Turkey Trot

 

Illustration via Quartz, April 2017.

I'll get to Trump in a minute, but first: imagine you're Vice President Joe Biden, August 2016, on an official visit to Turkey five or so weeks after the coup attempt in Turkey that July, and President Erdoğan gets you under a tree at some point and starts complaining about this state-owned bank, Halkbank, that the New York Southern District is investigating for evading US law by smuggling billions of dollars' worth of gold and other commodities into the sanctioned Islamic Republican of Iran—they've already indicted a guy, Reza Zarrab, and Erdoğan claims the whole thing is a hoax invented by his enemy the cult leader in Pennsylvania, and can Biden please get Obama to make it go away by firing the US attorney in the case, Preet Bharara, and the judge, and extradite the cult leader because he's the one who did the coup as well?

(It's also widely believed in a variety of places that the cleric in question, Fethullah Gulén, had in fact nothing to do with the coup, which Erdoğan has been using in the four years since as a kind of personal Reichstag Fire enabling him to move against all sorts of perceived enemies, depriving them of their livelihoods and public voices and jailing tens of thousands, and Erdoğan's regime has been credibly accused of a practice not at all distant from Vladimir Putin's or Donald Trump's of "post-truth politics".)

We know how Joe responded to the last bit, thanks to this big Times report by Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, and also because the answer is publicly available: with a courteous, but firm no: Sorry man, but no can do:

In Which David F. Brooks Undergoes a Self-Criticism

 

Cultural Revolution image via Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

No kidding. After decades of refusing to apologize for denying the existence of racism, promoting the sliming of Bill Clinton without having any clue what the so-called "Whitewater scandal" was actually about, backing the Iraq War ferociously and then, when that had become impossible, blaming it on everyone else, and spreading completely wrong misinformation on everything from whether "Asians and Westerners think differently" to the menu at Applebees, he's acknowledging having been wrong about something. He may have been too mean to Donald Trump, in the course of his career as a member of the "anti-Trump camp (The Floor of Decency"):

Nobody has emerged unscathed. Those of us in the anti-Trump camp will be smiled upon by history I imagine, but we might pause for a moment to consider the mote in our own eye. Our own sins are the only ones we can control.

Over the past four years we’ve poured out an hourly flow of anti-Trump diatribes and in almost every case they rise to the top of the charts — most liked, most retweeted, most read.

Even when justified, permanent indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe. Trump-bashing has become a business model.

Isn't that special.

Those rats won't fck themselves

 

Via.

Me, on 28 October 2016:

There is no chance, as far as I'm concerned, and based on what actual journalists are reporting, that the FBI has any new information that is of any relevance to the question whether or not Hillary Clinton ought to be president, regardless of your feelings about that question, since the emails that "may have been related to" Clinton's private server, which Huma Abedin seems to have chosen to print from a home laptop that was also used by Anthony Weiner to transmit pictures of his penis, or not, as the case may be, are neither from Clinton nor to Clinton, and are absolutely not documents that have been withheld from the investigation; the FBI is already perfectly familiar with their content, at least so far (there are thousands, naturally, and it will take many weeks, until long after the election is over, to finish looking at them). They could conceivably be relevant to the question whether Huma Abedin mishandled classified data, but nobody's saying that there's any likelihood of that either; they're just checking them out from an "abundance of caution".

Comey's conduct in making this non-information public 11 days before the presidential election is said to be from an "abundance of caution" too, or, as we say in English, covering his ass against accusations that he ended the Clinton investigation too early, just in case the Bureau does somehow learn something of interest to somebody. Yes, it's really improbable, but Comey's going to be ready. Not only does he wear a belt and suspenders but he also has his trousers surgically attached to his waist and ankles:

“In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season,” he noted, “there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”

(Via Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker, which you need to read.) Comey seems to think the worst thing that could ever happen to our republic would be if somebody criticized him. With the result, naturally, that he comes in for a lot of criticism, much of it very richly deserved. 

