Hopefully they have met their match in Anthony Fauci, there was just something the way he marched up to the podium at the press conference as if to suggest "ok enough of these clowns".Made me recall from way back during the AIDS crisis, how he's got the I-give-a-fuck-for-bedside-manner, God is Science and I am General Patton thing down pat.

From this about what he's been up to today, seems to me Trump is not that worried about things, it's like he's washed his hands (no pun intended) of this pesky coronavirus thing, can now throw Pence under the bus if things go sour (llke at the Apprentice hiring and firing when appropriate) keeping the fans entertained is what's important:

There is also this revealing how he's thinking of The Apprentice character and ratings 24/7:

He'll just take bragging about the stock market off the table for now. Never reallly cared about Wall Street votes anyways, it's all about the fans. Leaving them folks to Kudlow and Mnuchin to deal with. Again, they can always be thrown under the bus if need be.

The governor of the state of Washington:

oh, reminded now I saw this from two days ago, is actually quite an amazing thing to behold: good ole GOP guy Sen. Kennedy raking Homeland Security Acting Chief Wolf over the coals; among other things, he wants to know why Wolf doesn't know if they have respirator masks for everyone in the country:

Article on same @ The Hill.

Edit to add:

Looks like on impulse during a rally high, Trump's decided to bet the house:

He's confusing them:

Major major damage control team on duty today, tried to make it all better with today's press conference performance, I watched most of it, there was great improvement, someone even got Trump to talk softly and act a little humbler than normal, tone the narcissism down a notch, he was trying to play a character. It was striking enough for me to imagine him doing a prep session as with a debate. He was almost trying too hard to praise other people, and it was clearly kinda phony. I suspect Fauci had some input as a mediator of some kind, i.e., look we don't have to disparage you political people just to get the truth out, we can do both. This became clear to me when he went out of his way to volunteer  to speak on how he hasn't been muzzled at all when the question came up, and stressed how messaging is important..

BUT we got the story of what happened before today now by leakers galore:

Inside Trump’s frantic attempts to minimize the coronavirus crisis

By Yasmeen Abutaleb, Ashley Parker and  Josh Dawsey Feb. 29, 2020 at 6:13 p.m. EST

[...] Interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, former White House aides, public health experts and lawmakers — many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments and details — portray a White House scrambling to gain control of a rudderless response defined by bureaucratic infighting, confusion and misinformation.

“It’s complete chaos,” a senior administration official said. “Everyone is just trying to get a handle on what the [expletive] is going on.” [....]

When Trump stepped in front of the cameras, “he had not slept for a day-and-a-half, two-and-a-half” days, as acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told a gathering of conservatives Friday morning. The president offered an account that was, by turns, misleading and sanguine [....]

An 'inadequate' response

As Trump was in the air, a problematic scene was also unfolding on Capitol Hill, where senators were returning from a week-long Presidents’ Day recess to a private briefing with the top administration officials leading the coronavirus response.

The evening before, the administration had unveiled a $2.5 billion spending plan to combat the virus, and both at the closed-door briefing and in a subsequent open hearing with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a number of Republican senators voiced a variety of concerns. They fretted about the administration’s level of preparation to date, communication failures with Capitol Hill and, in the words of Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the “lowball” funding request.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — a target of Trump’s ire for his vote to convict the president of an impeachment charge — was among those who stood in the private briefing to register objections.

“One, I’m very disappointed in the preparation that’s been done over the last few years anticipating the potential of an outbreak of substance,” Romney said in an interview later [....]

Azar, who had previously been in charge, found out about his de facto demotion just moments before Trump publicly announced it. But two senior administration officials said Azar found it empowering to have the vice president formally join the response.

“He’s not in control anymore, and that’s clear,” a senior HHS official said of Azar, who remains chairman of the administration’s coronavirus task force. “You need HHS at the table — he’s just not going to be the one guiding the administration through the response." [....]

goes on and on...

Fauci in short interview Friday: 'You don't want to go to war with a president'

How Dr. Anthony Fauci is navigating the coronavirus outbreak in the Trump era.

By Sarah Owermohle @ Politico.com, March 3

[....] “You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don't want to go to war with a president,” Fauci, who has been the country’s top infectious diseases expert through a dozen outbreaks and six presidents, told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”

And the truth about coronavirus? “I don't think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed,” he said. “I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad.”

The plainspoken scientist with a heavy Brooklyn accent has navigated outbreaks from HIV to Ebola, Zika and the anthrax scare with an ability to talk frankly yet reassuringly about threats, to explain science, public health and risk to the public in a way few can match [....]

Fauci sat down with POLITICO in his office Friday, amid dozens of photos of himself with presidents, politicians and celebrities from Magic Johnson to Barbra Streisand. It was just hours after reports that the White House had ordered Fauci off the airwaves sparked a firestorm of protest from senators, former government officials and public health experts.

Fauci denied being muzzled. He did say that Pence’s office wanted him to run interviews past it for re-clearance once Pence was named the White House’s point person on the virus [....

