Liberty professor resigns after Falwell's 'Governor Blackface' tweet https://t.co/Kx0gk2tWLs AKA: Becoming black

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 30, 2020

TEXTBOOK COLLABORATION WITH THE ENEMY:

During the Dec. 29 call with Kislyak, the pair discussed sanctions at length, despite Flynn's denials later.

"[T]he idea is, be -- if you -- if you have to do something, do something on a reciprocal basis, meaning you know, on a sort of an even basis," Flynn said later in the call. "Then that, then that is a good message and we'll understand that message. And, and then, we know that we're not going to escalate this thing, where we -- where because if we put out -- if we send out 30 guys and you send out 60, you know, or you shut down every Embassy, I mean we have to get this to a -- let's, let's keep this at a level that uh is, is even-keeled, okay?"

The transcripts also predate the 2016 election, briefly describing a call Flynn made to Kislyak on January 5, 2016, to express his condolences to Kislyak about the death of Igor Sergun. Sergun was the director of Russia's military intelligence service, the GRU.

ASK JOHN, CHARLES & GEORGE IF LIBERALISM DEPENDS ON PEACE:

With the near-century of relative peace and prosperity, brought on largely by the spread of liberal ideas, the critics of liberalism claim that those ideas must then rely on a peaceful world. That those liberal ideas cannot answer for political turmoil and epidemics. But that is confusing cause and effect. 

Liberalism, as we know it today, was formed not in recent times of peace and prosperity, but in the crucible of the 1600s and 1700s. Indeed, some authors trace liberalism's roots all the way back to the fall of the Roman Empire (see Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop). The 1600s witnessed some of the most horrific religious wars the world has ever seen; it was a dangerous time, far in contrast to the relatively peaceful world we have now: the Thirty-Years War, repeated invasions by the Ottoman Empire, the Defenestration of Prague, the Bohemian Revolt, the English Civil War and English Restoration, just to name a few. Not to mention disasters like the Plague of Seville (about 25% of the population died) or the Great London Fire. 

During these momentous events, Hugo Grotius was writing his treatise The Rights of War and Peace, one of the first great liberal works of political philosophy. John Locke was writing his Treatises. Samuel Pufendorf was working on his various jurisprudence treatises. The foundations and arguments for liberalism were being laid in response to the turbulent times as a means of considering peaceful coexistence. 

The 1700s were much of the same. There were the Jacobite uprisings and the political turmoil of England that concerned Adam Smith and David Hume very much. There was the American Revolution and French Revolution, which spawned much liberal writing and discourse, especially between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. The leading liberals of the time were actively engaging in the turmoil of their day, not hiding away from it. As deadly plagues swept through major cities, these thinkers continued to think and spread liberal ideas. And their ideas did spread as well.

The 1800s saw some of the most devastating plagues mankind has ever seen as cholera gripped much of the world. But that did not stop liberalism; instead, it strengthened it. As cholera ripped through SoHo in London in 1854, Richard Cobden was advocating for free trade to alleviate the poor. As governments rose and fell in France (some lasting just a few months), Frederic Bastiat was agitating for a more liberal and cosmopolitan France. The ideas and efforts of these two men would ultimately form one of the modern world's first free trade agreements between England and France and lay the groundwork for these two age-old enemies to become staunch allies in the coming century. 

As disease spread through the faulty sewers of London, AV Dicey was working on his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, which would become the handbook for liberal rule of law study for centuries to come. Dicey, Cobden, and Bastiat all wrote, not in ignorance of the events surrounding them, but actively engaging in them.

NOW IMPOSE CONSUMPTION TAXES AND WE'LL INVEST IT:

The personal savings rate hit a historic 33% in April, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said Friday. This rate -- how much people save as a percentage of their disposable income -- is by far the highest since the department started tracking in the 1960′s, and surpasses consumer savings during the Global Financial Crisis. April's print is up from 12.7% in March.

WHY THE 3% AIN'T BLACK:

The words echoed the ones used by late Miami police chief Walter Headley, who issued a 'get tough' policy on black protesters during race riots in the city in the 1960s. 