OK so I was wrong about how long it would take for FBI to go through the material (it took exactly just long enough to poison the electorate and ended just in time for Comey to pretend it hadn't done that), and I was obviously wrong about whether this nonsense could affect the vote outcome (Steve was more doubtful). But I was right about the utter nullity of the scandal.

Me, almost exactly four years later:

Brand Coherence

Joe Biden approved this message.

Over at Steve's they're talking about these darn mild-mannered Democrats who never say anything mean and those terrific Republican rat bastards Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt and Dr. Bill Kristol who tell it like it is with their Lincoln Project and show us how the pros do it and why can't we have some more of that inside the party and I just don't know.

You know where.

I do know I specifically don't want Joe Biden to go around pretending to be a mean person, if only because—duh—he's not going to do it very well. And we're stuck with him, if you want to look at it that way, so there's not much point. But he has his virtues too, and they aren't doing too badly, if you've been looking at the polls. He's consistently ahead, 9.2 percentage points today, with an absolute majority (51.8% to Trump's 43.1%), meaning that even if the election were held today and Trump got all the undecided votes Biden would still have a majority (as we know that doesn't mean winning the presidency, but Samuel Tilden in 1876 was the only candidate who ever lost that way, with an edge of 50.9%, and it wasn't the Electoral College but his party literally selling him out), but that's not happening:

Literary Corner: Does That Make Sense Now?

Drawing by Mike Luckovitch, via Orlando Sun-Sentinel.

Death, Death—Cases, Cases

by Donald J. Trump

Now it used to be that if you had it, you were immune for life,

right? For life. With me, they say I’m immune for four months.

In other words, once I got it, the immunity went down from life to

four months. I don’t know. They don’t know either. Who the hell

knows? All I know is that for a little while, for at least four months,

I could run in there and kiss everyone, men and women. I’ll kiss

every one of them. I’ll kiss them. No, no. You get over it, then

you’re immune, for whatever period of time. No, it’s true,

though. You heard, for life, you’re immune. Right? That’d be it.

As soon as I got, I said I was immune, they said, “Only for four months.”

They brought it down to four months because that’s the fake news.

They’re fake. The cases are up, but listen to this, they’re all

talking about cases. You don’t see death, death—cases, cases.

You know why we have cases? Because we test so much. And in

many ways, it’s good. And in many ways, it’s foolish. In many ways,

it’s very foolish, because every time you test… Like, for instance,

Barron Trump. Did you ever hear of Barron Trump? He’s a rather

tall young man. He’s tall, and he’s a good kid, and he’s strong,

but he had it. They said, “Sir, Madam, I’m sorry to inform you

your son has tested positive, apparently.” I said, “Oh no.”

Fifteen seconds later, “Sir, your son no longer has it.” No,

it’s true. I said, “How’s Barron doing?” “Oh, he’s fine.

He’s fine.” I said, “What do you mean? You just don’t…”

No, he’s fine. They have a very strong immune system. Ninety-nine

point nine something, right? Ninety-nine point nine. Go back

to the school, North Carolina. Go back to the school. Barron Trump.

A legend. He’s a legend, he got rid of it so fast, but the kids get

rid of it fast. Strong immune systems. The mortality rate is down

eighty-five percent because of the therapeutics and all that they

learned. I mean, they know what to do. In other words, by doing

all of this testing, we’re the best in the world, the most…

I get calls all the time from leaders, “Your testing is the

best in the world.” I said, “Do you test?” “No.” I said,

“You don’t test?” “No.” “That’s why you have no cases.”

Well, very few cases. You know, the cases they have, when

somebody’s sick, they call it a case. I said to one gentleman

that’s very tough, very tough man, runs a tough country,

I said, “Do you test?” “Yes. When somebody comes into the

hospital and throws up all over the floor, we test, but we never

test other than that.” I said, “So you have cases.” “No, we show

very few cases.” So we show more cases because we test. So Barron

Trump, as an example, it’s a case. All the kids are a case. And by the way,

they’re very young now. They’re testing schools and high schools

and this and that and every… And what it does is it gives the

fake news media something to talk about. So they say,

“Cases are up in the United States.” That’s because we test.

