Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Trump PR Stunt Falls Flat, as White House Video Exposes His Failure to Prepare for Pandemic
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/14/trump-pr-stunt-falls-flat-white-house-video-exposes-failure-prepare-pandemic/
DONALD TRUMP GRINNED broadly on Monday as he tricked the news networks into broadcasting a taxpayer-funded testimonial to his own leadership, in the form of a video highlight reel of presidential statements on the coronavirus crisis, set to stirring music, unveiled during the president’s 29th daily briefing on the pandemic.
Austin Kellerman
✔@AustinKellerman
WATCH: Here was the scene in today's #PressBriefing when President Trump aired what @CNN has labeled a propaganda video.
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The video, which was riddled with errors and deceptively edited, was apparently intended to rebut a damning report on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times that detailed how slow Trump had been to take the threat posed by the virus seriously. While Trump was obviously pleased by the production — he pointed to the screen with a look of smug triumph at several points — he seemed unaware as it was unspooling in the White House briefing room that it contained a fatal flaw that helped reinforce the central argument of The Times report.
Paula Reid
✔@PaulaReidCBS
Inside coronavirus briefing President Trump is having reporters watch campaign style montage praising his handling of coronavirus. #Covid_19
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The compilation of clips, selected by the White House social media director, Dan Scavino, attempted to create an alternative history of the first months of the crisis, according to which the American media initially “minimized the risk,” but the president “took decisive action” nonetheless, only to be unfairly maligned by his political opponents, before the nation’s governors came together to sing his praises.
The centerpiece of the video was a timeline of actions by Trump and his administration, highlighting the partial ban on travel from China he ordered on January 31, and his declaration of a national emergency on March 13.
A screenshot of a White House video timeline of the coronavirus crisis.
Photo: White House
But, as CBS News correspondent Paula Reid pointed out to Trump after the video ended, there was a huge gap in the timeline: It mentioned absolutely no action by him in February and there was, as the Times had noted, a period of “six long weeks” after the travel restrictions until he “finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing.”
In fact, the only entry on the video timeline for February — the month Trump held mass campaign rallies and described criticism of his handling of the virus from Democrats as “their new hoax” — was February 6: “CDC Ships First Testing Kits.” The fact that those test kits were defective, a massive failure at a critical moment, seems like an odd thing to brag about.
Well into March, Trump was downplaying the new coronavirus as no more threatening than the flu.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
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Having seemed so pleased with himself while the video was playing, Trump looked stunned by Reid’s observation that its timeline showed the period of inaction the Times had described. “The argument is that you bought yourself some time,” by imposing the partial travel ban from China, Reid noted. “You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals, you didn’t use it to ramp up testing.”
CBS News
✔@CBSNews
.@PaulaReidCBS presses Pres. Trump about his administration's early actions on the coronavirus, after he spent the beginning of his press conference complaining about his media coverage https://cbsn.ws/2XwAwja
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As Trump interrupted to denounce her as “so disgraceful,” the correspondent pressed on to ask what, exactly, Americans were supposed to take away from his gauzy video tribute to himself? “Right now nearly 20 million people are unemployed. Tens of thousands of Americans are dead. How is this sizzle reel or this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?”
Trump had no response but to shift back to praising himself for restricting travel from China in January. “But what did you do with the time that you bought?” Reid asked. “The month of February… the video has a gap.”
After the briefing, Eric Lipton, one of the authors of the investigation that so enraged Trump, observed on Twitter that nothing in the video or the president’s comments “undermines even a single fact in the stories we published over the weekend.”
“The truth remains that the nation’s top health advisers concluded as of Feb. 14 that the U.S. needed to use targeted containment efforts to slow the virus spread,” Lipton added. “Trump then waited until March 16 to announce his support for these measures.”
The inadvertently revealing timeline was not the only flaw with the propaganda video produced by Scavino, Trump’s former caddie.
It began with a sequence lifted directly from the March 26 edition of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show: a series of clips of medical experts for ABC, NBC, and CBS wrongly predicting in January that Americans would not be badly hit by the virus. Those clips seemed to be included as an effort to embarrass reporters from those networks, but the statements of those TV doctors at the time echoed almost exactly the public messaging of Trump’s hand-picked CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, who said at a coronavirus task force briefing on January 31: “I want to emphasize that this is a serious health situation in China, but I want to emphasize that the risk to the American public currently is low.”