'We haven't had any serious problems with civil uprising and looting,' Headley said at a December 1967 news conference The New York Times reported at the time, 'because I've let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts.'

'We don't mind being accused of police brutality,' Headley noted. 'They haven't seen anything yet.'

IT'D BE HELPFUL IF WE COULD TEST EVERYONE:

WHAT IF IT REALLY IS FLIGHT 93?:

Perhaps it's because Trump was a celebrity with a TV show long before he entered politics that makes his fans love him so unconditionally. Whatever it is, Trump and his supporters have an unusually personal and almost intimate bond. It's clear after three and a half tumultuous years that they will follow his lead no matter what.

The political implications of this are profound. This weird relationship between president and base now completely dominates the Republican Party, apparently making it impossible for any prominent national figure in the party to allow even the smallest daylight between himself or herself and Trump. (Frankly, very few even seem to be trying.) 

The red MAGA hat serves as an official symbol of Trump loyalty, and there is a certain part of his following that uses it as a tool of intimidation. Even more disturbing, there has been a spate of mass shootings and other acts of violence by people who have named Trump or his ideas as motivation.

In order to maintain his supporters' devotion, Trump has stoked the culture wars at every turn, ruthlessly dividing the country in order to keep his fans engaged. They receive such hypocritical gestures of solidarity as his newfound "pro-life" zealotry with enthusiastic gratitude -- but what they really love are his brutal assaults on those they consider their political and cultural enemies. In that, Trump and his base are one.

So it should come as no surprise that when Trump faced the first crisis of his presidency that was not of his own making --- and failed to meet the challenge --- he would reflexively fall back on culture-war tactics to reinforce his base. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with the death toll now over 100,000 and the economy in dire straits. After bungling the response so badly that it will be studied by historians for centuries as an example of poor leadership, Trump is returning to his original instinct, which was simply to deny that the whole thing mattered, or was even happening.

ONLY GOVERNORS SHOULD BE PRESIDENTS:

Governors made a terrible showing in the Democratic presidential primaries this year. Montana Governor Steve Bullock quietly slipped into and out of the race without making much of an impression at all. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper followed the same course. And while the governor of my home state of Washington, Jay Inslee, managed to make climate change a major issue in the race, he too dropped out of the race long before a single ballot had been cast. At the time, pundits leveraged the failure of those campaigns into columns wondering if governors had lost all clout in national politics. 

Then came coronavirus, and governors who took swift and decisive action to lessen the impact of the pandemic on their states -- Republican and Democratic alike -- are now polling in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Even their worst partisan critics are largely praising governors for leading the way at a time when the federal response has been at best muddled and at worst actively harmful to the public health.

The lesson to be taken from this? People like it when their leaders lead. They want their leaders to explain and identify the problem, and then take decisive action to solve the problem. At a time when trust in federal government institutions are polling at all-time lows, it seems that the real frustration voters are expressing is not so much an ideological protest as it is an exasperation at the lack of leadership they've seen from Washington, D.C.

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING DONALD IS THAT HE HOLDS THE GOP IN CONTEMPT:

He's not a Republican. No Republican thinks our values are so fragile that they can be annihilated by stamps. https://t.co/TzSWC1oSuL

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 29, 2020

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

What if all cars switched to electric overnight? We recently published a peer-reviewed conference paper looking at the emissions impact for such a switch in Scotland alone, and have now extended our analysis to the whole of the UK for a forthcoming publication. We found that if the UK's cars went entirely electric its total carbon emissions would be cut by almost 12%.

LIKE THINKING HISPANICS PREFER LATINX:

On May 23rd, one day after @JoeBiden's comments on The Breakfast Club w/@cthagod, I polled a diverse sample of Black & White Americans using TurkPrime to collect data to share w/my Intro to American Politics class. @peyton_k and I looked at the data and made the plots below.

— Hakeem Jefferson (@hakeemjefferson) May 29, 2020

THE REAL FLEX WOULD BE A GALLEY OF THE NEXT LBJ BOOK:

We've all developed our share of collective quarantine quirks over the past few months. Among a certain circle of media types, the latest COVID-era trend appears to be owning a giant book.

