The White House has not held a full coronavirus press briefing since last Thursday, which was the occasion when Trump made the widely ridiculed and condemned suggestion that injecting bleach and other disinfectants might be a cure for Covid-19. The next day, he and Pence held a 20-minute session and walked off without taking questions. The weekend went by without any briefings and today they announced that there would also be no briefing. It looks like they may be gone for good. Trump, like the coward he is, does not want to face challenging questions and, like Brave Sir Robin, “When danger reared it’s ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled.”
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All of a sudden, I am getting daily emails from Donald Trump. Clearly someone has sold his campaign a list of emails addresses that include mine. My first instinct was to block them but then I thought I’d not, just to see what they think appeals to his supporters. For several days he would urge me to add my name to a ‘surprise’ birthday card for his wife Melania, something that was apparently done last year too and the goal this year seems to be to exceed the numbers who signed last year. Given that this is a repeat of last year, she must be someone who forgets things quickly or is easily surprised.
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Josh Marshall writes how Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp was rebuked by Donald Trump for licking his boots too vigorously, something I would not have thought possible. Trump has been saying that the country should start re-opening soon and no doubt Kemp thought that he could curry favor with trump by being the first to do so. But it backfired.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been outstripping the sizable competition in the race to become President Donald Trump’s biggest, and most thoroughly rejected, flunky.
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On Monday he mounted his flashiest maneuver yet, announcing that he would fling wide the doors of the state’s gyms, nail salons, barbershops, bowling alleys — bowling alleys — by the end of the week, about three laps ahead of even the cadre of his fellow Trumpy governors.
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But Kemp was left alone on the front porch, clutching his boutonniere, as Trump slammed the front door in his face.

“Would I do that? No. I’d keep them a little longer,” the President said of the social distancing guidelines at his Wednesday press briefing. “I want to protect people’s lives.”

“I’m going to let him make his decision,” he added, of Kemp. “But I told him I totally disagree.”

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Donald Trump is a menace to people’s health. There is no other way to describe his ridiculous suggestions about treating the coronavirus at yesterday’s White House briefing where he floated the kinds of crazy rumors that float around the internet as worth testing, such as injecting oneself with bleach or disinfectant or somehow ‘hit’ the body with light inside it, no doubt because he heard somewhere that bleach kills bacteria and viruses and that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

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I wrote before about how the coronavirus pandemic is creating the conditions for many natural experiments to be conducted. One is the question of how effective the various countermeasures being taken are. We have seen that in Trumpland, those parts of the country where his followers are dominant, the social distancing guidelines are being ignored or relaxed early, despite warnings by public health experts that this could lead to a resurgence in the number of infected cases. These people, especially in rural areas, seem to think that they are relatively immune from the pandemic because the absolute numbers in their areas so far have been relatively few, though on a per capita basis that may not be the case.
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