What Do We Actually Know About the White House COVID Cluster?
Everything you need to know for Monday, Oct. 5: Cal Cunningham's boring sext life + the NC voting settlement gets blocked
Monday, Oct. 5, 2020
29 days until the election
4 days until the voter registration deadline (click here to see if you’re registered)
10 days until early voting begins (you can register during early voting, too)
22 days until the deadline for absentee ballot requests
When the Tweet Tells the Story
This was Friday.
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> The White House COVID Cluster(f***)
Here’s what we know:
Donald Trump checked into Walter Reed Medical Center on Friday afternoon for an indeterminate period of time, though the White House now says he could be released today.
His age and obesity make him susceptible to severe illness.
His blood oxygen levels dropped at least twice, and he had a high fever on Friday.
He’s receiving a five-day antiviral drug regimen and a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies made by Regeneron.
He’s also been given the steroid dexamethasone, which indicates lung problems and is usually reserved for critical cases, as studies show it can actually harm COVID patients who aren’t critical.
In fact, all of his treatments are intended to prevent serious illness.
And we know that the White House has been sending mixed signals to the point of Death of Stalin absurdity, with a sunny press conference from the president’s physician on Saturday immediately contradicted by an ominous background statement from his chief of staff, which was contradicted later by a presidential video and obviously staged photo ops.
Saturday’s attempt at clarification only made things worse, with his doctors appearing to indicate that he’d been diagnosed as early as Wednesday and begun antiviral treatments as early as Thursday, though he continued campaigning during that period and didn’t disclose his diagnosis until early Friday morning.
His doctor tried to walk that back, but the walk-back statement got key details wrong, including incorrectly spelling the name of the antibody manufacturer, which seems like something his doctor should know.
On Sunday, we got another round of crisis communications malfeasance. The doctors admitted that Trump had trouble breathing on Saturday morning and said they had misled everyone the day before to keep Trump’s spirits up. But they avoided answering questions about whether his CT scans showed pneumonia. Trump then released a video about how he’d learned a lot about COVID—shame he couldn’t have done that 210,000 deaths ago—and made his Secret Service detail drive him around so he could wave at his supporters in front of the hospital.
So what do we know? There are a few possibilities:
Trump is very sick, but he wants to downplay it.
Trump has a moderate case, but his physicians are throwing everything at him anyway so he can get back on the campaign trail quickly.
Trump has, in fact, improved since Friday, perhaps significantly. But as we’ll see, the worst could still be yet to come.
The problem is, you can’t really believe anything the White House says.
The Science
Assuming we can trust the White House’s timeline, we might not have a good sense of the outcome for another week or so.
This is a disease that can and often does confound, with many people experiencing no or very mild symptoms and others progressing to prolonged, debilitating bouts of illness that, in some cases, can lead to death. It’s also a disease that can take its time: People who appear to be recovering can take a turn for the worse at a point where, with other respiratory infections like influenza or colds, one would be expected to be starting to recover.
The critical time to know whether Trump will remain in the former group or progress to more serious disease is a window of between about eight to 12 days after symptoms begin, experts say.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest a person 65 to 74 has a five times greater chance of being hospitalized with coronavirus infection than a person aged 18 to 29. The risk of death from Covid-19 in the president’s age demographic is 90 times higher than that of people in the 18 to 29 age group.
Ranney noted the risk of death from the infection for a person Trump’s age is 8%. While that means most people his age will survive this infection, that fatality rate is very high for a viral respiratory infection.
The Optics
The likeliest superspreader event is the Rose Garden nomination ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett the previous Saturday, held without social distancing and largely without masks before Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s body was in the ground. Trump did not take a test before the debate on Tuesday, though he was supposed to. While the lecterns were 12 feet away, you might recall that Trump spent a lot of time yelling, which can spread the virus. On Thursday afternoon, after Hope Hicks’s diagnosis, Trump went to a fundraiser at his New Jersey golf course, where there was a buffet lunch.
From The Washington Post:
The jarring contrast between the carefree, cavalier attitude toward the virus on display in the Rose Garden last Saturday and the pernicious awakening that occurred Thursday night resembles a Shakespearean tragedy.
The White House’s handling of the period between the first known symptoms — those of Hicks on Wednesday — and the president’s infection, which was confirmed about 1 a.m. Friday, is what experts considered a case study in irresponsibility and mismanagement.