The New York Times' Dana Rubinstein highlighted the trend involving Robert Caro's 1,246-page biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which has been popping up in the background of TV interviews with journalists and politicians working from home amid the pandemic. "The ultimate signifier of New York political sophistication," as Rubinstein put it, a copy of the book has become a must-have accessory for quarantine TV appearances.

NO ONE DESERVES TO LOSE HIS SEAT MORE:

VLAD WHO?:

Putin might have taken the occasion of the crisis to display some strong personal leadership to the public. Instead, his interventions have come across as belated and confusing. He gave his first speech about the pandemic only on March 25, three days after Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, announced restrictive measures to control the virus's spread. From that point, information and even leadership seemed to emanate from Moscow rather than from the central government. Putin never declared a state of emergency and seemed to follow behind events rather than anticipating them.

Perhaps most remarkably, Putin's public reticence has carried over to his behavior behind the scenes. A leader whom one might have expected to consolidate power in a crisis has instead returned a lot of decision-making powers to regional governors. The move is particularly curious because for nearly two decades, Putin has consistently worked to strip power from local strongmen and vest it in his own hands. Now, when the news is grim and the policies restrictive, Putin has chosen the local governors to play the bad guys responsible for the health-care failures and personal constraints. For himself he has chosen the role of benefactor, bestowing gifts in the form of nonworking days and financial assistance. 

The trick hasn't worked as planned. Putin's approval rating has fallen to a historic low of 56 percent from a peak of 86 percent. Russian citizens--accustomed to news of Russia's strong macroeconomic performance, triple surplus, and solid reserves--had imagined that in the event of a disaster, a powerful and generous Putin would take full control, overcome the crisis, and help the people. That vision has turned out to be far removed from reality. The president and his central government loosened the reins in the midst of the crisis rather than tightening them. Putin receded into the background, allowing others to take responsibility for tackling the epidemic and issuing less financial assistance than people expected. He has left his supporters unnerved and embarrassed.

GROOMING JUDAS GOATS:

Proving Joe Biden's point. All that is required to be black and a Trump supporter is acceptance of racism. https://t.co/b3r8yvQSGe

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 29, 2020

THE CENTRAL ERROR OF THE LEFT/RIGHT (profanity alert):

 As with many publishing coups, the ebullient response to This Life makes manifest a desire it seems to have met. Not coincidentally, correctly identifying desires in order to think about the ways they might be met is central to the book's vision.

Literally central. Midway through This Life, in a chapter devoted to the difference between natural and spiritual freedom, Hägglund is emphatic that the question, what should I do with my time, is 'the question that underlies all normative considerations.'

For any norm to matter to me, it has to matter to me what I do with my time. Furthermore, what I do with my time can matter to me only because I grasp my life as finite. If I believed that I had an infinite time to live, the urgency of doing anything would be unintelligible and no normative obligation could have any grip on me.

A number of philosophical theses are compressed in these assertions. Likewise, a number of surprising judgments follow, some of which are expressed elsewhere in the book. For example, early Christian martyrs ought not to be thought of as martyrs exactly, since they believed that they were living on past the destruction of their mortal bodies. And if they believed that they were going to live on, should we really revere them or fear them (whatever response seems appropriate) for their actions? True martyrdom is when someone gives their life for a cause and truly gives it - ends it, terminated. Anything else is delusional or bad faith.

'Bad faith' is a notion associated with Jean-Paul Sartre but also implicit in Martin Heidegger's existentialism, one of the pillars of Hägglund's effort. It names instances of inauthenticity in life, those moments when you disavow your choices as choices, treating them instead as consequences of necessities beyond your control. In Sartre's hands, sincerity as a social grace becomes one of his key examples of acting in bad faith. For there is nothing less authentically sincere than desiring to be sincere; if you were actually sincere you wouldn't have to try. The paradox of bad faith in this case is that, to avoid it, you have to affirm that the run of events could be otherwise, while at the same time denying that you yourself could do anything differently. The moral of the existentialist tradition to which This Life belongs is that one ought to avoid doing anything in bad faith. [...]