India has one point five million people and they do testing. They

test a tiny fraction of the number of people that we test.

So the good is that we know where it is, et cetera, and we

have to protect our seniors, and that’s really the most

important thing. But when you see all this stuff, watch,

they’ll go home, “Cases are up, cases are up.” And I saw it

today, but that’s because of tests. Does that make sense now? If we

cut it in half… And by the way, wasting a lot of money on testing

too We're not allowed to say that. We’re not allowed to say,

“We’re spending millions of dollars on testing.” But if we tested,

half, cases would be half, and they’d have a headline, “Cases

drop magnificently,” but they want us to test, test, test.

(Rally, Lumberton, North Carolina, 24 October)

Dr. Douthat and Mr. Ross

Illustration via Wikipedia.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has come up with the perfect allegorical representation ("The Last Temptation of NeverTrump") of his shtik: as an interior dialogue between his divided selves, the weary preppy of the surface, in roman type, and the alt-right maniac of the depths, urging a vote for Trump, in italics. 

Ah, sure — you’re my right-wing id. And let me guess — you want to make the case that I should vote for Trump? I figured the coronavirus experience had shamed you into silence.

Shame is what you should feel, sellout. Look, I get that you’re a lost cause. But someone needs to tell you that you’re going to miss Trump when he’s gone.

Douthat, you see, doesn't endorse Trump—he's just saying. But the endorsement's in there and has to come out. He's far too proper to do anything as disgraceful as voting for Trump himself—

He’s a bigot and an aggressive liar, he winks at violence, and he’s exacerbated one of his party’s worst tendencies, its obsession with the minor threat of voter fraud and its eagerness to throw up impediments to voting. What he’s given to cultural conservatives with the courts, he’s taken by making us seem like hypocrites and making embarrassments like Jerry Falwell Jr. the face of conservative Christendom. He’s radicalized young people and empowered some truly terrible tendencies on the left that will reshape American institutions deep into Amy Coney Barrett’s old age. And I haven’t even gotten to the coronavirus.

—but he hopes people won't agree with him too much:

For the Record: Why the Affordable Care Act Will Survive

Photo by CQ Roll Call via Forbes.

 

 A heavy Twitter day, sorry. Some more arguments with friends:

There's too much Grassley in it. We need to get it rewritten by a committee with fewer Republicans.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

That I have never believed. Huge financialized corporations--hospitals, insurers--have a very big stake in preserving it, and finding for Texas would cause serious chaos https://t.co/kdHUAkVLFi. The Court cares more about them than it does about Trump.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

For the Record: Debate Takes

 

The Debate (2017), by the Filipino painter Gerry Joquico, via ArtAnton.

Earlier in the evening, I had a kind of kerfuffle with our dear friend Bos over the framing of our attack on Trump's China business, where I think the prevailing rhetoric emphasizes the points that aren't important at all for the sake of a sound bite that really doesn't end up meaning anything:

Hard to say how it means something important. Certainly the one thing he did with the account deserves a lot of investigation, but it's not ready to publish. pic.twitter.com/G7DmBxi9ao

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 22, 2020

I don't know. Many people have foreign accounts. He disclosed it to IRS. He pays more in taxes because Chinese law is more effective against tax dodging.

He doesn't keep a lot of money in it. Except that one time he seems to have laundered $15+ million. That part is interesting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 22, 2020

I had a Singapore checking account for a couple of years after I came back to the States, and I really didn't mean any harm.

Flooding the Zone

 

Via ZDNet.

I'm going to be really skeptical in all directions about the report on Iranian interference in the election from our notoriously unqualified Director of National Intelligence, ex-Congressman John Ratcliffe, who got Trump's attention in 2017-18 alongside Devin Nunes as the two of them worked to turn the House Intelligence Committee into an adjunct of the Trump campaign, was criticized for not coming close to meeting the statutory requirements for the job

50 US Code § 3023, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

and lying about it in the most ridiculous way

Trumpfendämmerung

 

The original Zoom debate, from the Democratic primary campaign in New York's 14th congressional district, 20 May 2020, screenshot by Mashable.