Administration officials at first were not transparent with the public, and have not been forthcoming with detailed information about Trump’s condition since.
How reckless was the White House? This reckless.
President Trump at times told staff members wearing masks in meetings to “get that thing off,” an administration official said. Everyone knew that Mr. Trump viewed masks as a sign of weakness, officials said, and that his message was clear. “You were looked down upon when you would walk by with a mask,” said Olivia Troye, a top aide on the coronavirus task force who resigned in August and has endorsed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The Politics
Most politicians could turn a battle with a potentially deadly illness in the waning days of a campaign into a sympathy bump worth at least a few points. Then again, most politicians wouldn’t have spent the previous six months mocking people who took precautions to avoid that illness, and most politicians wouldn’t have avoided their own experts’ recommendations in the days leading up to contracting the illness. Compound the recklessness and the incompetence with the White House’s opacity, and I don’t see this episode helping his re-election; if anything, it probably dooms it.
The more complicated political question is, what happens if Trump doesn’t make it? Or—so as not to be partisan—what if Biden contracts COVID and dies? The answer isn’t entirely clear.
It gets messy, quickly.
First, the Republican National Committee would have to produce a new nominee, a process that would involve Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and the 168 national members—three from each state and territory. But since many states have already started printing, mailing, and accepting ballots, and some have begun in-person voting, the name of a new nominee could be unlikely to be printed on ballots in time for Election Day.
Then it would fall to individual states to decide how to proceed, and most have not set rules for this situation. …
The question would become more complex if Mr. Trump won but was unable to serve. Some but not all states bind their electors to vote for whoever wins the state, but even most states with binding elector laws make no mention of what could happen should a candidate die or be unable to serve.
The question could be resolved by Congress, which certifies the Electoral College vote, or it could end up in the courts.
Here’s the AP’s explanation:
WHAT HAPPENS IF THE WINNING PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE DIES AFTER THE ELECTION?
The 20th Amendment says the term of the current president and vice president ends at noon on Jan. 20. There is no provision to extend it. The amendment also says if the president-elect dies, the vice president-elect shall be sworn in as president at the start of the new term. … By law, Congress is scheduled to formally receive the votes from the Electoral College on Jan. 6. The new Congress, which will be elected in November and sworn into office on Jan. 3, will preside. …
WHAT HAPPENS IF THE WINNING CANDIDATE DIES BEFORE CONGRESS DECLARES A WINNER?
“That’s the worst, most confusing time,” said John Fortier, director of governmental studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “They are going to have to figure out what to do with (Electoral College) votes cast for a candidate who has died.”
If the winning candidate dies before the Electoral College meets, the electors could coalesce around a replacement candidate recommended by the party, perhaps the vice-presidential candidate.
The Count
Right now, at least 26 COVID cases have been linked to Trump:
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former adviser
Claudia Conway, Kellyanne’s teenage daughter
First Lady Melania Trump
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC)
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)
Rev. John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame
Ronna McDaniel, Chairwoman of the RNC
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI)
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager
Hope Hicks, Trump’s senior adviser
Nick Luna, Trump’s body man
RELATED: Here’s a cheery thought. Whenever there’s the possibility that the president will be incapacitated, the U.S. military apparently assumes other countries will mess with us, so we start revving up our nuclear arsenal.
“U.S. president Donald Trump tested positive for the novel-coronavirus on Friday morning. Shortly before the news broke, the U.S. Navy’s doomsday planes launched on both American coasts.”
The military says the flights were pre-planned, but, well, you don’t believe that either, right?
“The E-6B Mercury is one of the Pentagon’s airborne nuclear command posts. The four-engine planes—derivatives of the Boeing 707 airliner—carry special communication systems and crews for commanding the Navy’s Ohio-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarines.”
LOCAL & STATE
—> Cal Cunningham Sexts Like a Dork
As if Friday wasn’t weird enough, within a couple of hours we learned that a) Thom Tillis has COVID, and b) Cal Cunningham was exchanging romantic text messages with a woman who wasn’t his wife. I mean, you can’t really call this stuff “sexual,” can you?
The Cunningham story was broken by a right-wing outlet called The National File, and specifically by the same guy who broke the story about the Virginia governor’s blackface photo.
Some observations:
The woman Cunningham was texting, Arlene Guzman Todd, does PR for the weed industry. Cunningham supports removing cannabis from the federal controlled substances schedule.