And yet, Fauci has not only survived the town for decades but managed to make his priorities those of the presidents, above all HIV. Along with Redfield and HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, Fauci helped engineer getting the president include a pledge to ending HIV transmission in his State of the Union address last year.

But many challenges are still ahead, including sometimes contradicting the president he doesn’t want to “go to war” with. Fauci says it will be OK: he knows that “even if it’s uncomfortable” his years of truth-telling have earned him a backlog of respect [....]

he's heckuva job Pence so far, doesn't even have spin ready for basic questions:

by the way, this problem has been taken care of in New York state two days ago:

I haven't seen, however, any attempt to deal with the "time-off work means no income" problem and I saw plenty of questions about it on those threads. Especially in the metro area, it's basically free-lance, sole proprietor and independent contractor central, so they're ignoring it because there's no way the state could afford it.

still doing a heckuva job:

IT'S NOT WISE TO BE A PATIENT AT AN AMERICAN HOSPITAL FOR ANYTHING RIGHT NOW. Yes I am shouting. And it's not me saying that, it's the country's nurses.

Nurses Battling Coronavirus Beg for Protective Gear and Better Planning

Health care workers are among the most at risk of contracting the virus, but many say they lack protective gear and protocols to keep themselves and their patients safe.

By Farah Stockman & Mike Baker @ NYTimes.com, March 6

[...] Concerns from nurses in Washington State and California echo those of nurses nationwide. National Nurses United, a union that represents about 150,000 nurses across the country, announced on Thursday the sobering results of an online survey it recently conducted.

Of the 6,500 nurses who participated, 29 percent said their hospitals had a plan in place to isolate potential coronavirus patients, and 44 percent said they had received guidance from their employers about how to handle the virus.

Sixty-three percent had access to N95 face masks, and a quarter of the respondents had access to an even more protective mask recommended by the union, known as a PAPR, or a powered air purifying respirator.

One California nurse, who is in a 14-day self-quarantine after caring for a coronavirus patient, complained that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not testing her for the virus quickly enough. “This is not the ticket dispenser at the deli counter; it’s a public health emergency!” she wrote in a statement shared by National Nurses United.

At a news conference on Thursday afternoon, the union demanded, among other things, that the federal government ensure all health care workers receive the highest levels of protective equipment, that any vaccine that is developed be offered to the public for free, and that Congress immediately pass an emergency spending package in response to the virus [....]

Lovely lede @ NYTimes home page: President Trump continued to downplay the risks of the outbreak, and called Washington’s governor “a snake.” 2h ago

Whistleblower to the A.P. (which makes it harder to call it "faux news)":

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) mocked coronavirus concerns by wearing a gas mask on the House floor just days before an infected man from his district died.

“Reviewing the coronavirus supplemental appropriation and preparing to go vote,” he said in a tweet Wednesday before the Senate approved an $8.3 billion emergency funding bill to combat the virus.

In the tweet, Gaetz is seen wearing a gas mask

Just two days later, Gaetz released a statement saying a death from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, had occurred in his district.

“I’m extremely saddened to learn of the first fatality in our district from coronavirus, a Northwest Floridian residing in Santa Rosa County,” he said. “Our prayers are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/matt-gaetz-gas-mask-mock-coronavirus-concerns-one-of-his-constituents-just-died-from-it_n_5e64067cc5b68d61645545d6

Gaetz, like Trump, is a jerk.

some CPAC peeps apoplectic:

Trump insult tweet to Gov. Cuomo:

Preet Bharara epic twitter rant, mad as hell, can't take it anymore:

Matt Gaetz possibly an asymptomatic community spreader to Trump! Secret double agent? Stranger things have happened! Qanon needs to get on this!

2 Congressmen Who Spent Time With Trump Go Into Isolation Amid Fear of Coronavirus

One of them, Representative Matt Gaetz, rode back on Air Force One from Florida to Washington on Monday afternoon. He announced his self-quarantine an hour after getting off the president’s plane.

By Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman & Annie Karni @ NYTimes.com, March 9, 5:19 pm

WASHINGTON — Two Republican members of Congress who have spent time with President Trump in the last few days, including one who just rode back to Washington on Air Force One, put themselves into self-quarantine on Monday because of concern over exposure to coronavirus.

Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who attended a party with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate over the weekend and traveled with him from Florida to the capital on Monday afternoon, announced an hour after getting off the president’s plane that he would remain out of contact with other people for two weeks.

Mr. Gaetz boarded Air Force One in Orlando through the front door just steps behind the president, who had stopped there for a fund-raiser on the way back to Washington. Shortly after takeoff, Mr. Gaetz learned that he had been in touch with an infected person at the Conservative Political Action Conference late last month, according to two people informed about the situation.

He then essentially quarantined himself, sitting in a section of the plane alone. Reporters spotted Mr. Gaetz getting off the back of the plane at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland outside of Washington, where he was then escorted to a waiting car [....]