No, I'm not going to waste my time on a virtual debate. That's not what debating's all about. You sit behind a computer and do a debate is ridiculous. And they cut you off whenever they want.

Donald J. Trump, 8 October, rejecting the format proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates for the scheduled 15 October town hall–style debate in Miami, after Trump's Covid-19 infection raised safety concerns. I can't find out anything about the role computers were supposed to play in the proceedings—the CPD's statement didn't mention this—but it must have been discussed in the course of the CPD negotiations with the two campaigns, and that's where Trump got it.

My idea is that it was really going to be a Zoom debate, as suggested originally by Mashable and later backed up by Fox Business, Vice, Catholic University's The Tower, and I don't know who else—Fox was the most authoritative, citing Mitch McConnell and the Trump campaign's Mica Mosbacher—and Trump was thrown into a panic, not by the thought that the moderator was going to have a mute button (he's accepted that, at least for part of the time, for Thursday's debate), but because he might have to operate one himself; that he might be required to touch a key or click a mouse, hands at the console and face at the camera, and he was certain he would screw it up.

Malarkey Factory

 

It’s not complicated—Vote for Joe if you want to save America and democracy.

And watch this. It’s wonderful. 💖 https://t.co/VIBTkix0v9

— Pam Resists (@ResisterForever) October 19, 2020

I may be finding this Matt Viser/Washington Post story a little more reassuring than I should, but I'm glad to learn the Biden campaign has a multimillion-dollar "Malarkey Factory" combating disinformation, and very glad to get an explanation of what kinds of disinformation they decide to combat:

Swiss Miss

Via CEFA Aviation.

This is a couple of weeks old already, but I just heard about it on the radio, a Covid piece by Dr. Jonathan Schiffer ("Against Covid-19, Imperfect Measures Do the Most Good"), and it's a bit cheering: 

Schiffer, an associate professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, discusses the benefits of some effective, although far from flawless, tools in the battle against COVID-19. It’s an approach that reminds him of swiss cheese, he says, because “each of these strategies has holes but, if you apply all of them, fewer infections break through.”

The Swiss cheese is a reference to a kind of biz school model of risk assessment, envisaging safeguards against harm as an array of cheese slices, each of which blocks the oncoming threat except where it has holes; if each slice comes from a different part of the cheese, its holes are in different places, so if you have enough of them you can block just about everything (see illustration).

So if all our tools are flawed, all of them—the washing of hands and wiping down of surfaces, the masks, the distancing, the testing and tracing, the quarantine, the temperature check, eventually the vaccine that may be as little as 50% effective—have flaws in different places. I was inclined to feel despair at the thought of a vaccine that's only 50% effective, and I still see 70% would be a lot better, but the point is that trying to get where you need to go with the perfect method, the one that doesn't have any flaws at all, is a mistake—it's really better to have imperfect techniques, if you have a bunch of them.

Literary Corner: There Are Some Very Fine Anti-Pedophiles

Via Encyclopedia of Alabama,

I Know Nothing

by Donald J. Trump

(Let me ask you about QAnon.
It is this theory that Democrats
are a satanic pedophile ring
and that you are the savior, of that.
Now can you just, once and for all,
state that that is completely not true, and—)

I know very little.
You told me, but what you tell me
doesn't necessarily make it fact.
I hate to say that.

I know nothing about it.

I do know they are very much against pedophilia.

They fight it very hard.

But I know nothing about it.

If you’d like me to study the subject,

I’ll tell you what I do know about.

I know about Antifa,

and I know about the radical left,

and I know how violent they are

and how vicious they are.

And I know how they are burning down
cities run by Democrats,
not run by Republicans.

For a pronominal consideration

Georg Baselitz, "Portrait of Elke I", 1969. Via.