That opening montage also includes a misleadingly edited clip of Hannity asking Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and presidential adviser, in January if American experts might go to China if the coronavirus outbreak there was worse than expected. In March, Hannity tried to claim that this was proof that he had “warned” of a pandemic. In fact, before that clip was edited, it showed that Hannity had just been asking Fauci about sending American experts to China to “help them out to try to contain this” there. Like Trump, Hannity had spent all of February comparing Covid-19 to the seasonal flu, and by the end of March, he too was backpedalling furiously.
Another bizarre aspect of that sequence is that it ends with Dr. David Agus, a CBS News medical correspondent, stating that “coronavirus is not going to cause a major issue in the United States.” Agus is now a major proponent of the experimental use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 and has reportedly spoken directly with Trump about the possible benefits of the treatment that the president has become fixated on.
The third section of the video — about Trump’s supposedly unfair treatment by political opponents — takes audio of Times correspondent Maggie Haberman out of context to distort its meaning. Haberman was one of six reporters who wrote the article that angered Trump. In an interview with “The Daily” podcast in March, Haberman did call Trump’s order to slow travel from China “a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus,” but the White House edit omitted what she said immediately after that. “The problem is, it was one of the last things that he did for several weeks.”
Maggie Haberman
✔@maggieNYT
Here’s the full exchange with @mikiebarb, in which I compared the president’s behavior around the a China travel limitations to the Bush “Mission Accomplished” moment.
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“He did not do anything after that in terms of alerting the public, or telling people to be safe, or telling people to take precautions,” Haberman added, according to a transcript of the original interview. “And it basically squandered several weeks within the U.S.”
That same sequence included two false annotations in on-screen text of other statements by Haberman about Trump’s partial ban of travel from China. When she said, “He was accused of xenophobia,” an image of Joe Biden appeared, over the date March 12. Biden, however, was not referring to Trump’s travel ban in a speech he gave on that date; he was criticizing Trump’s nativist reference the day before, when he had shut off travel from most of Europe, to what the president called the “foreign virus.”
“Downplaying it, being overly dismissive or spreading misinformation is only going to hurt us and further advantage the spread of the disease, but neither should we panic or fall back on xenophobia,” Biden said. “Labeling Covid-19 a foreign virus does not displace accountability for the misjudgments that have been taken thus far by the Trump administration.”
The fact that Trump subsequently made a point of calling the new coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” inciting hatred of Asians and Asian Americans even in his own White House, makes his claim to have been falsely accused of xenophobia all the more absurd.
Moments later in the video, as Haberman said, “He was accused of making a racist move,” an image of Nancy Pelosi appeared, over a citation to The Hill from January 31. However, as the report in The Hill makes clear, Pelosi had, in fact, been referring to another travel ban issued by Trump that day — “adding Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania and Sudan to the travel ban that the President instituted three years ago” — when she denounced him for imposing “such biased and bigoted restrictions.”
The news conference on Monday, which brought the president’s time in the briefing room in the past month to more than 40 hours, was yet another example of Trump hijacking for his own ends what was previously a news conference dedicated to conveying vital information about a public health emergency. The president, however, seems to regard the free time on television each day as primarily an opportunity for self-promotion.
That was made clear at one stage when Trump told reporters that, after watching the video, “Most importantly, we’re going to get back on to the reason we’re here: which is, the success we’re having.”
IMF Warns Global Economy Could See Worst Year Since Great Depression Due to 'Magnitude and Speed' of Coronavirus Crisis
"This is the most frightening news the Fund has ever released on the status of our global economy."
by
Julia Conley, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/14/imf-warns-global-economy-could-see-worst-year-great-depression-due-magnitude-and
The worldwide economic shutdowns forced by the coronavirus pandemic are expected to cause the worst year the global economy has seen since the Great Depression, according to top economists—raising concerns for the well-being of people in developing nations.
Ahead of meetings between world leaders this week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the global economy will likely contract by about 3% in 2020 as governments around the world urge people to stay home and shut down businesses to slow the spread of the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19.
The contraction of the economy is expected to be more severe than the recession of 2008 and 2009, when the global economy shrunk by about 0.1%, and represents a major reversal of the IMF's earlier predictions for this year that the global economy would grow by 3.3% in 2020.
"As countries implement necessary quarantines and social distancing practices to contain the pandemic, the world has been put in a Great Lockdown," said Gita Gopinath, chief economist of the IMF. "The magnitude and speed of collapse in activity that has followed is unlike anything experienced in our lifetimes."
