I am not watching the impeachment trial. I’m tired of feeling like a raw wound. I’ll catch highlights tonight on cable. Instead, I’d rather focus on something positive and note that Paul Krugman is very, very happy about the Biden covid package.

Krugman begins by citing a column he wrote in January 2009. in which he warned that president-elect Obama’s economic stimulus plan was way too cautious and fell short of what was needed in the wake of the 2008 financial sector meltdown. And while the package did some good, it was widely perceived as a failure. And President Obama didn’t get another opportunity to enact more stimulus.

The good news — and it’s really, really good news — is that Democrats seem to have learned their lesson. Joe Biden may not look like the second coming of F.D.R.; Chuck Schumer, presiding over a razor-thin majority in the Senate, looks even less like a transformational figure; yet all indications are that together they’re about to push through an economic rescue plan that, unlike the Obama stimulus, truly rises to the occasion.

In fact, the plan is aggressive enough that some Democratic-leaning economists worry that it will be too big, risking inflation. However, I’ve argued at length that they’re wrong — or, more precisely, that, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says, the risks of doing too little outweigh any risk of overheating the economy. In fact, a plan that wasn’t big enough to raise some concerns about overheating would have been too small.

“Some Democratic-leaning economists” = Lawrence Summers, I suspect. Summers must be confused about why people aren’t taking him seriously any more. Back to Krugman:

One thing that may be encouraging Democrats, by the way, is the fact that Biden’s policies actually are unifying, if you look at public opinion rather than the actions of politicians. Biden’s Covid-19 relief plan commands overwhelming public approval — far higher than approval for Obama’s 2009 stimulus. If, as seems likely, not a single Republican in Congress votes for the plan, that’s evidence of G.O.P. extremism, not failure on Biden’s part to reach out.

This is an important point. When Biden talks about unifying the country, I believe he means exactly that. Not unifying the Senate or unifying the political parties. It appears so far he’s not even going to try to placate Republicans in Congress; he’s going to do what the people need doing, and if Republicans don’t like it they can go home and explain themselves to their constituents.

From yesterday’s Politico:

Already, there’s talk about midterm attack ads portraying Republicans as willing to slash taxes for the wealthy but too stingy to cut checks for people struggling during the deadly pandemic. And President Joe Biden’s aides and allies are vowing not to make the same mistakes as previous administrations going into the midterms elections. They are pulling together plans to ensure Americans know about every dollar delivered and job kept because of the bill they’re crafting. And there is confidence that the Covid-19 relief package will ultimately emerge not as a liability for Democrats, but as an election year battering ram.

Yes, yes, yes. This is how it’s done, Dems.

Always there are some people who don’t get memos. Some of the “moderate” Dems wanted to be more frugal with the direct payments. But it appears the progressives have defeated this. Cristina Cabrera writes at TPM that “moderate Democrats had proposed lowering the cap to $50,000 for individual filers and $100,000 for couples before the amounts per payment begin to phase out.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blasted the proposals to lower the thresholds on Saturday.

“It would be outrageous if we ran on giving more relief and ended up doing the opposite,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

“In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden. Brilliant!” Sanders tweeted.

To which some of the “moderates” must have said, oh, yeah. Duh. The former caps remain in place. And yesterday they added a provision that would give millions of families $3,000 per child.

Maybe if Democrats get used to throwing their weight around, next they’ll kill the filibuster. Oh, please ….

Elsewhere — Aaron Blake writes about the sodden mess that is Trump’s impeachment defense.

Watch this video that was shown in the Trump impeachment trial this morning. Just watch it.

The Atlantic has an article by Wendy Parmet titled Employers’ Vaccine Mandates Are Representative of America’s Failed Approach to Public Health. As people discuss mandating covid vaccines, the next question is, who will do the mandating? The government or employers? And right now it looks like we’ll be falling back on employers.