There is a lot of talk in This Life about what matters, but there's no account of what mattering means, a subject dear to contemporary consequentialism. Still, what Hägglund shares with this body of work is the notion that reason is the arbiter of what matters. One might think this is simply the definition of the philosopher - one for whom reason decides, and in the case of the moral philosopher, decides which desires are to be permitted and possibly fulfilled. But there are various pictures of this idea, and Hägglund's portrait is one in which reason does a fair bit of boundary work. The only potentially viable justification one can offer for one's acts is one that provides reasons that would be universally recognised as reasons, reasons that partake in Reason. This is why justifications that involve appeals to divine authority (such as those based on the sanctity of life) are inadmissible on their own terms. And if they are admitted, it's only so they can be re-described in such a way as to disclose their truth content in rationalist terms. Reason has its rules, and those rules are constitutively common. Reason is what's given, what is to be accessed and expressed by all. 

I grew up with the old axiom "my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins," which is about balancing personal freedom with the rights of others and one's own obligation to watch out for those rights. The maliciously gendered rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, the incels and pick-up artist subcultures, Trumpism, and a lot else have proposed, in recent years, that actually their right to swing their arms doesn't end and my nose and your nose are not their problem or are just in the way and need to move. Wearing masks, it turns out, is not manly, when the definition of manly is not having to do f[***]-all out of concern for others.

There are a lot of other things that turn out not to be manly, including caring about climate change and environmental problems, and even according to some studies recycling (and others, handwashing). Taking care of things is not manly. Four of the worst-hit countries in this pandemic are also afflicted with heads of state preoccupied with meeting the terms of machismo--Bolsanaro, Putin, Boris J., Trump--in ways that conflict with recognizing the gravity of the Covid-19 crisis and responding adequately.

This is a definition of masculinity as radical selfishness, and just as it's taken a huge toll in American lives by demanding and utilizing deregulation of access to semiautomatic weapons and other implements of mass death, so it's taken a huge toll by insisting that we don't have to respond to the pandemic because the "we" that is not responding imagines itself as invulnerable and full of unlimited arm-swinging rights. 

THE VALUE OF SURVEILLANCE:

It was a member of the public who filmed George Floyd grasping for breath as a white Minneapolis policeman pressed his knee on Floyd's neck for at least five minutes on Monday.

Floyd went still and was later declared dead in hospital. Four police officers were fired from their jobs but remain free and the city has had three nights of angry protests.

"If we did not have a video, would the officers have been fired as quickly?" Ibram Kendi, director of the American University's anti-racism research center, asked in an interview with Democracy Now! "Would they have believed all of those witnesses who were looking at what was happening and who was the asking officers to stop?"

In the second incident, a white woman falsely reported Christian Cooper, an avid birdwatcher, to police after he requested that she leash her dog in a wooded area of New York's Central Park.

"I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life," she told Cooper as he filmed her dial 911 in a video that has been viewed over 43 million times on Twitter.

In February, Ahmaud Arbery -- also African American -- was shot and killed by two white residents while jogging in their neighborhood in Georgia.

A third man, who was later also charged over Arbery's death, filmed the murder, with the cellphone video sparking outrage when it was leaked onto social media earlier this month.

HE ONLY LIKES CONFEDERATE FLAGS:

Trump's statement that 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts' is now hidden by a warning that it violated Twitter's rules - but the message can be bypassed and the tweet remains live. 

The president had used Twitter to intervene in the riots which erupted for a third night running following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who had gasped for breath as a police officer knelt on his head. 

Trump's 1am tweet described the looters as 'thugs' and warned that the federal government would 'assume control' with 'shooting' if necessary after protesters set fire to a police precinct. 

But Twitter put a warning on the tweet less than three hours later, saying it had 'taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts'. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was informed in advance.  

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN:

The aging Chesterton, recalling Thursday in the light of the darkness of his youth across the span of forty years, makes the perilous mistake of seeing the dragon of decadence and not the knight in shining orthodoxy who slays it. Thus in his autobiography he writes that "the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in the story... is not so much God... but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism," whereas, in fact, as the text testifies explicitly, Sunday refers to himself within the context of the Book of Genesis and the Days of Creation as "the Sabbath" and "the peace of God," and, as if to hammer the point home, his final words are those of Christ Himself, asking his interlocutors, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?" Pace Chesterton, whose myopic memory misreads his own novel, Sunday reveals himself as being much more than mere Nature, much more than a mere god, but the Christian God whose presence makes sense of the nightmare nonsense that His perceived absence presents.