David F. Brooks, "How to Actually Make America Great":

The frequency of the word “I” in American books, according to Putnam and Garrett, doubled between 1965 and 2008. The authors are careful not to put it into moralistic terms, but I’d say that, starting in the late 1960s, there was left wing self-centeredness in the social and lifestyle sphere and right wing self-centeredness in the economic sphere, with a lack of support for common-good public policies. But it was socially celebrated self-centeredness all the way across. It was based on a fallacy: If we all do our own thing, everything will work out well for everybody.

Robert Putnam, "with" Shaylyn Romney Garrett, in The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, are careful not to put it into moralistic terms, but David Brooks will happily fix that. 

His own use of "I" in his column has diminished by a good 70% since 24 September ("How Faith Shapes My Politics"), when he used it 19 times, to today, when there are only six (excluding four cases of "'I'" in quotes, which is technically not using the word, to refer to himself, but mentioning it, as a word people use). But I digress.

Horse Race Junk: Wave Multipliers

Image from Hotel News Resource. Fight me.

Trying to count the different kinds of waves. There's this geographical one signaled by southerner Ed Kilgore as "Jimmy Carter's revenge", where a multiracial progressive Democratic coalition is making really shocking inroads from Virginia and North Carolina through Florida to Georgia, and now extraordinarily looking powerful in Texas and South Carolina of all places:

Like Georgia, Texas is a state where Democrats made startling urban and suburban gains in 2018 and seem to be approaching a demographic tipping point. They flipped two House seats despite a heavily gerrymandered district map and improved their vote share almost everywhere, while Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke broke fundraising records and threw a serious scare into Ted Cruz. And that midterm election built on the gains of 2016, when Hillary Clinton reduced Barack Obama’s 15-point margin of defeat in 2012 to less than nine points.

Even in South Carolina, where the South’s conservative Republican revolution really began when the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond joined the GOP in 1964, the same coalition of Black and upscale white suburban voters is beginning to make serious inroads into Republican rule. This year, Democrat Jaime Harrison, one of the most prodigious fundraisers in U.S. political history, is running even in the polls with veteran Republican senator Lindsey Graham. No Democrat has won a Senate or gubernatorial race in the Palmetto State since 1998.

And the astonishing turn of older voters toward Biden in the wake of Trump's crazy mishandling of a murderous plague bringing Florida and Arizona within reach:

One step back, two steps forward

There was a big and humiliatingly stupid error in my Saturday post on DNI John Ratcliffe's attempts to use selective declassification of classified material to make it look as if Hillary Clinton had engaged in some kind of collusion with Russian intelligence agencies: when I said the meeting at which CIA director John Brennan took the handwritten notes released by Ratcliffe took place on 28 July 2016.

I think I must have gotten it, appropriately enough, from hack attorney Jonathan Turley, who said so in his post of last Wednesday:

Brennan’s handwritten notes would seem extremely serious on their face. It certainly indicates that Brennan considered the issue sufficiently serious to brief the President of the United States on July 28th. The notes state

“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. . . CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

But it also could have come from Dan Friedman at Mother Jones:

Acting on orders from Trump, Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified notes from former CIA Director John Brennan indicating that on July 28, 2016, Brennan had told President Barack Obama about US intelligence findings related to Russia. These finding included information suggesting that Russian intelligence analysis said that Hillary Clinton had approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” This same intelligence was apparently the basis of documents declassified by Ratcliffe last week that describe Russian claims that Clinton’s campaign wanted to highlight Trump’s Russian ties as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Both probably got the idea from some bad editing at the Fox News website's version of the story, according to which

Literary Corner: Have You Herd?

 

Protective Glow

by Donald J. Trump

I

It seems like I’m immune,
so I can go way out of a basement,
which I would have done anyway.

The president is in very good shape
to fight the battles.
I beat this crazy horrible China virus…

II

I passed the highest test,
the highest standards,
and I’m in great shape.

And I have to tell you I feel fantastically.
I really feel good.

Maybe a long time, maybe a short time.
It could be a lifetime.
Nobody really knows, but I’m immune.

III

I even feel good by the fact that, you know,
the word ‘immunity’ means something.
Having really a protective glow means something.

I think it’s very important to have that.
To have that is a very important thing.

