.”

Trump's extortion attempt against Ukraine formed the basis of the House impeachment of Trump in January before his acquittal by Senate Republican loyalists. Some of those voting for acquittal, most notably Maine Republican Susan Collins, claimed in essence that they could acquit Trump without hearing evidence because he had learned his "lesson" via House proceedings and would not again violate his Constitutional oath and the public interest.

That's obviously wrong, as indicated by, among other things, the U.S. death toll and Trump's unceasing efforts to leverage his presidential powers during the pandemic for personal and partisan gain.

The Boston Globe summed up the Trump team's shocking behavior in an April 1 editorial entitled, A president unfit for a pandemic. The subtitles were "Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. The president has blood on his hands."

In the early stages of what should have been preparations by Trump, his administration and Congress to safeguard the public, at least two prominent GOP U.S. senators dumped millions of dollars of stocks in apparent insider trading during mid-February.

They were Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina and Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, whose husband Jeffrey Sprecher chairs the New York Stock Exchange. This was after the two heard U.S. intelligence confidential briefings about the dangers the virus posed to the public and markets. They enriched themselves and failed to warn their constituents and the rest of the nation.

Remarkably, the corrupt actions of the two Trump defenders during impeachment occurred soon after the prison sentencing of Trump's first two congressional supporters from his 2016 presidential campaign, Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California. In separate cases, Collins and Hunter received long prison terms for insider trading and illegal use of campaign funds for personal expenses, respectively, with Hunter's case involving large purchases of prostitution services.

Our Justice Integrity Project has sought to cover these many horrific developments and scandals by extensive daily news summaries, segmented into monthly installments, as here.

The virus conflicts and their ripple effects keeping growing, as in the HuffPost story April 4 headlined, HuffPost via Yahoo News, Trump Org Reportedly Seeking Debt Help From Deutsche As Bank Is Probed By DOJ.

In the meantime, we have reduced our output of opinion columns.

But there comes a time to pull the materials together into larger themes. The numbers and the illustrative images tell much of the story. So does a daily listing of Trump's own words, particularly during the early part of the pandemic when he somehow thought he could get away with conning the public into thinking there would be no serious health problem.

He lied. Americans died, as did untold thousands more around  the world in a crisis of leadership fostered by many like-minded dictators and cover-up artists.

But those horrific results haven't stopped Trump from a new round of conning the public with his daily White House press briefings, by which he apparently seeks to replicate his successes on the fake reality show "The Apprentice" and at his "Make America Great Again Rallies."

Last week, Trump claimed that he will be vindicated if the U.S. death toll is simply the 100,000 to 240,000 his team foresees if things go well.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump's protector, falsely claimed that Trump was too preoccuppied with impeachment to focus on the virus.

That's false since McConnell ensured by thwarting witnesses and exercising iron control over fellow Republicans that impeachment was essentially over by the end January. Trump meanwhile undertook many golf outings, campaign rallies and fund-raising events with cronies.

Washington psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, who has treated many high-ranking official over his four decades of practice and has authored books profiling the mental state of recent presidents, two weeks ago warned that Sociopath Trump could see dead bodies from coronavirus and step over them.

The future is always murky, but not so the recent past: The man is a liar who is criminally negligent in the deaths already of thousands.

"I give you the President of the United States," wrote blogger Paul Maraschino in providing the research findings below:

Trump's response to the coronavirus (his words):

January 22: We have it to totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.

February 2: We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.

February 24: The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!

February 25: CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.

February 25: I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.

February 26: The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.

February 26: We're going very substantially down, not up.

February 27: One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.

February 28: We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.

March 2: You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?

March 2: A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.

March 4: If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.

March 5: I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.

March 5: The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!

March 6: I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.

March 6: Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.

March 6: I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.

March 6: I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.

March 8: We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.

March 9: This blindsided the world.

March 9: The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the coronavirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.

March 10: It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.

March 13: National Emergency Declaration

March 13: No, I don’t take responsibility at all.