Seeing Thursday in the contemporaneous light of Orthodoxy and its "ethics of elfland," we can see that it encapsulates the paradox, embodied in the character of Chesterton's delightful priest detective Father Brown, that wisdom can only be found in innocence. This is nothing less than the truth that Christ teaches. We will not be with Him in heaven unless we become as little children.

The paradoxical heart of The Man Who Was Thursday is the tension that exists between the childlikeness demanded by Christ and the childishness that St. Paul tells us to avoid. We have to remain child-like by ceasing to be childish. The first is the wisdom of innocence, or the sanity of sanctity, whereby we see the miracle of life with eyes full of wonder; the second is the self-centredness of one who refuses the challenge of growing-up. Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday is essentially about childish detectives attaining childlike wisdom, just as his later novel, Manalive, illustrates how the pure childlikeness of the aptly-named Innocent Smith is misunderstood by the childish world in which he finds himself.

The Man Who Was Thursday shows us the paradoxical truth that it takes a big man to know how small he is. It shows us that thinking we are big is childish whilst knowing that we are small is childlike. Thinking we are big, the sin of pride, turns our world into a living nightmare. Knowing we are small wakes us up. In a world that is somnambulating deeper and deeper into the living nightmare it has made for itself, we are in more need than ever of the wide-awake awareness of G.K. Chesterton, a visionary who was larger than life because he spent his life on his knees.

THAT ANCIENT AUTOMOBILE AGE?:

The team discovered evidence that high levels of ultraviolet radiation devastated the ancient forest ecosystem, which was largely driven by changes in the Earth's temperatures and climate cycles, leading to the erosion of the ozone layer.

The study's lead researcher John Marshall, who is a professor at the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, said the ozone layer likely vanished for a short period, and that deadly event occurred at a time when the planet was warming.

"Our ozone shield vanished for a short time in this ancient period, coinciding with a brief and quick warming of the Earth," he said in a release. "Our ozone layer is naturally in a state of flux--constantly being created and lost--and we have shown this happened in the past, too, without a catalyst such as a continental scale volcanic eruption."

A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

Now that rental car giant Hertz has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company's next steps aren't clear. But if a whole slew of used rental cars suddenly hits the market, don't immediately shy away from them. Picking up a used rental car isn't always as bad as you'd think.

Car sales have been in terrible shape this year, mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's currently a buyer's market for sure, so if you're thinking about picking up something new for yourself, now might be the time to do it. 

Hertz has no intention of buying any more cars for its fleets this year. In fact, Hertz and other suffering rental car companies are likely to sell off a big chunk of their fleets instead. Industry experts expect the companies to unload 1.5 million cars from their US fleets in the coming weeks and months, according to CNN Business. 

TOP OF VLAD'S PUNCHLIST:

Tech policy experts who spoke to Defense One said that the order would limit the ability of social media networks to block efforts to use their platforms for manipulation and disinformation, since the companies would need to give each disinformation-spreading bot a sort of hearing before it purges them. 

Daphne Keller, a fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, said, "If the [executive order] had legal effect, it would certainly make it much, much harder to police disinformation online." But she said much of the order is of dubious legality, and has produced a color-coded version showing how and why. 

Alex Howard, Director of the Digital Democracy Project at the left-leaning Demand Progress, said that the order "further abuses the powers of the presidency to advance a conspiracy about ideologically motivated censorship on social media without evidence, intimidating private companies from taking even small steps to accurately inform the public about elections, health and other issues by labeling provably false content, much less removing it from the platform if [those companies] decide it violates their policy." 

"This executive order and accompanying messaging appear designed to intimidate the tech companies from taking more aggressive steps to combat disinformation, particularly Twitter," Howard said.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has made disinformation and online platforms a legislative focus, said that the order is an "effort to cow platforms into allowing Trump, dark money groups, and right-wing militias to continue to exploit their tools to sow disinformation, engage in targeted harassment, and suppress voter participation." He described the order as a "distraction from the legitimate efforts to establish common sense regulations for dominant social media platforms."

