South Dakota's governor encouraged people to go shopping the same day the state reported its highest single-day COVID-19 death total
The South Dakota Department of Health on Saturday reported 54 new deaths from COVID-19, surpassing the state's previous record death total of 53.
The same day, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem encouraged state residents in a tweet to go shopping, writing that small "businesses are the lifeblood of so many South Dakota communities."
Noem, a Republican, has refused to issue a statewide mask mandate and has otherwise disputed science and calls to enact stricter measures to contain the virus in the state.
Over the past week, more than 42% of COVID-19 tests in South Dakota administered have come back positive, according to data analyzed by Johns Hopkins University.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks during the Republican National Convention in August. Photo Courtesy of the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images
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The South Dakota Department of Health on Saturday reported 54 new COVID-19 deaths since Friday, the highest single-day increase in deaths of all time in the state as cases of the virus surge statewide.
The previous record, 53, was set earlier this month on November 14, the Rapid City Journal reported. As the outlet noted, there have been 942 deaths in the state from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus since the pandemic began, with more than half of those — 517 — occurring in the month of November. There were more than 800 new cases diagnosed in the state Saturday.
But hours earlier, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, encouraged state residents to go shopping to support local businesses.
"Remember, today is #SmallBusinessSaturday," Noem tweeted Saturday morning. "These businesses are the lifeblood of so many South Dakota communities. Please support them today and every day! #shopsmall."
"Another thing to add to the list of reasons to be very thankful today," Noem said in a tweet Thursday.
In addition to refusing to issue a statewide mask mandate, Noem has also defended individuals who neglect to wear masks despite repeated recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and health experts who have pleaded that widespread adoption of mask-wearing would curb the spread of the disease.
"We talk often about the government's role in a situation like this in dealing with a pandemic," Noem said on November 18, disputing that the lack of a mask mandate was responsible for a surge in cases, according to The Associated Press. "At this point, frankly, I'm getting more concerned about how neighbors are treating neighbors."
Noem said that it was an individual's "personal decision" to wear a mask, refused to encourage residents to wear a mask or to practice social distancing, and claimed the most effective way to combat COVID-19 spread was through handwashing, according to the AP.
There have been more than 79,000 cases of COVID-19 in South Dakota diagnosed since the pandemic began, per Johns Hopkins University data. Over the past week, more than 42% of all COVID-19 tests administered there have come back positive. That's more than four times higher than the 9.4% national positivity rate, according to the Hopkins data.
WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's leading infectious disease expert, warned that the travel-heavy Thanksgiving holiday could make the current surge in Covid-19 cases even worse as the nation heads into December.
Appearing on NBC News' “Meet the Press” Sunday, Fauci said that public health officials “tried to get the word out for people, as difficult as it is, to really not have large gatherings” during the holiday due to concerns that the celebrations could exacerbate the coronavirus spread.
What we expect, unfortunately, as we go for the next couple of weeks into December, is that we might see a surge superimposed on the surge we are already in,” he said.
“I don’t want to frighten people except to say it’s not too late at all for us to do something about this,” he added, urging Americans to be careful when they travel back home and upon arriving, and to take proven steps like social distancing and wearing masks.
It can sometimes take two weeks for infected people to develop symptoms, and asymptomatic people can spread the virus without knowing they have it. So Fauci said the “dynamics of an outbreak” show a three-to-five-week lag between serious mitigation efforts and the actual curbing of infection rates.
While the first wave of vaccinations could start in America within a matter of weeks, Fauci said that, for now, “we are going to have to make decisions as a nation, state, city and family that we are in a very difficult time, and we’re going to have to do the kinds of restrictions of things we would have liked to have done, particularly in this holiday season, because we’re entering into what’s really a precarious situation.”
Covid-19 cases and deaths in the U.S. have been accelerating in recent weeks. There have been more than 4 million cases and 35,000 deaths attributed to the virus in the month of November alone. Overall, America has had 13.3 million coronavirus cases and 267,000 deaths attributable to the virus, according to an NBC News analysis.
Despite a mid-November warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encouraging Americans not to travel during Thanksgiving, air travel broke pandemic records, with 6.8 million people traveling through airports in the seven days ahead of the holiday.
Fauci said that he is concerned about the nation’s hospitals, noting that he received calls last night from colleagues across the country “pleading for advice” amid the “significant stresses on the hospital and health care delivery systems.”
While he explicitly said he was not calling for a national lockdown, Fauci said at the local level, Americans could “blunt” the surge’s effects on the hospital system by taking mitigation steps “short of locking down so we don’t precipitate the necessity of locking down.”
The surge in cases comes amid promising news about a coronavirus vaccine, with both public health officials and the federal government planning to begin the first wave of vaccinations in December. Fauci said that while the “exact” recommendations for scheduling groups to receive vaccinations have not been finalized, “health care workers are going to be among” those first in line for the vaccines.
He pointed to the country’s success in distributing annual flu vaccines as “the reason we should feel more confident” about the ability to send the needed vaccine across America.
