Pence: Trump Will Continue to Send Batshit Anti-Social Distancing Tweets, Deal With It

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

19 April 20

According to the VP, the president is simply “communicating” with the people when he whips protestors into a frenzy.

n Thursday night, perhaps having been zapped with some sort of taser that sent a momentary current of sense through his body, Donald Trump announced that despite previously, falsely claiming he had “total” authority to force states to reopen far sooner than experts say is safe, the decision would be left to the individual governors. “If they need to remain closed,” he said, “we will allow them to do that.” Then he went to bed and woke up the exact same lunatic we’ve come to know and fear over the last three-plus years, and decided to spend a portion of his day whipping anti-social distancing protesters into a frenzy, contradicting everything he had said less than 24 hours prior.

The three states Trump all-caps called out have the distinction of being run by Democratic governors who’ve had the temerity to insist that logic and science will dictate when and how they will get people back to everyday life, a plan that has been met by mobs of angry protesters who’d prefer to congregate in large groups ASAP, wildly contagious coronavirus be damned. While some of them, like Virginia’s Ralph Northam, dismissed Trump’s tweets as the ravings of an online troll, saying at a press conference that he’s “fighting a biological war” and “[does] not have time” to involve himself in “Twitter wars,” others were less inclined to let them slide.

“The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts,” Washington governor Jay Inslee wrote on Twitter. “He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.” He continued: “The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies—even while his own administration says the virus is real, it is deadly and we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted…. The president’s actions threaten his own goal of recovery. His words will likely cause a spike in infections where distancing is working. That will further postpose the 14 days of decline his own guidance says is necessary to ease restrictions…. I hope someday we can look at today’s meltdown as something to be pitied, rather than condemned. But we don’t have that luxury today. There is too much at stake.”

Meanwhile, in a Friday call with Mike Pence, Senate Democrats questioned the vice president re: what the hell Trump is doing and if they can expect someone in the administration to sit him down and tell him to cut the shit. To which the answer was obviously no:

Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) pressed Pence on Trump’s Twitter feed at the end of the call, asking why the president was trying to incite division by tweeting “LIBERATE” Virginia, Minnesota and Michigan and aligning himself with protests in those states over their lockdowns. Pence said the administration is working with governors but that the president will continue to communicate with the American people as he always has.

So that’s something to look forward to.

Trump sends an additional half a billion dollars to states to fight COVID-19

No, just kidding. That money’s actually going to his completely useless wall, per the Daily Beast:

In the middle of a pandemic that has killed 27,000 Americans and counting, the Army this week gave a politically connected Montana firm half a billion dollars—not to manufacture ventilators or protective gear to fight the novel coronavirus, but to build 17 miles of President Trump’s southern border wall. On Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it awarded BFBC, an affiliate of Barnard Construction, $569 million in contract modifications for building “17.17 miles” of the wall in two California locations, El Centro and San Diego. That works out to over $33 million per mile—steeply above the $20 million-per-mile average that the Trump administration is already doling out for the wall. Construction is supposed to be completed by the end of June 2021.

On the bright side, it’s not like the money is effectively being lit on fire except, oh wait, that’s exactly what it’s like:

Smugglers sawed into new sections of President Trump’s border wall 18 times in the San Diego area during a single one-month span late last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection records obtained by the Washington Post via a Freedom of Information Act request…. The records do not indicate whether the one-month span last year is a representative sample of how frequently people are trying to breach new sections of Trump’s border barrier, which are made of tall steel bollards partially filled with concrete and rebar. The Post reported last November that smuggling crews armed with common battery-operated power tools—including reciprocating saws that retail for as little as $100 at home improvement stores—can cut through the bollards using inexpensive blades designed for slicing through metal and stone.

On Wednesday, a group of 66 representatives and 25 senators sent a letter to the administration calling for the halting of construction on the wall until the coronavirus crisis is tackled. “We should be using all resources and funding to combat this virus and protect Americans, instead of using critical funding and resources to continue the construction of a border wall,” the lawmakers wrote. “The construction of a wall puts workers, law enforcement personnel, and border residents in immediate danger.” Said letter will presumably be used as toilet paper in the West Wing washroom, but it was a valiant effort nevertheless.

Surprise: guy who kills endangered species for sport thinks other guy who keeps animals captive should get a pardon

This seems like a good use of presidential time and resources:

Donald Trump Jr. revealed on Tuesday that he had a conversation with this father—the president of the United States—about pardoning Joe Exotic, a tiger owner who was convicted of trying to kill an animal rights activist. Trump Jr. noted that the idea of pardoning the star of Netflix’s Tiger King began as a joke on a radio show before the president was asked about it in a briefing.

“He actually called me late that night,” Trump Jr. said during a Q&A on Facebook. “He was still in the Oval Office and was like, ‘So what’s with this?’ So, we had a couple of seconds before him sort of checking in and getting back to work, you know, he was fascinated. I think Melania may have shown him one of the memes that I had posted. It was like Donald Trump’s face with a Tiger King mullet, which was pretty epic.”

Area man brags about country only having second most coronavirus deaths in the world