The IMF said the economic crisis could stretch into 2021 even if the spread of the virus significantly slows in the coming months, and if there is a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall or early next year, the economy is not likely to rebound in 2021.
The warning intensified recent calls from anti-poverty campaigners for debt relief for the world's most vulnerable countries. The global economy is expected to lose about $9 trillion in 2020 and 2021, according to the IMF's World Economic Outlook.
"Urgent action is required by the IMF and G20 this week," said Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA, a coalition of faith and advocacy groups which secures debt relief for poor countries. "During the meetings this week world leaders must move forward aid, financing, and debt relief for developed and developing countries so people can survive the devastating health and economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis."
As Oxfam International said last week, even before the IMF released its prediction, about half the world population could fall into poverty if the Fund and the World Bank do not cancel $1 trillion in developing countries' debts and issue a $1 trillion stimulus package to shore up the healthcare systems and economies of poor nations.
As Common Dreams reported Monday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) joined the call to demand debt cancellation for developing countries, warning, "We could be on the precipice of a global financial crisis unlike any seen since the 1930s."
Jubilee USA was encouraged Monday after the IMF Executive Board approved $500 million debt relief for 25 developing countries, including Chad, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Nepal.
The IMF's warning on Tuesday, however, prompted the coalition to call for more immediate action to shield vulnerable communities around the world from the worst effects of the anticipated global economic crisis.
"This is the most frightening news the Fund has ever released on the status of our global economy," said LeCompte. "When you analyze what the IMF is actually saying, the message is things could even get worse and they really don't know how bad it can actually get."
On social media, Oxfam reiterated its call for debt cancellation Tuesday.
"Stop collecting debt from the poorest countries," the organization said, addressing the IMF and the World Bank. "They must use it to protect their people from the coronavirus pandemic."
'Propaganda Aired at Taxpayer Expense': Trump Uses Coronavirus Briefing to Play Campaign-Style Clip Attacking Media
"Suggests they are spending their precious time right now making videos that defend the president's record and tenure rather than provide the much-needed emergency medical information that was promised."
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
41 Comments
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/14/propaganda-aired-taxpayer-expense-trump-uses-coronavirus-briefing-play-campaign
President Donald Trump on Monday evening used the daily Coronavirus Task Force briefing—purportedly designed to provide the U.S. public with urgent COVID-19 updates—to air a bizarre campaign-style video attacking the press and touting the White House's response to the pandemic in the wake of new reporting documenting how the administration failed to take decisive early action.
"We have a few clips that we're just gonna put up, we can turn the lights a little bit lower, I think you'll find them interesting," Trump said from the podium. "And then we'll answer some questions, I'll ask you some questions because you're so guilty, but forget it. But, most importantly, we're gonna get back onto the reason we're here, which is the success we're having."
The video featured a compilation of clips of Trump touting actions his administration has taken in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic as well as governors singing the White House's praises.
"The media minimized the risk from the start," read the text on one of the video's slides, which were accompanied at one point by dramatic background music. At several moments, Trump pointed to the screen and smiled, apparently satisfied with the production.
Watch:
MSNBC cut away from the briefing as the video progressed, with anchor Ari Melber saying the network would go back to the briefing "when it returns to what it was supposed to be, which was the Coronavirus Task Force providing medical information."
"What we just saw, I want to be very clear with viewers, was a video the White House put out which suggests they are spending their precious time right now making videos that defend the president's record and tenure rather than provide the much-needed emergency medical information that was promised," said Melber.
John King, chief national correspondent for CNN, described the video as "propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room."
Trump confirmed following the conclusion of the video that the brief clip was produced inside the White House. "We're getting fake news and I'd like to have it corrected," the president said.
The video appeared to be aimed at countering New York Times reporting over the weekend showing that "throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government—from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies—identified the threat, sounded alarms, and made clear the need for aggressive action."
"The president... was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy, and batting away warnings from senior officials," reads the story, which was based on internal administration emails, government records, and interviews with current and former White House officials.
The Coronavirus Task Force briefing on Monday took another alarming turn when Trump asserted that "when somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total."
"And that's the way it's gotta be. It's total," said Trump, declaring that he has the power to overrule governors if they disagree with his push to lift social distancing guidelines and reopen the U.S. economy.
"Trump's claim is false—governors have broad authority to close schools and businesses in their states," noted Vox's Aaron Rupar. "Unsurprisingly, when Trump [was] pushed to articulate a legal justification for his position, he couldn't come up with anything."
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