“The part about 300 million doses getting shipped is going to get taken care of by people who know how to do that,” he said. "The part at the distal end, namely, getting it into people’s arms, is going to be more challenging than a regular flu season, it would be foolish to deny that. But I think it’s going to be able to get done because the local people have done that in the past. Hopefully, they’ll get the resources to help them to do that.”
OpEd: Americans know what the right thing to do is.They know traveling to get togethers is foolish, selfish and dangerous but they do it anyway. Let those fuckers get sick and die. Insurance companies should refuse to pay for their treatment. The surge is a purge!
Donald Trump, pictured on Thanksgiving, was said to be muttering ‘like Mad King George’ on election night
(AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump on election night was like "Mad King George, muttering, 'I won. I won. I won,' " according to one close adviser, who spoke to The Washington Post for a remarkable recap of the 20 days since the election.
More than 30 senior administration officials, members of his legal team, campaign aides and advisers told the paper of his increasingly unhinged attempts to overturn the election result, and how those left within the White House humoured him.
Those around the president after 3 November were "happy to scratch his itch," the close adviser said.
"If he thinks he won, it’s like, 'Shh, we won’t tell him.'"
Of the ensuing legal strategy, a senior administration told the paper that the theory was: "Just roll everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car, and when it’s time for a press conference, roll them out."
The paper confirmed that, on the night of the election, Mr Trump was enraged by Fox News being the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden - a call which ultimately proved correct - and that he ordered his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to ring Rupert Murdoch and demand a retraction.
In the days that followed Mr Trump surrounded himself by people who told him what he wanted to hear, the paper reported, such as campaign pollster John McLaughlin, who told the president of a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Mr Trump with a positive approval rating and a majority in the country who thought the media had been "unfair and biased against him".
"Trump scrambled for an escape hatch from reality," the authors write.
Thanksgiving was spent for the first time at the White House, further insulating him from the real world. He played golf in the morning and spent part of the day calling advisers to ask if they believed he really had lost the election.
"You really have to understand Trump’s psychology," said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director, who has now distanced himself from the president.
"The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories."
Perhaps most telling is the number of insiders who have tried to distance themselves from the spectacle.
There was no mention in The Washington Post story of Mike Pence, the vice president, nor his daughter Ivanka.
The Trump campaign had arranged for deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee counsel and others to make plans for post-election litigation.
The two men had readied a series of law firms across the country for possible recounts and ballot challenges
The self-declared "elite strike-force" team of Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell - since dropped - were not involved.
"Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it became clear there was no ‘there’ there," a senior administration official told the paper.
Many of the other lawyers felt that Mr Giuliani seemed “deranged” and ill-prepared to litigate, a source said.
Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis were “performing for an audience of one,” and Mr Trump held Mr Giuliani in high regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”
On 13 November, Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis staged what a senior administration official called “a hostile takeover” of what remained of the Trump campaign.
Mr Trump called Mr Giuliani from the Oval Office while other advisers were present, including Mr Pence; White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel; and Mr Clark, the deputy campaign manager who had laid the legal foundations for the challenges.
Mr Giuliani, on speakerphone, told the president that he could win and that his other advisers were lying to him about his chances. Mr Clark called Mr Giuliani "an expletive," the paper reported, and said he was feeding the president bad information.
The following day, 14 November, Mr Trump tweeted that Mr Giuliani, Ms Ellis, Ms Powell and others were now in charge of his legal strategy.
Ms Ellis arrived at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters and told employees that they must now listen to her and Mr Giuliani, the paper reported.
"They came in one day and were like, ‘We have the president’s direct order. Don’t take an order if it doesn’t come from us,'" a senior administration official recalled.
Mr Clark and Jason Miller, an aide to the president, objected and so Ms Ellis threatened to call Mr Trump - to which Mr Miller replied: “Sure, let’s do this,” said a campaign adviser.
Ultimately Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis were victorious.
On 23 November the president reluctantly allowed the General Service Administration to approve the release of funds for the Biden transition team, and grant them permission to speak to government officials.
Permission was granted, however, after Mr Trump's aides told him that it didn't mean he had to give up his legal fight, or concede.
The president has vowed to fight on but, with the electors meeting on 14 December to officially name Mr Biden the president-elect, it is seen as a futile fight.
In a few weeks the US will see a massive death toll and most of the dead will be MAGAts. The COVID-19 surge has just left the starting line and it's picking up speed and momentum. If a vaccine gets distributed to the general population by mid May that will be a minor miracle. The plan now is to vaccinate healthcare workers and nursing home residents. Who knows when the MAGAts will get the vaccine and who knows how many MAGAts will get vaccinated?
When he leaves office, can ex-President Trump be trusted with America's national security secrets?
WASHINGTON — When David Priess was a CIA officer, he traveled to Houston, he recalls, to brief former President George H.W. Bush on classified developments in the Middle East.
