Every once in a while, the Gameshow President inadvertently blurts out the truth during his streams of unconsciousness. It happened again this last week, when he admitted this:

“If we did very little testing, [America] wouldn’t have the most cases.  So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

There it is.  Trump has been promising millions of “beautiful tests” since February. It’s mid-May, and we’re still testing at extremely anemic rates.  In Texas, for example, our current testing rate is 2%, and that rate ignores possible multiple tests who have already tested positive.  Every single medical expert I’ve heard speak repeats the mantra that massive testing is mandatory for opening economies.  Without it, we’re all flying blind.

The problem? Trump is playing a gameshow and in this game, the smallest number wins.  The prize is another 4 years to tear the US apart and avoid felony indictments from the State of New York.  We’ve been calling this for months, and, once again Trump admits that he doesn’t want testing.  He’s literally risking millions of lives for a win.

Leaving for Arizona yesterday, a reporter asked Trump why he supported reopening even as cases increase.  He said, “”The whole world is excited, watching us, because we’re leading the world.”  Yes, we are leading the world:

Trump’s delusion is complete.  I would think that the only thing the world is excited about is ridding itself of Donald Trump on November 3 (but only if we do our job).

Today, in a leaked audio of a call with Republican representatives, Greg Abbott admitted that opening up the economy will increase the community spread of COVID-19.  At the same time, he offered up his strawman argument that, since we’ll never get to zero spread, we should open up anyway.  Of course, NO ONE has EVER set the standard of zero spread.  The standard is 14 consecutive days of diminishing new cases, which we are most certainly not experiencing.

This is the same argument that Abbott and other Republicans have used to not do immigration reform.  They keep saying that reform can only happen when undocumented immigration is brought to zero.  They KNOW it will never be at zero, so by default immigration reform will never happen.

If you want to get really aggravated, listen to the leaked recording:

The Lincoln Project, a group of GOP leaders who are trying to oust Trump, released a new ad, this time using Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme from his first campaign.  This one is just a little different.

Greg Abbott is a small government, local control, free trader.  Until he’s not.  Abbott is the worst kind of politician, one who doesn’t really believe in anything but his own power, who shifts his ideology to fit the situation that always advantages himself and his largest donors.  Texas has always been very independent where local control has been sacrosanct, and the governor’s office was designed to be a weak position.  No more.  It started under Rick Perry, but Abbott put consolidation of power on steroids aided by a state house full of ideologues who are either stupid, corrupt, or likely both.

Abbott has seized power away from municipalities and counties on everything from oil and gas development to environmental regulation to even trimming trees.  In good times the consolidation of broad local authority to a central point is bad policy.  The US Constitution recognized the role of the states in limiting the power of the federal government.  Abbott and Perry quoted that loudly and often with Barack Obama occupied the White House.  No more.  Now, Abbott cherry picks what he wants to control, like tree removals for some weird personal reason, and has done so again by abruptly ordering the reopening of thousands of businesses in Texas over the orders of municipal and county authorities all over the state.

What Abbott is doing is stupid; it’s not only stupid, he’s also doing it for precisely the wrong reasons.  He’s not rushing to reopen the state’s businesses because he believes it’s the right thing to do, he’s doing it to kick hundreds of thousands of workers off of state unemployment rolls.  The Texas Workforce Commission has already announced that if a business reopens and employees do not work ALL of the hours required by that business, the employees lose their unemployment benefits. Cisco Gamez, a Texas Workforce Commission spokesman even said that if an employee doesn’t feel safe working, they must refer their concerns to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, governed by the US Labor Department currently run by…wait for it…Eugene Scalia.  Yes, that Scalia, the son of Antonin Scalia.  The younger Scalia who’s made his career and is well known for undoing worker and safety regulations, was appointed by Trump to head the agency tasked with protecting workers’ rights (Yes, it’s a drinking game.)  Since Gamez’s statement, the Texas Workforce Commission “clarified” the policy that the state “may” allow some benefits to survive if a worker doesn’t feel safe to go to work.

The dangerous feature of Abbott’s idiotic orders is that he’s going to damage the programs that adults, like Lina Hidalgo and Sylvester Turner, have been implementing round the clock to protect those in Harris County.  The result is reduced cases here, but according to latest data from Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracking program, Harris County new cases are still growing at an average weekly rate of 13%, which is low compared to other counties like Tarrant County, location of Fort Worth.  That city is governed by Trump supporter Betsy Price, who has already ordered that churches can begin holding services and bars and restaurants can open.  Their case growth rate? 51% this week.  That’s right, THREE times that of Harris County.  And those are just the cases we know about.

Abbott, like Trump, is literally getting people killed.  And he’s covering it up.  To keep the numbers low, I’m convinced Abbott is dragging his feet on broad distribution of testing.  Like Trump, Abbott keeps promising millions of tests that never materialize.  Texas has tested just over 200,000 people or less than 1% of the population.  Every medical expert advises not to reopen businesses and public buildings until testing and contact tracing is massive.  Abbot clearly doesn’t want that because then it would be hard to justify what he’s doing right now.

Abbott’s plan is dangerous.  Overruling local officials who are actually listening to medical experts is nothing short of gross negligence.

We all know that Trump’s incompetent and cruel response to the Coronavirus cost US lives.  Now we’re getting a sense of just how many.  During March and early April, the US recorded 8,128 deaths from COVID-19.  But, and it’s a big but, there were another over 7,000 “excess deaths” during that time not attributed to the disease, but probably were.  Here’s the graph:

“Excess deaths” is defined to be those deaths above the normal curve of mortality in the US.  Were all these deaths attributable to Coronavirus?  We don’t know because testing during that time was unavailable, and continues to be unavailable for millions of Americans.  Only history will be able to tell the story of how many died in this pandemic once this crisis is over, but I think any objective person already knows the answer.