COVID-19 Update

The US will top over 7,000,000 cases some time tomorrow.

We have 4.2% of the world's population, and 22.4% of the world's COVID-19 cases.

USA

• New Cases:   42,533
• New Deaths:       657

Daily Beast:

‘We’re Not Scared’: Tens of Thousands of Motorcyclists Pack Lake of the Ozarks for Bike Rally
Motorcycle enthusiasts have descended on Lake of the Ozarks for the annual Bikefest, potentially turning the Missouri tourist destination into a COVID-19 hotspot

Along the Bagnell Dam Strip in the heart of the Lake of the Ozarks, thousands of motorcycles are tightly parked in the middle of a two-lane highway.

Tourists from across the country have been cutting loose along the historic stretch, known as the “main party hub” of the Missouri resort area, for months—but over the last three days, the highway lined with bars, hotels, and concert venues has been home to one of the largest motorcycle rallies in the Midwest: Lake of the Ozarks’ Bikefest.

Tens of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts have flooded the area for the annual rally, which started Wednesday, participating in five days of rides, fairs, music concerts, and coordinated stops at local bars and restaurants.

In one video from Thursday night, hundreds of patrons—most maskless—could be seen crowding into the strip’s bars and restaurants, clearly flouting federal social distancing recommendations. And Bikefest is not the only gathering at the lake this weekend. Hundreds are expected to show their support for President Trump at a boat parade taking place across the 92-mile-long lake.

“There are thousands of bikes here. A lot of people here—this weekend there will be even more people,” Dan Ousley, a 51-year-old local who has participated in Bikefest for years, told The Daily Beast. “It’s great to see. Honestly, I think that the COVID-19 thing is a little overblown, to be honest. We made national news for having large crowds, but we just want to live our life.”

Ousley, who is hosting a 15-mile “Bikefest-Trump parade” ride on Saturday that is expected to attract a couple hundred participants, admitted that local residents are “not real big on masks here,” because they don’t want to “infringe on anyone’s rights.”

“Around here, if people don’t want to go out and want to stay home, that’s totally fine. We’re all about freedom here,” he said. “We did the whole stay-at-home order thing and enough’s enough. People have to live and feed their families and life goes on.”

Health experts, however, are concerned that Bikefest, which was attended by 125,000 bikers last year, and the Trump boat parade will lead to a surge in the already fast-growing number of COVID-19 cases in Missouri, a state that even the White House has deemed in danger.

“For mass gatherings like this bike rally, it is very unlikely people are going to social distance. People are going to congregate from all over the country, and it will likely spur a chain of transmissions that has impacts in various different states,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who specializes in infectious diseases, told The Daily Beast. “It will be a major task for public health officials because it is very difficult to track this mobile population.”

The rally comes just weeks after the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, a 10-day event that attracted nearly a half-million visitors. The August gathering has since been deemed a coronavirus “super-spreader” event that infected hundreds and killed at least one biker.

- snip -

Since the state lifted its coronavirus restrictions in June, Missouri has seen COVID-19 cases climb. According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, 1,780 residents have died from the coronavirus and 110,129 more have been infected.

Now among the top 10 states for cases per capita, Missouri is currently battling a daily positive COVID-19 test rate of about 11 percent and an average of 1,000 new cases each day. The state, which does not have a mask mandate and has left all public health decisions up to local officials, has also seen record daily hospitalizations over the last week, according to data from the Missouri Hospital Association.

“As the number of COVID-19 cases in our community continues to climb, we again face a stark truth: This pandemic is not just happening somewhere else—it’s happening here,” CEO Dane Henry of Lake Regional Health System wrote in a July letter.

“Although many are wary of the national coverage and political debate about COVID-19, the fact is there are things you can and should do to protect yourself, your family, and others. Here’s why—we are now seeing widespread COVID-19 cases in each of the counties Lake Regional serves, as well as a recent uptick in the number of patients hospitalized with, and dying from, this illness.”