It was part of a long tradition of former presidents being consulted about, and granted access to, some of the nation's secrets.
Priess and other former intelligence officials say Joe Biden would be wise not to let that tradition continue in the case of Donald Trump.
They argue soon-to-be-former President Trump already poses a danger because of the secrets he currently possesses, and they say it would be foolish to trust him with more sensitive information. With Trump's real estate empire under financial pressure and his brand suffering, they worry he will see American secrets as a profit center.
"This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it's easy to imagine with this one," said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
"He's shown as president that he doesn't take secret-keeping terribly seriously," Goldsmith said in an interview. "He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him."
Image: President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavro (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo / AP)
The president also may be vulnerable to foreign influence. His tax records, as reported by the New York Times, reveal that Trump appears to face financial challenges, having personally guaranteed more than $400 million of his companies' debt at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on the hotel industry, in which Trump is a major player.
"Is that a risk?" said Priess, who wrote "The President's Book of Secrets," about presidents and intelligence. "If it were someone applying for a security clearance, damn right it would be a risk."
The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Biden transition declined to comment.
Trump has said his finances are sound, and that the debts are a small percentage of his assets. Generally, though, large debts to foreign banks — Trump's biggest creditor is reported to be Deutsche Bank, a German institution with links to Russia — would exclude a person from a top secret clearance.
Presidents, however, are not investigated and polygraphed for security clearances as all other government officials are. By virtue of being elected, they assume control over all the nation's secret intelligence, and are allowed by law to disclose any of it, at any time, to anyone.
Former presidents aren't subject to security clearance investigations, either. They are provided access to secrets as a courtesy, with the permission of the current president.
Typically, former presidents are given briefings before they travel overseas, or in connection with an issue about which the current president wishes to consult them, Priess and other experts say.
When President Bill Clinton sent former president Jimmy Carter to diffuse a tense stand off in Haiti, for example, Carter likely received classified briefings on the situation ahead of his trip.
And when George H.W. Bush visited his son in the White House, he sat in on on the President's Daily Brief, the highly classified compendium of secrets that is presented each morning to the occupant of the Oval Office, according to Priess, who interviewed both men for his book.
Former presidents have long made money after leaving office by writing books and giving speeches, but no former president has ever had the kind of international business entanglements Trump does. Trump has business interests or connections in China, Russia and other U.S. adversary countries that covet even tiny portions of what he knows about the American national security state.
That said, Trump probably is not conversant with many highly classified details, experts say, He was famous for paying only intermittent attention during his intelligence briefings and declining to read his written materials. Moreover, intelligence officials tend not to share specifics about sources and methods with any president, unless he asks.
So Trump probably doesn't know the names of the CIA's spies in Russia, experts say. But presumably he knows a bit about the capabilities of American surveillance drones, for example, or how adept the National Security Agency has been at intercepting the communications of various foreign governments.
Trump disclosed secret weapons system to Woodward
The president revealed to Bob Woodward in the new book 'Rage' that he had built a secret weapons system. The panel discusses.
Like so much with Trump, his track record of sharing secrets has been unprecedented in American presidential history.
In interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward for a book released this fall, Trump boasted about a secret nuclear weapons system that neither Russia nor China knew about.
According to the Washington Post, Woodward's sources "later confirmed that the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system, but they would not provide details, and that the people were surprised Trump had disclosed it."
When Trump briefed the public about the commando raid that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, he disclosed classified and sensitive details, according to reporting by NBC News.
Image: Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago (Nicholas Kamm / AFP - Getty Images file)
In 2018, the New York Times reported that Trump commonly used insecure cell phones to call friends, and that Chinese and other spies listened in, gaining valuable insights.
Trump's large debts, he wrote, present "obvious and alarming counterintelligence risks" to the United States.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, for one, would have a great incentive to pay Trump to act on Russia's behalf, Wise wrote.
"Assuming President Joe Biden follows custom, Trump would continue to have access to sensitive information that the Russians would consider valuable," he wrote. "As horrifying as it would seem, could a financially leveraged former president be pressured or blackmailed into providing Moscow sensitive information in exchange for financial relief and future Russian business considerations?"
It was not impossible to envision Trump paid millions on retainer by Gulf Arab states or other foreign governments, Harvard professor Goldsmith said, "in the course of which he starts blabbing and disclosing lots of secrets. It wouldn't be an express quid pro quo, but people would pay for access to and time with him, knowing that he will not be discreet."
Former CIA Director John Brennan, a frequent Trump critic who was denied access to his own classified file by the president, said the Biden administration should carefully weigh the question of Trump's access to future secrets.
"The new administration would be well-advised to conduct an immediate review to determine whether Donald Trump should have continued access to classified information in light of his past actions and deep concern about what he might do in the future," he said.
Then again, it may never become an issue, said former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who pointed out that Trump has long displayed "disdain" for American intelligence agencies.
"I would frankly be surprised if he even wanted these briefings," Polymeropoulos said.