Some messages were screenshotted an hour after they were received, the rest within a week or so. Either someone had access to Guzman Todd’s phone pretty quickly—her husband, perhaps?—or she was setting Cunningham up.
Whoever it was had a mind to send the images to a fairly new far-right website rather than, say, the N&O.
Yes, this is pretty tame as far as extramarital relations go. But Cunningham made his family a prop in his campaign, so a) this isn’t a good look, and b) he’s a shithead for embarrassing them in a public way.
Cunningham is extraordinarily lucky the story broke exactly when it did.
Will it matter? Maybe, but probably only to the extent that it brings home the GOP base. Still, in a close race, that could be significant. And if the Dems lose a Senate majority because the establishment-picked guy sent some PG text messages, there will be recriminations for days.
Beyond that, though, Tillis has wrapped himself so tightly around Trump’s leg that his fate probably rises and falls with Trump’s. And while the NCGOP is jumping up and down to make this a story, Tillis is all-in on a man who paid off a porn star, so 🤷♂️.
—> The Absentee Ballot Settlement Is on Hold
On Friday, a Superior Court judge approved the agreement between the State Board of Elections and a voting rights group to relax standards for absentee ballots, batting down the GOP’s contention that the Democrats had essentially circumvented the legislature.
Federal judges, however, have been more skeptical. On Friday, at the behest of Republican state lawmakers, Judge James Dever slapped an injunction on that ruling and combined the case with a second lawsuit brought by the Trump campaign. (So weird how Republicans want to make it harder to vote.)
“The settlement extended the number of days the Board of Elections would accept mailed-in ballots to nine as long as the ballot was postmarked by 5 p.m. Nov. 3, which is Election Day. It also allowed absentee voters without witness signatures to sign affidavits that it was their vote in order to fix the ballot. Lastly, it allowed county board of elections offices to designate separate absentee ballot drop stations at all one-stop early voting locations and county board offices.”
—> Weather
Mostly clear, with a high of 73. ☀️☀️☀️
NATION & WORLD
—> The Recovery Isn’t Recovering That Well
This got buried in the #TrumpCOVID news avalanche, but on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its September jobs report, the last before the election. Employers added 661,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate fell—in a normal world, good; in this world, bad. It shows that the recovery is sputtering, and the economy is still down some 10 million jobs from February. The 7.9 percent unemployment rate comes largely because 700,000 people left the workforce.
The monthly report, the last before the presidential election, is the latest sign that the recovery is losing steam. Government data released on Thursday showed that personal income fell in August and that consumer spending grew more slowly as supplemental unemployment benefits expired. …
Even with the recent slowdown, the economy has done better than many forecasters expected in the spring. It has regained just over half of the more than 22 million jobs lost in March and April, and the unemployment rate has fallen sharply since it reached a record high of nearly 15 percent in April.
But those early gains were largely a result of businesses’ reopening and bringing back workers. … A growing number of businesses are deciding to make permanent job cuts, or to shut down. The number of people reporting they had lost their jobs permanently, as opposed to being on temporary furlough, rose in September. … Economists warn that permanent losses could worsen if Congress doesn’t provide more aid to households and businesses to replace the programs that expired over the summer.
That brings us to another development that got buried: House Dems pushed through another stimulus package, this one for $2.2 trillion, on Thursday. Like the one they passed in May, however, it’s DOA in the Senate.
The Institute of International Finance, meanwhile, is predicting a 4.1 percent global economic decline in 2020, worse than during the Great Recession.
—> The Roundup
With three Republican senators out with COVID, Mitch McConnell won’t call the Senate back until October 19, though he will allow the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on Amy Coney Barrett starting October 12. It’s possible the absences will give Democrats some procedural wiggle room to slow things down.
Attorney General Bill Barr’s 18-member commission on policing is illegal, a federal judge ruled.
Because the Cold War never ended, the US is now banning any member of a Communist or “totalitarian” party from entering the country.
Eric Trump will speak with investigators in New York today.
Paris plans to ban cars with fossil fuel engines by 2030.
Most people vastly overestimate their romantic partner’s intelligence, which is kind of sweet.
Senator Rick Scott, R-FL, on Saturday: “I was tested yesterday, I think for the 6th time, and I tested positive again.” Rick Scott, later Saturday: “I misspoke this morning in my @FoxNews interview. I was tested yesterday for COVID and tested NEGATIVE.”
See you tomorrow.