The rising number of cases has also put Missouri on the White House’s radar, according to a September report by the administration’s Coronavirus Task Force. The task force recommended that bars and some dining establishments be restricted in counties marked as “yellow” or “red” zones,” where there are higher rates of transmission.

The White House also recommended a mask mandate for Missouri—which Gov. Mike Parson publicly rejected.

We are The Stoopid Country.

Today's Pix

click

▼👀

Today's Quote

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination."

- Lindsey Graham

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." pic.twitter.com/quD1K5j9pz

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) September 19, 2020

COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases   51,000
• New Deaths       958

2 from WaPo (freebies):

CDC reverses controversial guidance, saying tests are for anyone who contacts someone with covid-19

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday reversed a heavily criticized guidance it issued last month about who should be tested for the novel coronavirus. The agency updated its recommendation to call for testing anyone — including people without symptoms — who has been in close contact with someone diagnosed with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

The change took place after the agency was directed last month by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to shift its testing guidance. The Task Force-directed guidance said those without symptoms "do not necessarily need a test.”

- and -

Trump’s appointees sought to censor what government scientists said about the coronavirus, emails show 

Michael Caputo and his adviser pressed them to use White House talking points as the pandemic raged out control

Trump political appointees tried to silence a longtime top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after she stressed the seriousness of the coronavirus, arguing her statements to a medical group contradicted those of top Trump administration officials, including Vice President Pence.

In a June 30 email, Paul Alexander, one of those appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services, excoriated Anne Schuchat, CDC principal deputy director, for remarks she made before the group affiliated with one of the nation’s leading medical journals. Schuchat, a physician, had spoken to JAMA Network the day before, saying she hoped the country could “take it seriously and slow the transmission,” adding that “we have way too much virus across the country … right now.” The emails were first reported by the New York Times.

Schuchat’s comments came as cases were surging across several southern and western states — even as the president and his top advisers were intent on reopening the country and boosting the economy. But Alexander wrote to his boss, Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, reprimanding Schuchat and writing a seven-point takedown of her assessment.

“Her comments are in contrast to those of senior members of the Trump administration — notably Vice President Pence, who said on Friday, ‘we have made truly remarkable progress,’" Alexander wrote.

“Importantly, having the virus spread among the young and healthy is one of the methods to drive herd immunity,” Alexander added. “She is duplicitous.”

Both Caputo and Alexander are now gone. But their emails offer new insight into how they created their own power center at the agency overseeing the pandemic response and used it to censor, and even humiliate, top scientists and health officials in an effort to sideline them or make them conform to White House-sanctioned messages. The tone of the emails is often emotional and accusatory, and they put more emphasis on the political import of the messages than on their medical or scientific substance, even as the virus raged out of control.

Mis-information is the main weapon that the Daddy State uses to exert its power. It's always about power, which isn't what makes the Daddy State different.

The difference is that a Daddy Stater is interested in gaining and using power for the sake of gaining and using power. He'll always try to dress it up and make it look like Law-n-Order or National Pride or A Higher Morality, or whatever, but it's never about anyone but himself, and it's never about anything but his own perverted sense of what he thinks of as prestige.

Daddy State Awareness Rules

PREAMBLE:

• The Daddy State tells us lies as a means of demonstrating its power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want ...

... SO THEY CAN DICTATE REALITY TO US.

Update Update

The new blogger interface still kinda sucks (altho I like the new fonts - a lot), and Google's responsiveness to my feedback really sucks.

COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases:  46,000
• New Deaths:      879

NYT:

C.D.C. Testing Guidance Was Published Against Scientists’ Objections

A controversial guideline saying people without Covid-19 symptoms didn’t need to get tested for the virus came from H.H.S. officials and skipped the C.D.C.’s scientific review process.

A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about who should be tested for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists and was posted to the agency’s website despite their serious objections, according to several people familiar with the matter as well as internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.

But officials told The Times this week that the Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process.

