COVID Update August 12: The failure of Trump to respond to the crisis facing Americans is akin to not responding to an attack on Pearl Harbor or 9/11– accept with millions of Americans affected. 1/

STRIKE 1: Sending low income Americans to work during a pandemic without investing in testing first.

Dozens of bus drivers, hundreds of nurses, hundreds and thousands of meat packing workers & farm laborers are already dead.

And we’re still doing it. 2/

STRIKE 2: The House passed a bill to continue the moratorium on evictions. The Senate & the President, who was in charge of the negotiation, let it expire. 3/

The impact. Homeless camps will get more crowded. People in tight living quarters will have cousins & friends on their couch. Shelters will be more crowded.

The same working people we have a hard time being safe at work will be less safe from home. 4/

Trump’s Executive Order? Illegal, ineffective & PR like much of his responses.

Only 30% of rental units were applicable to begin with. 90% of legal & civil rights attorneys from across the country report eviction courts already beginning. 5/

STRIKE 3: Eviction protection was never enough. Income protection through one time payments & unemployment insurance is the necessary backstop.

To eat. To make rent & mortgage payments. 6/

Thanks to the Congress up until now the poverty rate has not increased. But that’s about to change.

Trump’s illegal EO lowered the UI payment, only runs it out for a few weeks & asks the states to pay a portion now & the rest from there. Without the $ to do so. 7/

STRIKE 4: 18 million have lost their jobs. The unemployment rate is higher than any point in 70 years at 11.1%.

At this point this is entirely due to our pandemic response. South Korea has their first reported case the same day as the US. Their unemployment rate is 4.3%. 8/

I love hearing about the dignity of work from Ted Cruz about as much as I enjoy his let them eat cake tweets (after he’s handed $2 trillion in tax cuts to corporations & people w large estates). 9/ https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1292852461338652673

STRIKE 5: Health care & education. So far 5 million people have lost health care coverage & as they face the impact of a pandemic, Trump won’t allow them access to ACA exchanges.

Meanwhile he’s forcing budget cuts in health & education while schools are in desperate shape. 10/

He has let the program for loans to small businesses expire which will cause more people to lose their jobs, their incomes & their health care. 11/

STRIKE 6: Trump is eliminating funding for Social Security and Medicare in a move nobody in their right mind thinks is a good idea— let alone legal. 12/

STRIKE 7: The way out of this— massive testing, contact tracing & isolation— are all funded in the House bill & Trump has no interest in. I’m going to tell a tale here... 13/

I asked someone very senior in the White House 2 months ago if they would get behind a massive context tracing program. Their reply was they were concerned about people who wanted to protect their civil liberties. 14/

I write a lot here about deciding what the most important thing is in a crisis. If it’s not people’s lives, it’s politics.
15/

Having the evangelical community as your base is one thing. Having them approve your head of the CDC because they believe abstinence is the best approach to HIV, that’s another thing. 16/

Why is this happening? Why on top of the attack of a pandemic do we refuse to have the backs of the people who work & live & are are trying to build this country. 17/

I talked to @SenSherrodBrown today who spent the day talking to seniors on fixed incomes, small business owners & families in Ohio.

He cannot understand for the life of him why everyone doesn’t see the massive urgency. 18/

The first time I met him Brown wanted to make sure I knew how many people make literally dollars a day in this country.

He and @ConnieSchultz, come on #inthebubble for a heart wrenching discussion of what is being done to working people tomorrow. 19/ http://Smarturl.it/inthebubble 

We’ve added at least 7 strikes— 10 pound rocks the President is making working Americans carry around. 20/

The presidents on Mt Rushmore led us through uncertain times, saved our union, defined our democracy, and fought forces who wanted to destroy our country. They showed they loved our country by their deeds.
21/

They were imperfect but they did stuff like fight for our country, care about our future, risked hanging, and mostly shut they hell up.

They faced plagues too. I’m sure they had the occasional bone spur. 22/

The enemy actually isn’t invisible after all. /end