Although important legal questions and limits remain—such as whether vaccines that have received only emergency-use authorization, rather than full FDA approval, can be mandated—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent guidance assumes that employers can require, subject to limitations established by the Americans With Disabilities Act and Title VII, that their workers be vaccinated. This comports with the long-standing view that employers, especially in nonunionized workplaces, have broad power to set the terms and conditions of employment, including requirements that their employees be vaccinated. Doing so might be just the trick to overcoming people’s resistance. Although many Americans rebel when the government tells them what to do, they can, for obvious reasons, be quite acquiescent to the dictates of their employers.

Already some employers are offering bonuses to employees to get vaccinated, which I’m fine with. I understand there’s a real problem with nursing home staff refusing to get vaccinated, and IMO state health departments need to mandate vaccines asap.

Keep in mind that a big problem with U.S. nursing homes is that, while there may need to be a Registered Nurse on duty at all times, most of the staff are either Licensed Practical Nurses — high school graduates with one year of nurse’s training — or Certified Nursing Assistants — high school graduates with four months of training. Depending on the state, there may be more CNAs than anything else, and while they may be very good at helping residents with bathing and other functions, they don’t necessarily know science from salsa. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that staffers are afraid of the vaccine.

Wendy Parmet’s larger point is that the pandemic is showing us how much public health has been privatized in the U.S. And this is not working.

Unquestionably, the private sector has a role to play in public health—just look at the private companies that produced the vaccines and the private hospitals that have cared for the ill. But to rely on it to protect the public’s health is pure folly. As the pandemic has shown only too well, private and public interests do not always align. Before COVID-19, for example, hospitals focused on their bottom line and failed to stock up on personal protective gear or extra ventilators, even though they knew a pandemic could strike. Once one did, competitive pressures also pushed many businesses, such as restaurants and meatpacking plants, to stay open and overlook the health of their employees and communities, even as they became sources of infection. To depend now on the private sector to increase vaccination rates would further underscore America’s tepid commitment to the basic principles of public health.

This goes along with our insane religious faith in “free markets” to provide for everyone’s needs. It doesn’t work, folks. But the other point, IMO, is that people who don’t like being told what to do are just trading one authority for another. If the government doesn’t make them get vaccinated, their employers probably will sooner or later. I believe that eventually covid vaccinations are going to be required before any of us can do much of anything — hold a job, go to school, travel — and if government doesn’t enforce it, the private sector will step in. And the private sector is much less democratic than government.

What else can I say but … go Chiefs.

Josh Marshall has a members only post at Talking Points Memo that warns us not to think of QAnon as a conspiracy theory.

Q is not a “conspiracy theory”. The faked moon landing was a conspiracy theory. Perhaps birtherism was a conspiracy theory, though one with similarities to QAnon because of its strong ideological valence. But Q is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals (and everyone else outside its definition of true Americans) in an imminent apocalyptic political reckoning. What we call the ‘conspiracy theories’ are simply the storylines and claims that justify that outcome. They could easily be replaced by others which serve the same purpose.

I think one way to understand this is that the fantastical stories that make up much of the Q phenomenon are not the source of the problem. The problem is that a whole lot of people are alienated and confused and fearful and enraged and, yes, bigoted, and the Q stories are a post-hoc explanation that justifies their feelings. As Josh Marshall says, another set of completely different stories would serve the purpose.

It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s a form of aggression. Things like the Q phenomenon are just this aggression writ large. I say you’re a pedophile because it is itself an act of aggression but also because it dehumanizes you. It’s a storyline that makes hurting you or killing you make more sense and be more exciting.