“That was a doc that came from the top down, from the H.H.S. and the task force,” said a federal official with knowledge of the matter, referring to the White House task force on the coronavirus. “That policy does not reflect what many people at the C.D.C. feel should be the policy.”

So while President Stoopid does indulge in spreading a lot of crappy info, he doesn't have to do that because his pals do it for him - his main job is to shrug and pretend it's all just opinion and nobody has to do anything they don't feel like doing, as long as what they're doing doesn't interfere with him getting what he wants.

That's pretty much where we are now - or where we're about to be. That's what this new(ish) Radical Libertarianism is - it's sold to us as the freedom to do what you want, but the way it works is: the freedom to do what you're told. 

And if I go along with it, I can deputize myself and assume the freedom to punish anyone for doing anything I think is in opposition to the dogma - remembering always that "the dogma" is a fairly simple matter of combining whatever Trump says, plus whatever I decide he means by what he says.

COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases:  40,000
• New Deaths:   1,150

WaPo:

Ten days: After an early coronavirus warning, Trump is distracted as he downplays threat

In explaining why he repeatedly misled the American public about the early dangers posed by the novel coronavirus, President Trump has argued that he did not want to engender panic — and suggested that his actions showed he took the looming pandemic seriously.

But a detailed review of the 10-day period from late January, when Trump was first warned about the scale of the threat, and early February — when he acknowledged to author Bob Woodward the extent of the danger the virus posed — reveals a president who took relatively few serious measures to ready the nation for its arrival.

Instead, enabled by top administration officials, Trump largely attempted to pretend the virus did not exist — spending much of his time distracted by impeachment and exacting vengeance on his political enemies. He also carried on as usual with showy political gatherings and crowded White House events.

The period would presage Trump’s disjointed and often dismissive approach to the virus in the months to come, as the president and his aides repeatedly sought to diminish the danger of a pandemic that has now claimed nearly 200,000 American lives while leaving millions more infected or out of work. Trump and White House officials disagree, arguing that the president took definitive steps in the early days of the virus that showed his resolve and helped limit the death toll.

Joe Grogan, former head of the Domestic Policy Council, said that the analyses now, more than half a year later, are “all ex post facto about where this was going to go.” Grogan said Trump was “focused on the issue but getting frustrated with others internally who were panicking about it because they were raising their voices and being hyperbolic.”

“The president didn’t want to panic people,” Grogan said. “Taking a step back, messaging was a challenge. Could we have done better as an administration? Yes. Could the president have done better? Perhaps.”

People who didn't have to die are dead, and they're gonna stick with, "Maybe we coulda done better, but gee whiz, let's not second guess ourselves - it is what it is." ?

That may cut it if you're doing a proper post mortem, and you're trying to make real corrections in the policy. But these assholes have no policy, and all they're doing is covering their asses by pretending they had nothing to do with this massive fucking fuckup.

On that final Tuesday in January, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien had warned Trump during a top-secret Oval Office briefing that the virus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.”

In the hours to come on Jan. 28, Trump appeared at the White House alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before heading to a campaign rally in Wildwood, N.J., where he did not mention the virus. The next day, Trump tweeted that his team was “on top of it 24/7!”

He flew later that week on Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago, where he spent the weekend golfing and hosted a Super Bowl bash at his private club in Palm Beach, Fla. Later, back in Washington, the president focused first on his State of the Union address and then on vanquishing his perceived rivals following the Senate’s vote to acquit him of impeachment charges.

His allies, too, publicly downplayed the coronavirus. Three days after O’Brien’s foreboding assessment, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar appeared in the White House briefing room and said “the risk of infection for Americans remains low.” O’Brien, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Sunday, offered a starkly different public analysis than the one he had shared privately with the president just days earlier.

“Right now, there’s no reason for Americans to panic,” O’Brien said. “This is something that is a low risk, we think, in the U.S.”

