1) After Atlas arrived in August and said COVID deaths were overstated, Trump "often [told] aides that the real number of dead was no more than 10,000."
He dismissed about 95% of attributed deaths as fake news. /1 nyti.ms/3hEjRCj
2) Azar, Kushner, Hicks, and pollster Tony Fabrizio lobbied Trump to wear and promote masks. They showed him evidence that masks worked and that Republicans supported mask mandates.
Who talked Trump out of it? Meadows and Stephen Miller. They told him, "The base will revolt." /2
3) In multiple meetings, Trump explicitly opposed testing on the grounds that it exposed infections, thereby making him look bad and hurting his reelection chances. In debate prep, He told Kushner, "I’m going to lose. And it’s going to be your fault, because of the testing." /3
In an Aug. 19 meeting, Trump complained to Kushner that the U.S. was testing too much: “You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases. ... I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting." /4
4) Birx, Fauci, Hahn, and Redfield made a pact to "stick together if one of them was fired for doing ... the right thing."
5) Some aides indicated that "John McEntee, the president’s personnel chief," found Atlas by "Googling for a Trump-friendly doctor who would be loyal." /5
The GOP is in the grip of insurrectionists. It's controlled by a president who's trying to overthrow an election, and a base that's rallying in streets to threaten coups and civil war.
The match hasn't been struck yet. But here are some warning signs. /1 bit.ly/33LEpDd
The president has demanded direct intervention in the election:
- “STOP THE COUNT!”
- Millions of votes for Biden, because they were counted outside the view of GOP partisans, must be nullified
- “the results of the individual swing states must be overturned ... immediately.” /2
Trump is rejecting Biden's legitimacy:
“Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained”
Biden “cannot be considered ‘president’” and should be called “presidential occupant” /3
"Close the bars and keep the schools open," says Fauci on @ThisWeekABC. "The default position should be to try... to keep the children in school or to get them back to school. ... If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all."
.@margbrennan: "Are you asking governors to close the bars to keep schools open? Is that your advice?"
Birx doesn't say yes. She says where cases and hospitalizations are high, the first places to close are those "where people cannot wear masks," i.e., "bars and... restaurants."
Birx emphasizes masks, not closures. "What we do know works is mask mandates," she says in response to the question about bars. In states, cities, and counties that mandated masks, "We can see a really significant difference in not only cases but hospitalizations and fatalities."
"Don’t talk to me that way! You’re just a—you’re just a lightweight! ... I’m the president of the United States! Don’t ever talk to the president that way!”
Today at the White House, Trump had one of the saddest meltdowns you'll see by a public figure. /1 bit.ly/33kyGE1
Trump rejected the election:
"It was a rigged election, 100%."
"This election was a fraud."
"Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes."
"I got 74 million, but there were many ballots thrown away. So I got much more than that."
"At the highest level, it was a rigged election." /2
Trump claimed *millions* of votes were fraudulent:
"687,000 fraudulent votes cast in PA."
"I won [GA] by hundreds of thousands of votes."
"We have tens of thousands votes more than we need in all cases."
"You’re gonna find fraud of hundreds of thousands of votes per state." /3
Excerpts of @MarkMeadows' jaw-dropping CNN interview:
1) He says WH is focused on limiting deaths, not spread. "We’re not going to control the pandemic," he says. "What we need to do is make sure that we have... vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don’t die" from it.
2) @MarkMeadows derides Biden for promoting masks: “This president is leading, while Joe Biden is sitting there suggesting that we’re going to mandate masks.”
”What is Joe Biden’s plan for the pandemic?” Meadows asks later. ”He’s going to wear two masks, like he does every day?”
3) Meadows argues that masks aren't "the answer," since experts admit they wouldn't make schools perfectly safe.
He suggests mask science is dubious because WH virus officials Fauci and Birx, "the people you like to tout," changed their views. (They now strongly urge mask use.)