Maybe a long time, maybe a short time.
It could be a lifetime.
Nobody really knows, but I’m immune.

I too feel good by the fact that "immunity" means something. I've always been attached to the idea of words having meaning. But "protective glow" may be taking it a little too far.

For the Record: Tenth Justice

 

Stephen Johnson Field of California, the last 10th Justice. Via Wikipedia.

By the way, y'all know who succeeded in packing the Supreme Court? Did you know that it actually happened?

She didn't fabricate a quote, she backed an incorrect interpretation.

BTW a better interpretation shows how much smarter Lincoln was than Trump, who shot his wad before Justice Ginsburg's funeral and gained zero votes pic.twitter.com/UcydNGChvo

— Ghastly Blyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2020

It was Congress that established the 10th seat (partly to help administer the newly established 10th Circuit of California and Oregon, but partly to rebalance the overly conservative Court of Dred Scott CJ Roger Taney).

— Ghastly Blyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2020

Later, after Taney's death, Lincoln replaced him with a more "leftist" Justice, his Radical Republican Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase as CJ.

— Ghastly Blyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2020

If Biden expands the Court, I would expect it to be after the style of Lincoln and Obama: only with a push from Congress, and in all probability naming a conservative to the new seat (a NeverTrumper, hopefully not approved by Federalist Society but no leftist).

— Ghastly Blyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2020

But replacing Thomas or Alito, if that turned out to be possible (those guys are always spreading the story that they'd like to retire, but they never go through with it) with somebody more fun, and maybe reverting to nine justices when the crisis is over, as happened in the 1860s. In any case I really wish it would happen, and your sacred historical authority is right here, for your reading pleasure. They did this thing, and it didn't destroy the Republic. It didn't even change it as much as one might like.

Negative Thereness

In Everybody's Autobiography (1937) Gertrude Stein complained about her native Oakland “...what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” But somebody finally supplied one—photo by Joe Sciarillo.

I need to make a confession: I'm the one who started the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. I mean, alongside Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, CIA director John O. Brennan, and our handlers in Russian intelligence and, frankly, a whole lot of other people, most of whom aren't even aware that we had Russian handlers. If current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe knows what he's talking about. 

I don't know what he's talking about, but just saying: Krugman's New York Times column ("Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate") of 22 July 2016, Josh Marshall's blogpost ("Trump & Putin: Yes, It's Really a Thing") of the following day—

Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

—and my own post on the 24th ("As a Notorious Billionaire Once Said, Just What in the Hell Is Going On") 

The Reality

 

Illustration by Todd St. John from The New Yorker (Jane Mayer's prescient piece of October 2017 on the prospect of a President Pence).

Page:

Vice President Pence, more than 210,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since February. The US death toll as a percentage of our population is higher than that of almost every other wealthy nation on Earth. For instance, our death rate is two and a half times that of Canada, next door. You head the administration's Coronavirus Task Force. Why is the U.S. death toll, as a percentage of our population, higher than that of almost every other wealthy country? 

Pence:

I want the American people to know that from the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of Americans first. Before there were more than five cases in the United States, all people who had returned from China, President Donald Trump did what no other American president had ever done. And that was he suspended all travel from China, the second largest economy in the world. Now, Senator Joe Biden, Biden opposed that decision. He said it was xenophobic and hysterical, but I can tell you, having led the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that that decision alone by President Trump bought us invaluable time to stand up the greatest national mobilization since World War II.

Not only did Pence completely ignore the question, but as everybody ought to know by now, Biden was right to call the Trump travel restriction on travelers from China only (admitting US citizens and permanent residents and not imposing any quarantine on them) "hysterical" and "xenophobic", given the way it focused on a single Yellow Peril population (after 5 cases had been confirmed in the US and more in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Italy...), too late and too restricted to be effective at stopping the coronavirus, which was already spreading in New York; spreading, in fact, through travelers from Europe, but hidden for weeks because of the Trump administration's failure to develop adequate testing, rejecting the advice of the WHO (consistent with Trump's xenophobic hatred of international organizations in general).