Ten days after O’Brien’s initial warning, Trump called Woodward and privately acknowledged the virus’s threat, including that it was airborne and thus highly contagious: “You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump told the journalist, according to Woodward’s new book, “Rage.” “It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. . . . This is deadly stuff.”

There are some public signs of action during the 10-day period. On Wednesday, Jan. 29, the administration announced the formation of a coronavirus task force, initially led by Azar. Briefed on the group, Trump offered an optimistic assessment over Twitter, saying he had just been updated by “all of our GREAT agencies.”

“We have the best experts anywhere in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!” he wrote.

But behind the scenes that same day, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote a memo offering a much grimmer assessment, warning that the virus could evolve “into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” It is unclear whether Trump ever saw that memo and others, and several White House aides dismissed the warnings from Navarro because of his broader antipathy toward China, where the virus originated.

That Thursday, Jan. 30, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency, and the first human-to-human transmission of the virus was documented in the United States — a couple in their 60s, living in Chicago. But speaking at a trade event in Warren, Mich., Trump devoted scant attention to the issue.

“Hopefully it won’t be as bad as some people think it could be,” Trump said, adding, “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for it.”

In this early period, Trump was receiving mixed messages from public health officials, including those at HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. Initially, the task force focused almost entirely on trying to keep the virus out of the country, rather than preparing for an all-but-certain outbreak in the United States, these people said.

At first, the White House did not have an empowered person to help organize the virus response and regulate who briefed the president, a former senior administration official said. The National Security Council in this early period also struggled, without someone with a clinical epidemiology or global health security background empowered to run the response or challenge health officials — a huge failing, this official added. Because of the glut of conflicting information, Trump simply picked what he wanted to be the truth, the official said.

On Friday, Jan. 31, the administration announced a temporary travel ban into the United States for foreign nationals who were in China 14 days prior. But Trump, concerned about spooking markets, had to be talked into the ban, which included exemptions for U.S. citizens and others that still allowed tens of thousands of travelers to enter the country from China.

That same day, in a news conference that Trump did not attend, Azar announced that the coronavirus was “a public health emergency” while simultaneously minimizing the threat. “I want to stress: The risk of infection for Americans remains low,” he said. “And with these and our previous actions, we are working to keep the risk low.”

About a half-hour after Azar concluded, Trump boarded Marine One to head to Mar-a-Lago with plans for golf. On Saturday, Feb. 1, the president tweeted a photo of himself on the greens — white polo, red “Keep America Great” hat — enthusing, “Getting a little exercise this morning!” He also sat for a two-part interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, although the coronavirus barely came up.

“Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump told Hannity, when the host asked him how concerned he was about the virus — eight cases of which had so far been reported in the country.

On Sunday, Feb. 2, as O’Brien appeared on “Face The Nation,” the president visited Trump International Golf Club for another day on the links.

That evening, before returning to Washington, Trump hosted a Super Bowl party at his club, complete with cheerleaders shaking pompoms, the Florida Atlantic University marching band and an oversize likeness of Trump dressed as a football player, wearing a red jersey emblazoned with the number “45.”

Behind the scenes, however, some in Trump’s orbit were showing signs of concern. The day before the O’Brien briefing, staffers gathered in then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s office for a meeting to begin discussing the administration’s response to the virus, spurred by “a realization that we weren’t doing enough,” a senior official present at the meeting explained. And first lady Melania Trump in early February began privately raising concerns about her husband’s planned trip to India at the end of the month, worried about the spreading virus, two officials said.

The White House defended Trump’s early approach to the coronavirus.

“President Trump took the virus seriously from the beginning as evidenced by his administration taking early steps in January to protect the American people, including issuing travel advisories for Wuhan, China, on Jan. 6, implementing screenings at airports on Jan. 17, forming the Coronavirus Task Force on Jan. 29, declaring a public health emergency on Jan. 31, and taking the unprecedented step of halting travel from China on Jan. 31,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said in an email statement, adding: “All the while, Democrats and the media were obsessing over the partisan and futile impeachment trial while falsely accusing the President of being a racist or a fearmonger.”

