At a time when the world needs to come together to fight the pandemic, Donald Trump lets loose his racism yet again.

Trump also called the coronavirus “the China virus” at the press conference and argued it wasn’t a racist term. When a reporter noted that dozens of Chinese Americans have faced racist attacks because of the virus in recent weeks, the president doubled down.

“It’s not racist at all, no. Not at all,” Trump said. “It comes from China.”

One senator, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has vowed to “punish” China for the virus. “We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world,” he said last week.

Asked Wednesday if he agreed with Cotton, Trump said, “I don’t know if you’d say China is to blame. Certainly we didn’t get an early run on it. It would’ve been helpful if we knew about it earlier.”

As the press conference came to an end, one reporter asked about a tweet from CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang, who wrote on Tuesday, “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.”

Trump sidestepped the question about whether he thought the remark was appropriate, and doubled down on his earlier comments, saying again, “It comes from China.”

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Starting at midnight last night, the ‘shelter in place’ order has been extended to Monterey county where I live due to two cases of Covid-19 being detected here. Since I have been voluntarily doing it already, this will not cause any change for me but it is going to be disruptive and costly for workers who lose their jobs and wages, parents with young children, businesses, and a whole host of others for whom the impact is not yet clear.

As I wrote before, there is something strange about this crisis because even though it is serious on a large scale, for most people things in their immediate surroundings seem so normal. This can cause people to minimize the danger and think it is overblown and thus ignore the recommendations. That would be very unwise. One woman, who describes herself as a “healthy 48 year old with no underlying conditions”, came down with the disease and had to be treated in the emergency room said that after her recovery, she was so irritated by all the comments that she read on various sites dismissing the threat that she decided to describe her “brutal” ordeal in order to let others know what it is really like and warn them not to take things lightly.
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There will be a debate today between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden starting at 8:00pm ET and moderated by CNN. It will be held in a studio in Washington DC without an audience instead of the original location in Phoenix in a large auditorium. One thing that you can be sure of is that the coronavirus is going to be the main topic of discussion. Both Sanders and Biden will deservedly blast Donald Trump for his administration’s catastrophically bad response. Another thing that you can be sure is that Sanders will hammer home the undeniable fact, now increasingly being realized, that the single-payer health care system like Medicare For All that he has been pushing for and which Biden has dismissed, would have been far better placed to respond to this pandemic that the rotten system that we now have in the US. I do not expect Biden to have a coherent response despite all the time he has had to prepare one.
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We have been fortunate not to have experienced a global pandemic before in our lifetimes. The previous global epidemics that threatened to become one, (SARS, MERS, swine flu (aka H1N1), and bird flu) did not pan out (Ha!) so it is hard to know what would constitute a normal state of events during one. So I am not surprised to find that things seem to me to feel a little strange.

I went to the supermarket today to buy a couple of potatoes for a recipe but there were no potatoes. It is a very large supermarket so at first I thought that they had moved it to another location, something they do from time to time but no, they were out of potatoes, something that had never happened before. I then realized that there had been a run on potatoes because people were stocking up on food. Why potatoes? I don’t know. I was about to leave when I thought I would wander around a few aisles to see what else was gone. The shelves were mostly full and by no means bare, unlike in the Latvian town where Andreas Avester lives, but some shelf sections were empty, especially those that should have had cleaning products. [Update: See correction from Andreas.] This article describes what people are NOT buying, as evidenced by the things still on the shelves of denuded grocery stores: pasta made from chick peas, chocolate hummus, Dasani brand bottled water while all other brands are gone, pork, kidney beans, vegan food, and obscure canned vegetables.
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Donald Trump is notorious for thinking that he can create his own version of ‘reality’ that can replace, you know, actual reality, by simply dismissing the views of experts, making counterfactual assertions, and claiming that anyone who contradicts his ‘reality’ is either a fool or a knave, part of a larger conspiracy that seeks to thwart his glorious plans to make America great again. He is not the first person to try this. We recall the top official in the administration of George W. Bush (believed to be his chief propagandist Karl Rove, though he denied it) who told reporter Ron Suskind during the period when the Bush administration was lying about the Iraq war:
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The myth of the so-called ‘Bernie bros’, that the supporters of Bernie Sanders seem to be particularly prone to making nasty misogynistic attacks on rival candidates and their supporters, seems to be one of those things that will never die. But what evidence is there for this idea? Part of the problem is that the criteria for being a Bernie bro is very vague and getting vaguer with time. Right now, it seems to consist of just two necessary and sufficient conditions: (a) that one must be a supporter of Sanders and (b) one has to have said something bad about other candidates and/or their supporters. Neither gender nor age nor ethnicity nor any other demographic feature seems to be required to be thus classified. This is indeed a wide net that has been cast and it should not be surprising that it should catch people in it. As Robinson Meyer, the person who coined the term later wrote, what we are witnessing is ‘category collapse’, where something that was intended to have very narrow usage has become so elastic as to cease to have any meaning since it could be applied to pretty much anything and anyone.
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