Trump's MAGA: An Anti-Intellectual Shit-Hole Country of Citizens Encouraged to Kill One Another in His Civil War

Trump's Tweets of Fury Are Dividing America for Trump to Conquer and Rule

No Great Nation Has Ever Ended so Stupidly: That's Why if Trump is Successful 

The United States Will Not Be Classified as One of the Great Historical Nations

Trump Seeks ‘Law and Order’ in Tweetstorm on Portland Death

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump unleashed a tweetstorm early Sunday about Portland, Oregon, hours after a man was killed there during clashes between a large group of Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

The string of messages enlivened criticism from Democrats, including presidential candidate Joe Biden, that Trump is looking to inflame unrest in U.S. cities because he believes it will help his re-election campaign.

“I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same,” Biden said in a statement Sunday. “It is not a peaceful protest when you go out spoiling for a fight.”

Biden said “the job of a president is to lower the temperature” and Trump’s “failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is.”

Wheeler, the Portland mayor, hit back at Trump during a press conference. “It’s you who have created the hate and the division,” Wheeler said of the president. “You’ve tried to divide us more than any other figure in modern history. And now you want me to stop the violence that you helped create.”

Read the Full Story Here: By Ros Krasny  43 mins ago

Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Scientists Over a Covid-19 Treatment

President Trump’s accusatory tweet barreled in at 7:49 a.m. a week ago Saturday: The “deep state” at the Food and Drug Administration was trying to sandbag his election prospects by slowing progress on coronavirus treatments and vaccines until after Nov. 3.

Shocked and upset, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who was tagged in the tweet, immediately began calling his contacts at the White House to find out why the president was angry. During his conversations, he mentioned the FDA was on the verge of granting emergency authorization to convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19. The agency planned to issue a news release.

The White House would upend those plans, turning a preliminary finding of modest efficacy into something much bigger — a presidential announcement of a “major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus,” as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany previewed in a tweet late that Saturday night.

At a news conference on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump lauded an emergency authorization for convalescent plasma as a “very historic breakthrough.” Hahn, who had rushed back to Washington from a family home in Colorado, was initially restrained but then doubled down on Trump’s talking points. He said that 35 of 100 people with Covid-19 “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma”— a gross overstatement denounced by scientists and public health experts.

The misrepresentations became a stunning debacle for the FDA, shaking its professional staff to the core and undermining its credibility as it approaches one of the most important and fraught decisions in its history amid a divisive presidential election — deciding when a covid-19 vaccine is safe and effective. Yet again, the president had harnessed the machinery of government to advance his political agenda — with potentially corrosive effects on public trust in government scientists’ handling of the pandemic.

Hahn apologized the following day for misspeaking, saying on Twitter, “The criticism is entirely justified.” But demoralized employees felt he had allowed the agency to become a prop in the president’s reelection campaign — a bit player in a reality TV show scripted by political operatives, not scientists, according to several people familiar with their thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect them from retaliation.

It wasn’t so much the inaccurate use of 35 percent — anyone can make an error. What rankled agency insiders was the way a defensible FDA decision to authorize an incremental advance for a disease with few treatments was being described as a huge leap forward in an over-the-top White House rollout. How, they wondered, would the FDA have any credibility on a vaccine decision if it bungled something much simpler?

“There is this weird Stockholm syndrome where FDA higher-ups are starting to identify with their captors,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “ … It’s not clear they’re going to do the right thing.”

The incident was just the latest misstep for the FDA, following flip-flops earlier this year on authorizing and then revoking clearance for the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and its initial decision not to regulate Covid-19 antibody tests.

It also feeds a long-running narrative of a White House repeatedly undermining its health and science experts, not just at the FDA but also at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, the CDC came under fire from a host of medical and public health groups and infectious-disease experts for an abrupt change to its guidelines that no longer recommend testing for asymptomatic people even if they had contact with an infected individual — a shift that coincides with the president’s stated desire to reduce testing.

“I’ve been following health regulatory decisions for decades and have never seen this amount of White House arm twisting to force agencies like FDA and CDC to make decisions based on political pressure, rather than the best science,” said Jerome Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who decried the “routine policy distortions we now see nearly every week.”

Read the Full Story Here By McGinley, Abutaleb, Dawsey, & Johnson