A senior White House official added that especially in the pandemic’s early days, the administration was grappling with “an unprecedented moment on the global stage,” including misinformation and supply hoarding by China and incorrect projections from the WHO.

A second White House official sent along a list of two dozen actions the administration took in January and February to fight the virus, including the CDC repeatedly offering help to China, various travel advisories and beginning work on a vaccine.

Trump’s public schedule on Monday, Feb. 3, consisted of one item — his private weekly lunch with Vice President Pence. That Tuesday, the president delivered his State of the Union address before Congress, devoting two subdued lines to the coronavirus.

“We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China,” Trump said in his address. “My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said Trump’s response to the virus — and specifically his decision to deliberately downplay the threat — “is an example of everything you should not do if you are the president of the United States and a pandemic of an emerging virus occurs.”

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said. “I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”

“It’s not good to sit on information like that, and it’s even worse when somebody does what President Trump did,” Rasmussen said. “He didn’t only maintain calm; he completely dismissed the threat and actively encouraged the opposite of what people should be doing.”

On Wednesday, Feb. 5, administration officials — including Azar and Mulvaney — traveled to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on the virus. But some found the briefing deeply unsatisfactory, including Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who later tweeted that the administration “wasn’t taking this seriously enough.”

“Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake,” Murphy wrote.

The president, meanwhile, was focused on another event that day: the Senate vote to acquit him of impeachment charges that he abused the powers of the presidency and obstructed Congress as it investigated his attempts to pressure Ukraine into political investigations to damage Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Trump celebrated his acquittal at the White House with his lawyers, while a coterie of his top advisers — then-counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; staff secretary and counselor to the president Derek Lyons; Mark Meadows, Trump’s current chief of staff; and O’Brien — headed several blocks east to the Trump International Hotel. There, in a private room, the coronavirus was hardly the central focus as they clinked glasses and shared reminiscences, a former senior administration official said.

On Thursday, Feb. 6, the first U.S. coronavirus death occurred in Santa Clara County, Calif., although the cause of death was announced only retroactively. The CDC also began shipping the virus test kits it had developed across the country — but because of substandard practices, the kits were contaminated and unusable.

That same day, Trump spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast but did not mention the virus, nor did he mention it later that day, when he offered celebratory remarks at the White House on his impeachment acquittal and railed against his enemies, real and perceived.

Trump was in a vengeful mood that week, looking to remove aides and so-called “Deep Staters” who he said had crossed him during impeachment. One adviser who spoke to Trump that Thursday said the president was “clamoring to get rid of the people in the government who were against him,” making moves against two of them.

That Friday, Feb. 7, Trump tapped out a pair of tweets about a conversation he had the previous night with Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying he believed Xi would be successful in combating the virus, “especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone.”

Trump also phoned Woodward that day, saying what he had withheld from the American people for more than a week, at least twice calling the virus “deadly.”

Former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said the president should have communicated to the American public in real time what was happening with the virus and helped the nation understand how to ameliorate the threat.

“Anyone who is still defending how President Trump messaged this virus is delusional,” Bossert said. “Was he right to think that a leader should downplay this and say don’t panic? He’s wrong.”

Here Kitty Kitty

 Siberian tiger.

45* Is A Mirage

This "president" doesn't hold up under any kind of scrutiny.

If the "debates" are properly staged, and there's any kind of fact-checking or honest journalism going on, 45* will wilt like a slug on a hot driveway.

The town hall thing ABC held the other night didn't go too well, even though DumFux News tried mightily to prop it up and sell it to the rubes as something it totally wasn't.

WaPo:

President Trump deigned to take hard questions at a town hall on Tuesday night, and the verdict of his propagandists is in: Trump was treated with hideous unfairness even as he managed to convert the spectacle into a triumph through sheer force of his forthrightness and deep benevolence.

