Trump team weighs a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism

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With Trump under fire for his handling of the outbreak, his advisers are eyeing the federal bureaucracy for other culprits ahead of the election.

White House officials are putting a target on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, positioning the agency as a coronavirus scapegoat as cases surge in many states and the U.S. falls behind other nations that are taming the pandemic.

Trump administration aides in recent weeks have seriously discussed launching an in-depth evaluation of the agency to chart what they view as its missteps in responding to the pandemic including an early failure to deploy working test kits, according to four senior administration officials. Part of that audit would include examining more closely the state-by-state death toll to tally only the Americans who died from Covid-19 directly rather than other factors. About 120,000 people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus so far, according to the CDC’s official count.

Aides have also discussed narrowing the mission of the agency or trying to embed more political appointees in it, according to interviews with 10 current and former senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House. One official said the overall goal would be to make the CDC nimble and more responsive.

Politically, Trump aides have also been looking for a person or entity outside China to blame for the coronavirus response and have grown furious with the CDC, including its public health guidance and actions on testing, making it a prime target. But some wonder whether the wonky-sounding CDC, which the administration directly oversees, could be an effective fall guy on top of Trump’s efforts to blame the World Health Organization.

“WHO is an easy one,” said one former administration official. “It is foreign body in Switzerland. CDC will be tough to create a boogeyman around for the average voter.”

The moves are among the White House’s efforts to deflect attacks on President Donald Trump and place blame elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy. Protecting the president is seen as increasingly important by political aides as the general election approaches in just over four months and criticism mounts from former Vice President Joe Biden, other Democrats and even former national security adviser John Bolton, who say the blame rests squarely on Trump.

The efforts risk backfiring if they blame career health experts at the CDC, whose warnings early in the crisis were dismissed by Trump and his top aides as fearmongering.

Juliette Kayyem, an Obama-era former Homeland Security official who aided the response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, said it can be valuable for agencies to revisit their performance after a crisis — but that there’s no reason to single out the CDC.

“When the history books are written about this crisis, is anyone actually going to believe that America’s abysmal performance and its high death rate was because of some bureaucratic impediment at the CDC?" Kayyem said. “The core of America's problem is a White House that clearly was not pressed into action in January. And every flaw — from CDC and testing to FEMA and the stockpiles to the supply chain and the states — every systemic problem is rooted in White House malfeasance.".......

Read the rest at: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/23/trump-cdc-overhaul-coronavirus-335039

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Trump’s frantic shifting of blame for coronavirus has hit rock bottom

Here, in no particular order, is a list of various people, developments and entities that President Trump and his top advisers have tried to blame for his towering failures on the novel coronavirus and the resulting economic catastrophe we’re currently living through:

1. China
2. The World Health Organization
3. Democrats
4. Governors
5. The media
6. Hospitals
7. Protesters
8. Anthony S. Fauci
9. General Motors
10. The top deputy inspector general for Health and Human Services
11. Barack Obama

But now Trump’s advisers are taking this to a new level entirely. The latest target for their blame-shifting? Trump’s own government.

White House advisers are concocting a new campaign to turn the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the latest scapegoat, as coronavirus cases spike in many states and as the U.S. falls behind other countries in combating the virus, Politico reports:

Politically, Trump aides have also been looking for a person or entity outside of China to blame for the coronavirus response and have grown furious with the CDC, its public health guidance and its actions on testing, making it a prime target. But some wonder whether the wonky-sounding CDC, which the administration directly oversees, could be an effective fall guy on top of Trump’s efforts to blame the World Health Organization.

 

“WHO is an easy one,” said one former administration official. “It is foreign body in Switzerland. CDC will be tough to create a bogeyman around for the average voter.”

Trump’s political advisers are pretty clear on what they’re hoping for out of this new campaign:

The moves are among the White House’s efforts to deflect attacks on President Donald Trump and place them elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy. Protecting the president is seen as increasingly important by political aides as the general election approaches in just over four months and criticism mounts from former Vice President Joe Biden, other Democrats and even former national security adviser John Bolton who say the blame rests squarely on Trump himself.

Trump has of course sought to deflect blame onto others for many months, as noted. But there’s a reason this new effort deserves special recognition for its depravity, and we cannot let it get memory-holed.

It’s this: When Trump urged governors to reopen their economies more quickly, he was defying guidelines suggested by that very same agency, i.e., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, CDC is not merely getting cast as the scapegoat for the current spikes; it is getting cast as such even though it was far more right than Trump was.

The New York Times has a deep dive into the mounting cases we’re seeing across the country, summarizing the situation this way:

New known virus cases were on the rise in 23 states on Monday as the outlook worsened across much of the nation’s South and West. Hospitalizations for the coronavirus reached their highest levels yet in the pandemic in Arizona and Texas, and Missouri reported its highest single-day case totals over the weekend.

The Times analysis links rising cases to decisions to reopen too quickly, noting that the spike “underscores risks” that will “persist” if this pace of reopening continues. As one infectious-disease expert put it: “This is exactly what most people would expect when you lift stay-at-home orders and isolation orders.”

Importantly, this reopening, which Trump urged relentlessly, got its start by flouting CDC guidelines. In early May, when it got underway in earnest, more than half of states were reopening in defiance of CDC directives that cases should be on a “downward trajectory,” sparking criticism from public experts at the time.

Indeed, Trump had been pushing for a rapid reopening as early as March, when he had to be talked out of prematurely lifting his own government’s social distancing guidelines by his top health advisers.

“We have repeatedly seen President Trump ignore or contradict the advice of public health experts,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me. “It is one of the original sins of the U.S. response to the pandemic.”

Now Trump’s advisers think he can get away with blaming his own government for the spikes we’re currently seeing? Really?

To be clear, it is theoretically possible to envision a way in which a review of CDC’s conduct could be constructive. The CDC did in fact make some serious missteps, most notably its botching of various aspects of early testing efforts.

But Trump was far more of a contributor to the CDC’s failures than a victim of them. As a deep Times investigation concluded, the fact that Trump “wished away the pandemic” and tended to “dismiss findings from scientists” helped saddle the agency with “unprecedented challenges.”

More to the point, there is simply no chance that Trump will treat such a review in a genuine spirit of accountability — one in which he would accept part of the blame for his own government’s failures — rather than using it to entirely exonerate himself of any such accountability.

The man who unabashedly proclaimed, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the very testing failures that such a review would have to examine cannot claim to be seriously interested in any accounting into what went wrong.

Trump himself helpfully confirmed this, by tweeting the following:

Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2020

Trump is basically admitting that the actual number of cases doesn’t weigh on him in the least. He actively wants to create the illusion of fewer cases, and he’s openly advertising this goal to the world.

It’s remarkable that we’ve sunk to a level where such a tangle of presidential depravity and pathology needs to be untangled and interpreted. But obviously, the man who is blaming a surfeit of testing for the spike in cases — and the man who sees these rising numbers as solely a problem for him, ones that should thus be subject to manipulation downward, regardless of the human consequences that might have — cannot be taken seriously as a voice demanding accountability for any aspect of this catastrophe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/23/trumps-frantic-shifting-blame-coronavirus-has-hit-rock-bottom/

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I totally blame General Motors!!! LMAO