Capital G BLOG 3. Trust Matters.
October 4, 2020
Big Numbers:
7,411,716 Confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US
209,720 Confirmed COVIdD-19 deaths in (per Johns Hopkins)
12 Number of positive diagnoses of COVID, among the president’s inner circle, including the first lady, Campaign chair, advisors and so far at least three senators and a former governor, Chris Christie who has checked himself into the hospital.
Presidential Oath of Office:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
What does protect and defend mean, and in what ways has the meaning of the term evolved during the Trump presidency? I will work to get a Constitutional scholar on Capital G at some point in the future, but for today’s discussion, I just want to talk colloquially about what it means to protect the American people.
We now know that since January, Trump has known about the coronavirus and, at least since he told Bob Woodward in recorded interviews for Woodward’s book, Rage, Trump knew the virus was:
· Highly contagious
· Airborne, or spread in part through aerosolized droplets in the air
· And easily transmissible from one person to another
Yet he did virtually nothing to mitigate the risks to the American people. A semi-slow down of travel from China and production of some ventilators is hardly an accomplishment, especially on the heels of sending the nation’s stockpile of PPE to China and Russia.
The CDC and all of our experts have spent months educating US about public health and the need to wear masks, keep a social distance of at least 6 feet and wash hands frequently. In the first few days of the declaration that we were experiencing a pandemic and would need to take personal actions, there was some confusion about the effectiveness of wearing a mask. Further there was concern about using masks because they were in such short supply, but since mid-March there has been no question about the need to wear masks.
Everyone parroted this line, including the Vice-president, who headed the Coronavirus Task Force. The only person who has not been consistent with this message is the president. Because he has had no intention on protecting the American people, as his oath dictates. His efforts have all be directed at protecting his own fragile ego and political prospects.
“Of the flood of misinformation, conspiracy theories and falsehoods seeding the internet on the coronavirus, one common thread stands out: President Trump.”
That is the conclusion of researchers at Cornell University who analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media around the world. Mentions of Mr. Trump made up nearly 38 percent of the overall “misinformation conversation,” making the president the largest driver of the “infodemic” — falsehoods involving the pandemic.
“Misinformation around the pandemic is ‘one of the major reasons’ the United States is not doing as well as other countries in fighting the pandemic,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former principal deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration.
The researchers sought to identify all mentions of misinformation in “traditional media” They included fact-checking articles that corrected misinformation in their total tally. But fact-checking articles accounted for only 16.4 percent of those that included misinformation, “suggesting that the majority of Covid misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction,” the authors wrote.
In other words, less than 20% of the inaccurate information out there is being corrected, leaving people with confusion that could prove to be life-threatening.
Adding to the confusion, are the misstatements or intentional inaccuracies being propagated by the president’s own medical team. Starting with the refusal to clearly state when the president was first known to test positively for coronavirus, whether it was 72 or 36 hours previous to the Saturday press conference of his medical team, we don’t know how far it’s advanced, and whether the president knowing put others in jeopardy.
We are still learning about how it spreads and behaves and understanding the president’s diagnosis and prognosis would go a long way toward outlining a case that we could use to expand our understanding. However, the president wants political credit for “taking one for the team,” but not the responsibility for accepting his current health condition.
They are using experimental drug therapies that would normally be used for more advanced patients, which simultaneously indicates he’s more advanced that his team is letting on, while reinforcing the notion that they are being less than forthright with the American people.
He’s going back to the White House possibly tomorrow, which adds to questions about if it’s a hoax.
The ultimate question voters should be asking is “If Trump, with all the medical teams, drugs, advance planning, aggressive treatment, and other resources can’t keep himself and his team safe, they why should we believe he could or would keep the American people safe?”
I’ll leave us today with this last big number
53 or 14 In an NBC News/WSJ poll conducted after the debate, Joe Biden leads Trump nationally by 14 points (53% to 39%) — his largest lead to date. This number was recorded prior to the Trump COVID-19 diagnosis.
When the president was diagnosed with COVID-19, and later airlifted to Walter Reed Medical Center, thousands if not millions of American began openly debating whether or not the diagnosis was real or a hoax. The president’s Sunday evening departure from the hospital to drive around and wave to supporters from a motorcade, exposing all involved, reinforced the notion that his medical team might be misleading the American people about the condition of the POTUS.
Listen to episode #3 of the Capital G Podcast to understand why the controversy exists, as we move into the final month of the campaign.
The Capital G Blog is a supplement to the Capital G Podcast
✓