The White House began releasing negative stories about Fauci to the press this week.
Larry Hogan, GOP governor of Maryland, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. First he recounts how he got COVID tests from South Korea and feared the Trump Administration would confiscate them: Then a caravan of Maryland National Guard trucks escorted by the Maryland State Police drove the tests from the airport to a refrigerated, secure warehouse at an undisclosed location. The federal government had recently seized 3 million N95 masks purchased by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. We weren’t going to let Washington stop us from helping Marylanders.
He puts the blame squarely on Trump:
- I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals. … So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response.
- So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren’t
- instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans.
- Describes briefing of Governors Association in early February: It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals. Weren’t these the people the White House was consulting about the virus? What made the briefing even more chilling was its clear, factual tone. It was a harrowing warning of an imminent national threat, and we took it seriously — or at least most of us did. It was enough to convince almost all the governors that this epidemic was going to be worse than most people realized.
- an undertaking as large as a national testing program required Washington’s help. We expected something more than constant heckling from the man who was supposed to be our leader.
Trump’s DHS sent civilians in unmarked military gear into Portland to arrest protestors.
One of the protestors who was beaten and tear gassed spoke with the AP, 53-year-old Christopher David: “They came out in this phalanx, running, and then they plowed into a bunch of protesters in the intersection of the street and knocked them over. They came out to fight…They are thugs and goons. I couldn’t recognize anything tactically that they were attempting to do that was even remotely related to crowd control. It looked to me like a gang of guys with sticks.””
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.2%
COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 3,630,587 / 138,782