Should Trump Lock The Scientists Up Until After The Election To Preserve
The Integrity of Superstitious Rightwing Dogma?

Scientists keep undermining everything Trump says and believes and that
won't do because we, his followers, believe everything he says and trust
him not to lie to us. He says science is all political because it
refutes everything he says and he must have revenge on his enemies.

Kushner: Trump had to take the country 'back from the doctors'

(CNN)The failed bet laid by President Donald Trump to ignore science and
prioritize his political goals early in the pandemic, revealed Wednesday
in fresh detail by new Jared Kushner tapes, is backfiring in devastating
fashion at the critical moment of his reelection bid.
Dark warnings by scientists and new data showing a nationwide explosion in
a virus Trump says is going away, crashing stock markets and real-time
examples of the White House's delusions about its failed response are
consuming the President as tens of millions of early voters cast judgment.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden, leading in the polls with five days of
campaigning to go, is accusing the administration of surrendering to the
virus and offering to shoulder the nation's grief in the grim months to
come.
The extent to which the country's worsening trajectory has overtaken the
final days of the campaign emphasizes how the election has become a
personal referendum on Trump and how he mishandled the worst domestic
crisis in decades.

The roots of his current difficulties were bedded down months ago.
"Trump's now back in charge. It's not the doctors," the first son-in-law
and White House adviser, Kushner, said back in April in tapes of
interviews with Bob Woodward, obtained by CNN.
To win next Tuesday, the President will have to convince sufficient
Americans to build an Electoral College majority that his populist anti-
Washington message, cultural themes, hardline "law and order" rhetoric and
claimed expertise in rebuilding the ravaged economy are more important
than his botched choices on a pandemic that is getting worse every day.
Stock slump is another blow to Trump

Stocks sell off sharply as coronavirus cases soar
While the coronavirus tightened its grip, the President tried to change
the subject, seizing on violence in Philadelphia after another police
shooting to blame Democrats for looting.
But another huge slump on Wall Street showed how the election endgame
narrative was slipping out of his control. The Dow Jones Industrial
Average, one of the President's favorite metrics for his own performance,
was off more than 900 points Wednesday.
Former top Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor outed
himself as the author of a searing 2018 New York Times op-ed by
"Anonymous" that castigated Trump's leadership.
And new polling showed few signs that the President is making the kind of
late run that helped power his shock win over Hillary Clinton four years
ago. A new CNN national survey had Biden leading by 12 points among likely
voters. Even a win in the high single digits could assure Biden a
comfortable margin in the Electoral College. Other swing state polls in
Wisconsin and Michigan also had the Democrat ahead.
The President insisted he was doing "fantastically" in polls and was in
better shape than four years ago. Trump appears, however, to face a
complicated scenario on the electoral map that would require him to run
the table on a string of Southern and Western battlegrounds before a final
showdown with Biden in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
With more than 75 million votes already cast -- one-third of registered
voters -- the chance for a late change to the race is limited, even as the
President tried to shore up his far Western power base with rallies in
Arizona, a state that could help Biden block his route to 270 electoral
votes.
The new recordings of Kushner's interviews with Woodward for his book
"Rage" show in the most intimate detail yet how the President and close
aides marginalized government scientists earlier this year in a bid to
push economic openings at all cost to help his reelection effort.
In a conversation on April 18, the President's son-in-law told The
Washington Post veteran that Trump was "getting the country back from the
doctors" and referred to public health officials as if they were
adversaries when he talked of a "negotiated settlement" with them.
Comprehensively misreading the situation, Kushner, who had no previous
governing experience to match his elevated influence, also said the US was
moving swiftly through the "panic phase" and "pain phase" and was at the
"beginning of the comeback phase," while allowing there was a lot of pain
to come for a while.

At the point of the recordings, more than 40,000 Americans had died from
the virus. More than 227,000 have now perished, the death toll is rising
and hospitals in many states risk becoming overwhelmed.
But Trump told his crowd in Bullhead, Arizona -- as usual packed together
with little mask wearing -- that "people are getting better."
"We will vanquish the virus and emerge stronger than ever before. Our
country will be stronger than ever before," he claimed.

Biden warns beating the virus is not just 'flipping a switch'
Biden draws contrast with Trump on coronavirus as pandemic worsens in
campaign's final days
Biden draws contrast with Trump on coronavirus as pandemic worsens in
campaign's final days
Unlike the President, who is in charge of stemming the latest spike in
infections, Biden had a briefing from public health experts Wednesday. He
emerged to tell Americans that mask wearing was patriotic, not political,
but warned that if he is elected president he won't be able to end the
pandemic by "flipping a switch." And he drew on his own experience of
personal tragedies to console bereaved relatives of Covid-19 victims.
"I know all too well what it feels like to have your heart ripped out,
losing a loved one too soon, to sit by their hospital bedside and feel
like there's a black hole in the middle of your chest," Biden said.
Health experts inside and outside the government made clear that the state
of the pandemic was closer to the status report laid out by Biden than the
President's continuing false appraisals.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, said, "We are not in a good place," and predicted
that even with a vaccine, it would be "easily" late 2021 or into the
following year before Americans experience any degree of normalcy. Dr.
Scott Gottlieb, a former head of the US Food and Drug Administration, said
the US was on a trajectory to "look a lot like" Europe's current spike by
early November.

Trump has been arguing with some justification in recent days that
European countries lauded for doing a better job than he is in fighting
the virus are now experiencing awful escalations in infections. France
imposed a new lockdown starting on Thursday.

But those countries, by aggressively managing the virus, were able to give
their populace some respite over the summer, saving thousands of lives.
Trump's push for state openings unleashed a viral surge across the Sun
Belt in the summer and the US never returned to the lower levels of
infections experienced across the Atlantic.

Several Trump aides on Wednesday tried to defend Trump's handling of the
virus but only served to expose his negligence. Campaign spokesman Hogan
Gidley told CNN's "New Day" that "we are moving in the right direction"
after a White House document boasted Trump had ended the pandemic. And
Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director, conceded that the
choice of words was poor but said the US is "rounding the corner."

"Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer
them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating
distractions through petty insults and name-calling," Taylor, who is now a
CNN contributor, wrote in a statement. "I wanted the attention to be on
the arguments themselves."

In the op-ed, Taylor slammed Trump for "amorality," "reckless decisions"
and "erratic behavior" -- and he sparked a White House hunt for his
identity.

White House press secretary liar Kayleigh McEnany released a statement
blasting Taylor as a "low-level, disgruntled former staffer" and a "liar
and a coward who chose anonymity over action and leaking over leading."
But in many ways, the President's decision to ignore the ramifications of
sidelining scientists in favor of minimizing the pandemic and
concentrating on his own electoral prospects validates Taylor's critique.