The larger context includes Trump's dismantling in 2018 of the White House office created through the years to address the dangers of pandemics.

Important also is his administration's relentless war in Congress, courts and state legislatures to abolish the 2009 Affordable Care Act (ACA, sometimes called "Obamacare") without presenting a substitute, thereby putting tens of millions of American lives at risk -- especially during a pandemic.

All of this is part of what commentator Robert Harrington described on April 5 as This is the moment that contempt for science comes home to roost.

Among the many tragic ironies of our current American situation is that George Conway III, right, an activist conservative lawyer and husband of Trump's acerbic counselor Kellyanne Conway, has been recently leading public warnings against the president and his danger to society.

Citing the famous language of the Republican Senator Howard Baker during Watergate as the Tennessee senator geared up to protect the Constitution, Conway and a co-author asked in the Washington Post last month:  What did Trump and Congress know about the coronavirus, and when did they know it? 

According to a Post report, they wrote, quite possibly a lot, and for quite a while: Intelligence agencies 'were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat.'

They continued:

These intelligence assessments about the global danger posed by the virus made the rounds in the executive and legislative branches, sources told The Post, but the American people weren’t told about them. Now Americans should know precisely what their government knew about an impending crisis that would jeopardize their livelihoods and lives.

These reports should be declassified, to the maximum extent feasible, and released as soon as possible, along with the identities of senior administration officials and members of Congress who learned of it. That’s especially true given how Trump repeatedly told the public that the impact of the virus on the United States would be minimal.

That's in the future, we can only hope. We already know plenty.

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Related Commentary

Palmer Report, Opinion: This is a complete disaster on every level, Robert Harrington, April 11, 2020. Testing is the key. We know this because Germany and South Korea made testing a priority, and that is why they have the fewest rates of new cases and the fewest deaths per capita than any other nations on earth. Large numbers of tests followed by rigorous protocols for mandatory quarantine of infected persons has kept the numbers of deaths low. With fewer people infected, Germany and South Korea can focus their resources on care and treatment.

Germany performs 500,000 tests per week. South Korea performs 150,000 tests a week. South Korea is reporting barely 100 new cases a day, while America has twenty times that number in deaths alone. And South Korea had its first reported case on the same day the United States did.

As Trump puts it, “We have a great testing system. We have the best testing system in the world.” That’s almost true, except for two problems. America has an abysmal testing system. America has the worst testing system in the world and ranks dead last. Otherwise whatever is left of that statement is correct. And, thanks to Trump, America’s testing system is about to get worse. Donald Trump has just moved to end federal funding for coronavirus testing sites this week. You read that right.

Denver Post, Editorial: Trump is playing a disgusting political game with our lives, Editorial Board, April 9, 2020. President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives. For the good of this nation during what should be a time of unity, he must stop.

In just the latest example of his gross display, the president tweeted on Wednesday:

Trump had only days before prevented Colorado Gov. Jared Polis from securing 500 ventilators from a private company, instead, taking the ventilators for the federal government. Polis sent a formal letter pleading for medical equipment, but the president took the time to make clear he was responding to a request from Gardner. We are left to believe that if Colorado didn’t have a Republican senator in office, our state would not be getting these 100 ventilators. How many ventilators would we be getting if we had a Republican governor and a second Republican senator? Would that indicate we had more Republican lives in our state worth saving for Trump and resources would start flowing? Should Utah be concerned that Sen. Mitt Romney voted to remove the president from office?

This behavior comes, of course, weeks after Trump informed states they would have to compete against one another in the procurement of medical supplies at a time of global shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s far too early to reflect on the performance of Trump’s administration during this crisis, but on this one urgent point — the immediate allocation resources to states — we felt it essential to speak up immediately. We find it hard to believe decisions are being made on such a morally bankrupt basis, but Trump is doing this nation no favors by giving us the impression that politics will drive his administration’s response to a virus that has already killed thousands of Americans and will kill thousands more.