After Trump appeared at the ABC News forum, which featured Pennsylvania voters questioning Trump, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham pronounced the affair an “ambush” that could have been staged by the Democratic National Committee. The Fox chyron read:

"ABC SPRINGS AMBUSH ON PRES TRUMP AT TOWN HALL"

This response, and the town hall itself, capture a larger truth about the moment. When Trump is not permitted to freely dissemble with abandon or coddled by an interviewer who treats his magnificence as a foundational premise — as he so often is on Fox — he is actually very bad at answering difficult questions about his performance.

The notion that this spectacle constituted an “ambush” underscores the point: If this felt like a surprise attack, it’s only because direct and persistent questioning about his towering failures and broken promises really are politically damaging to him.

Follow-up questions are deadly

The questions from voters and moderator George Stephanopoulos were pointed, but they were largely premised on basic facts about Trump’s presidency. Over and over, Trump tried to lie away those facts, but (and this is the rare part) he was then pressed with follow-up questions based on more facts.

For instance, one woman asked Trump why he downplayed the coronavirus. When he repeated his frequent lie that he didn’t downplay it (he did, endlessly), she responded that he had admitted downplaying it himself, which he did in fact admit to Bob Woodward.

When Trump claimed our coronavirus mortality rate shows we have done “very well” compared to other countries, Stephanopoulous produced a chart debunking the claim, and pointed out that we have 4 percent of the world’s population and more than 20 percent of cases and deaths.

Trump spewed lots of other coronavirus nonsense, as Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler documents: He falsely claimed he’d inherited a ventilator shortage, absurdly blamed our high cases on testing (another area of national failure), and dramatically overstated the impact of his China travel restrictions (his weeks of dithering let the virus rampage here after that).

But some of the most damaging moments of all concerned health care.

After a woman with a preexisting condition pointedly asked Trump how he’d protect people like her, a remarkable exchange followed, in which Stephanopoulos pointed out that the Affordable Care Act contains extensive such protections, that Trump has repeatedly tried to repeal it, and that he supports a lawsuit that would wipe it out right now.

Trump kept saying over and over that he has his own secret health-care plan. But as Stephanopoulos noted, Trump has been promising a plan for a very long time, and it hasn’t materialized.

The whole exchange is worth watching and should loom large in the remainder of the campaign:

CNN Fact Check:

“I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan,” Trump insisted, demonstrating a level of contempt for the intelligence of voters that countless of them will find insulting. But, notably, Trump was pushed to this point of self-incriminating absurdity by hard questions.

To top it all off, Trump again insisted the coronavirus will just go away, and actually said the public will develop a “herd mentality,” when he meant herd immunity. That not only hints at his contempt for voters; it also demonstrated — along with that health-care exchange — his lack of real answers to our most pressing challenges.

Yet, after all this, Trump’s pollster told Ingraham that Trump had “answered those questions,” while hailing him for demonstrating “empathy.” That was a reference to an exchange in which Trump showed the bare minimum of humanity toward a woman who’d lost her mother — before abruptly pivoting to blaming China!

But Ingraham appeared to understand how damaging this had been. Baffled, she likened the questioning to the work of the “Trump resistance,” and asked: “Why did the president decide to do this?”

Yes, why did Trump expose himself to difficult questions about his record from voters, anyway? Didn’t he know in advance how risky this could be?

Big holes in the protective shield

Remember, Trump himself believes he’s entitled to his very own 24/7 propaganda network that doesn’t commit such heresies. When Fox News lapses from its role in that regard, which it sometimes does, Trump rages at it as a form of profound betrayal.

Indeed, last year a Fox anchor felt compelled to respond to Trump’s fury over this by clarifying, “Mr. President, we don’t work for you,” while admitting that many Trump supporters had come to expect and demand that the network show absolute fealty to him.

In a way, the Tuesday night town hall really was an ambush. It was an ambush of facts and follow-up questions that blew more big holes in the protective shield his propagandists have tried to construct around a record of extraordinary failure.

Overheard

It's OK to kick a pregnant woman.

As long as you do it from the inside.