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(CNN) – Coronavirus infections are skyrocketing. Unemployment is on the rise. The food lines get longer. And President Donald Trump is tweeting.
Happy Thanksgiving Day. This year’s Christmas season is bringing Americans together, literally, despite the best advice and increasingly urgent requests from experts, worried that family reunions will generate a double wave of COVID-19 cases.
The solidarity requested by President-elect Joe Biden in a speech Wednesday seems like a distant dream compared to the situation in Washington, where Trump continues to dig into his bunker. The president simultaneously denies his electoral defeat and begs his loyalists to fight it. And the federal government and Congress are effectively absent without permission, leaving millions of Americans to their fate in the midst of a medical and economic catastrophe.
In this strange interregnum Between Biden’s victory and Trump’s departure, the helpless president and the incoming president have taken considerably, if not surprisingly, different paths.
Trump is caught up in the core of his delusional attempt to win back a presidency that gets out of hand with each passing day. He staggers between complaints and chimeras, without thinking of the destruction in his path. Biden, operating in the world as it is, has painstakingly built a pending government. And in the two days since a Trump appointee allowed the formal transition to begin, Biden’s team has begun examining the rusty nuts of the ailing institutions he will inherit.
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Biden’s reality and Trump’s fantasies collided on the eve of Thanksgiving.
First came news that weekly jobless claims had risen to 778,000, more than three times their pre-pandemic average. Meanwhile, Trump has canceled his plans to participate in a charlatan circus advertised as a “hearing” for election fraud by Pennsylvania Republicans in Gettysburg after his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was again exposed to the coronavirus. Giuliani showed up anyway and Trump called out, his rants audible through a loudspeaker pressed into a microphone.
The president attacked the courts, which almost unanimously rejected his outlandish claims, the Democrats, with even more blatantly absurd lies, and demanded – who, it was hard to say – to cancel the election results. A few hours later, he pardoned loyal Michael Flynn, his national security advisor who pleaded guilty in 2017 for lying to the FBI about conversations with the then Russian ambassador.
Afterward, Trump invited Pennsylvania Republicans to the White House for a meeting in the west wing, two sources told CNN. It’s a repeat of a tactic the president tried with two prominent Republican lawmakers from the state of Michigan, who visited Washington last week, for a report the president hoped would fuel his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. But he received none, and the Republicans quickly released a statement after stating the truth that “they had not yet been informed of any information that could change the outcome of the Michigan election.”
Distant galaxies
In Delaware, some 190km and several psychic galaxies away from the Gettysburg disaster, Biden has made a sober appeal for caution and resolution in the face of the spiraling crisis.
“I know the country is tired of the struggle. But we must remember that we are at war with the virus, not between us. Not against each other, “Biden said.” This is the time when we need to strengthen our columns, redouble our efforts and re-engage in the struggle. “
As he did during the campaign, Biden channeled his grief over the loss of his first wife and daughter in 1972 and the death of his son from brain cancer just over five years ago in an effort to relieve Americans. in mourning.
“It’s really hard to matter,” Biden said of the jaw-dropping sight of an “empty chair” where a loved one once sat. “It’s hard to thank, it’s hard to even think about looking ahead, and it’s so hard to hope. I see. I will think and pray for each of you this Thanksgiving.
Earlier in the day, future first lady Jill Biden was seen leaving bags of produce at a food bank in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the Bidens go on vacation. The small gesture underscored the enormous challenges faced by many, with their lives devastated economically by the pandemic, who have turned to increasingly strained charities to temporarily meet their basic needs.
And Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, tweeted an article by Time recounting the crisis, stating, “Food banks across our nation are struggling to keep up with demand due to COVID-19. Know that when @JoeBiden and I are in the White House, we will fight food insecurity and tackle this crisis. “
“Nobody should go hungry in America,” he added.
A survey of The Washington Post Data from the Census Bureau from late October and early November found that food insecurity is growing at a frightening rate. One in eight Americans said they ran out of enough food in the past week, a figure that has risen to 1 in 6 in families with children.
Kellie O’Connell, executive director of the Lakeview Pantry in Chicago, described the painful scenes in which the most affected families seek help, many of them for the first time.
Describing a family of four who had run out of savings, O’Connell spoke to CNN’s Brooke Baldwin about the feelings of shame that often accompany having to ask for help.
“They came to us so they could put some food on your table this Thanksgiving,” she said. “One of the parents stayed in the car because he was a little embarrassed about how they got the food. And it’s really hard.
The swollen lines outside the food banks have become a bitter sign of this terrible season.
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Congress is still stuck on the aid package
On the horizon: more pain. An estimated 12 million people will lose the major unemployment benefits provided by a federal aid package approved in March. The prospects for a second round of federal stimulus in the near future look bleak.
There is a deadline for government funding within weeks, which could provide an opportunity for lawmakers to budget for new aid. But a Democrat-backed House stimulus first approved in May and then updated in early October is languishing.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to accept it, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has so far refused to consider smaller and more fragmented legislation. Stagnation has increasingly left desperate American workers adrift and has pushed entire industries to the brink.
The absence of a central and organizational figure in the White House has also begun to raise concerns about the ongoing processes for the distribution of coronavirus vaccines.
In a mirror of the chaos this spring, when local leaders had to compete with each other for ventilators and personal protective equipment, the top health official of the state of Illinois said the federal government had already told him he couldn’t meet a initial request for 400,000 doses.
“We’re still waiting to see the answers and maybe understand why this is so, but it looks like the initial assignment we thought would be ready to go, that number has dropped,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike told CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson. “As a result, all states will receive a lower amount.”
Fighting the Thanksgiving wave
With Washington in the knots and the coronavirus spreading at record rates, one of the nation’s leading health workers, the Mayo Clinic, announced it was bringing in staff from out of state and asking retirees to return to work to combat the rise. . virus in Minnesota.
By 10pm on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins University had reported 178,752 new cases nationwide and 2,207 deaths. This followed more than 2,100 COVID-19-related deaths on Tuesday, so the highest number in a single day since May. Public health experts fear that the millions of people traveling Thursday to spend time with their families indoors and without protection will cause another wave of infections.
“It is potentially the mother of all super-propagation events,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, former adviser to the White House medical team, told CNN this week.
In the shadow of these grim statistics and dire warnings, the White House issued a Presidential Proclamation promoting the “service and sacrifice” of “first responders, medical professionals, essential workers, neighbors and countless other patriots.”
He then proceeded to promote behaviors that would have put them all in even more danger.
“I encourage all Americans to come together,” said Trump, “in homes and places of worship, to offer a prayer of thanks to God for our many blessings.”
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