It's not the first time Trump has tried to regulate social media companies. Last August, the administration drafted a similar executive order that would allow the FTC and FCC to police social media companies for perceived bias. But officials at the FTC and FCC pushed back against the order on constitutional grounds. 

Trump issued the new order after Twitter on Tuesday labeled a provably false tweet about mail-in ballots with a "fact check" link. 

WHITE SWAN:

2. Establish a global response

"To respond to a pandemic, members of the international community will continue to work together," Bush said. "An influenza pandemic would be an event with global consequences, and therefore we're continuing to meet to develop a global response."

Bush requested $251 million from Congress to help foreign nations train local medical personnel, expand their surveillance and testing capabilities, and detect and contain outbreaks.

In September 2019, the Trump administration stopped funding PREDICT, an initiative under the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that worked with dozens of foreign laboratories -- including the one in Wuhan, China, that identified the novel coronavirus.

The program also trained thousands of people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to detect new viruses, according to the Los Angeles Times.

PREDICT was resurrected in April with $2.26 million in emergency USAID funding. But that same month, Trump ordered the US to stop funding the World Health Organization, claiming the organization allowed China to conceal the extent of the contagion.

The US has also pulled back from collaborating on international efforts to combat the pandemic: It didn't send a representative to the Coronavirus Global Response, a virtual summit that raised more than $8 billion for a vaccine, The Guardian reported.

And it has not said if it will attend the Global Vaccine Summit in London on June 4.

"What the United States has chosen in these recent meetings - not to attend, and not to participate - it has chosen instead to begin talking about a sort of go-it-alone approach," Stephen Morrison, director of the Center on Global Health Policy, told the Guardian.

That approach, he added, "fractures the international efforts and creates tensions and uncertainties and insecurities."

3. Strengthen domestic surveillance

"By creating systems that provide continuous situational awareness, we're more likely to be able to stop, slow, or limit the spread of the pandemic and save American lives," Bush said in his pandemic address.

His administration launched the National Bio-surveillance Initiative in 2005, which increased the government's ability to rapidly detect, quantify, and respond to outbreaks in both humans and animals.

It also set up systems to quickly share data between local, state, national, and international public health officials.

In 2018, Trump's National Security Adviser, John Bolton, disbanded the National Security Council's Global Health Security and Biodefense unit, set up by the Obama administration to handle pandemic preparedness.

Bolton tweeted that it was a "streamlining" of NSC structures.

Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, the top official responsible for overseeing our pandemic response, left the administration shortly thereafter.

The White House also eliminated the $30 million Complex Crises Fund, which the secretary of state can access to deploy disease experts.

Trump's budget proposals have consistently called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's budget to be slashed by millions of dollars, though Congress has declined those provisions.

4. Stockpile vaccines, antiviral drugs, and medical supplies

Bush warned that, in a pandemic, "everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators, masks, and protective equipment would be in short supply."

In 2003, the Bush administration placed the country's reserve of vaccines and antitoxins under the control of the Department of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security.

It also expanded the reserve to include medical equipment, like ventilators and personal protective equipment, and renamed it the Strategic National Stockpile.

In his address, Bush asked for $1.2 billion for enough avian flu vaccine to inoculate 20 million Americans and $1 billion to stockpile antivirals like Tamiflu.

The Obama administration utilized the stockpile during the 2009 H1N1 and 2016 Zika outbreaks but did not replenish it. The Trump administration also failed to replace those items despite warnings the stockpile was not prepared for a pandemic, according to NBC.

In February, HHS requested $2 billion to replenish the stockpile, but was rebuffed by the Office of Management and Budget, the Washington Post reported, resulting in a screaming match in the Situation Room between Azar and an OMB official.

The White House ultimately trimmed Azar's request down to $500 million when it was brought to Congress.

Once the virus came to the US, hospitals and state officials sounded the alarm about a lack of protective gear, but Trump called PPE shortages "fake news."