On the electric twitter machine Tuesday, Jonathan Martin of The New York Times blew off a complaint from an actual epidemiologist named Gregg Gonsalves, a guy who was on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, because Gonsalves objected to a both-sidesish piece about the president* on which Martin had shared a byline. Martin tweeted that Gonsalves should “move along,” and Gonsalves proceeded to take Martin downtown, to the roaring cheers of the homebound. This was the first shot in a daylong fight to keep the elite political media from bringing us another performance of the famous opera bouffe, The Day He Became President*.



Later Tuesday afternoon, the president* held his usual Five O’Clock Follies, in which he remarkably did not bellow and whine and bite the head off a live chicken, for which he was given high marks by several reporters for his “tone,” and for acknowledging that, yes, we are in a pandemic and the consequences of that will be dire. Thus did he clear a bar located somewhere in Earth’s mantle. It is going to be very important for all of us—including reporters—to maintain focus on how badly the administration* has bungled the response to this pandemic, on how people are profiteering off of it, and on how readily the administration has resorted to cheap deception to cover its own incompetent ass.

Further proof of all of this can be found in...wait for it...The New York Times.



A Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act has been used to place hundreds of thousands of orders by President Trump and his administration to ensure the procurement of vital equipment, according to reports submitted to Congress and interviews with former government officials. Yet as governors and members of Congress plead with the president to use the law to force the production of ventilators and other medical equipment to combat the coronavirus pandemic, he has for weeks treated it like a “break the glass” last resort, to be invoked only when all else fails. “You know, we’re a country not based on nationalizing our business,” Mr. Trump said earlier this month. “Call a person over in Venezuela, ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well.”



Invoking the Defense Production Act is hardly a rare occurrence. As recently as last summer, the Department of Defense used it to obtain rare earth metals needed to build lasers, jet engines and armored vehicles. The Defense Department estimates that it has used the law’s powers 300,000 times a year. The Department of Homeland Security — including its subsidiary, FEMA — placed more than 1,000 so-called rated orders in 2018, often for hurricane and other disaster response and recovery efforts, according to a report submitted to Congress in 2019 by a committee of federal agencies formed to plan for the effective use of the law.



Therefore, all the excuses that the president* has used for not using the DPA more widely in response to this pandemic, and in response to desperate pleas from the country’s governors, are absolute moonshine. He prefers the way things are working now. He wants governors to compete against FEMA, lose, and then have to beg for ventilators and PPE, which he can dole out like pork-barrel projects to help his re-election campaign. And he’s got help, too. From Bloomberg:



That argument is similar to the U.S. Chamber’s. Companies are voluntarily “doing everything that the government is asking for them to do,” said the Chamber’s chief policy officer, Neil Bradley, in an interview. He confirmed the group had lobbied the White House not to use the Defense Production Act...

On Tuesday, 16 state attorneys general sent Trump a letter urging him to immediately use his DPA powers. Six Democratic senators, led by Elizabeth Warren, slammed the U.S. Chamber, a Republican-allied trade group, calling its lobbying of the White House to not use the law “shameful.” In a March 23 letter, the senators said it placed “the short-term desires of its members above the economic and public health needs of hundreds of millions of American families.” The letter asks the Chamber to say on whose behalf it was lobbying, but Warren’s office on Wednesday said it hadn’t received an answer.

Using the DPA on GM isn’t enough. It should have been invoked and employed across the entire manufacturing economy and noting that, for once, the president* didn’t present himself as a rodeo clown in public doesn’t alter the fact that nothing but ruin follows in the man’s wake.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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