In the several years now that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve written many posts about how the U.S. right wing tends to “think” in symbols, archetypes, and allegories rather than rationally and conceptually. The most recent such post is from November 2020. In this, I quote a friend who points out that if you ask a Trump supporter why they like Trump, they don’t talk about policy or programs, at least not real ones. They talk either about how he makes them feel or who he is going to “own” or “get tough” with (e.g., nonwhites, libs, uppity women, elites, China).* Maybe they’ll claim he built the wall, even though he didn’t, but the only reason they want a wall is to lock out brown people. “While Democrats are calling, texting, trying to persuade—Trumpists just drive around waving his name and snarling,” my friend wrote. “Democrats are talking healthcare and Covid-19–Trumpists are driving around shouting ‘Hunter Biden!’ out their car windows.”

(*I have to note that I observed the same thing to be true of Ronald Reagan supporters in 1980. If you asked them why they were voting for Reagan, the answer was either some variation of how he made them feel, or else “He’s going to kick the bums off welfare!”)

And, of course, the Hunter Biden who lives in their heads is an archetype that represents something; they probably know next to nothing about the actual Hunter Biden. See also Why There Are Trump Trains, also from November 2020.

The social-psychological foundations of all this mess have been with us for a long time. And the Republican Party has been feeding this beast for a long time, because it helps them win elections without having to do anything useful for anybody who isn’t a wealthy capitalist. However, a wise person told me once that anything you feed will grow. Donald Trump didn’t create the beast, but he — on some instinctual level — recognized it and took it over from the party just as it had gotten too big for its cage. And now it’s his.

See also What’s Left Of The ‘Mainstream’ Republican Party Is Looking Around And Getting Nervous by Kate Riga at TPM. Republicans still in office are used to thinking of themselves as the “party of ideas,” even though I doubt they’ve had any new ideas since McKinley. See Lawrence Glickman, Boston Review, December 2020, How Did the GOP Become the Party of Ideas? Glickman writes that the GOP’s celebrated “ideas” from 1970s onward were just warmed-over anti-New Deal talking points. And now that those have run their course as serious governing principles, Republicans have nothing left. But there are a few in the GOP who aspire to be serious policy makers, and they’re looking at Marjorie Taylor Greene and thinking, What the hell happened?

Even if the spell breaks, and his supporters grasp that Trump is not a superhero but just a bumbling con man, I suspect most of them will easily fall behind some other cult leader rather than be restored to sense. The origins of the problem are older than Trump, and bigger than Trump.

Now, let’s move on to How Trump Unleashed a Domestic Terrorism Movement—And What Experts Say Must Be Done to Defeat It by Mark Follman at Mother Jones.

The mob assault on Congress that left five people dead, scores injured, the Capitol building desecrated, and American democracy deeply shaken was the culmination of a campaign of terrorism. It was led by the president of the United States.

The description of Trump as a terrorist leader is neither metaphor nor hyperbole—it is the assessment of veteran national security experts. Trump, those experts say, adopted a method known as stochastic terrorism, a process of incitement where the instigator provokes extremist violence under the guise of plausible deniability. Although the exact location, timing, and source of the violence may not be predictable, its occurrence is all but inevitable. When pressed about the incitement, the instigator typically responds with equivocal denials and muted denunciations of violence, or claims to have been “joking,” as Trump and those speaking on his behalf routinely made.

Do read the article linked in the quote above on stochastic terrorism, a term I just learned. And as Follman writes, addressing this problem, shrinking the beast, is going to take a lot more than law enforcement functions. It’s going to take a whole-government, whole-society approach. And as it’s been festering for a long time, it’s going to take a long time to tone it down.

I also want to call your attention to Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda by Jason Stanley at Just Security. This is an analysis of a slickly produced video shown at the January 5 rally on the Ellipse, before the mob stormed the Capitol. The article begins:

On January 6, Trump supporters gathered at a rally at Washington DC’s Ellipse Park, regaled by various figures from Trump world, including Donald Trump Jr. and Rudy Giuliani. Directly following Giuliani’s speech, the organizers played a video. To a scholar of fascist propaganda, well-versed in the history of the National Socialist’s pioneering use of videos in political propaganda, it was clear, watching it, what dangers it portended. In it, we see themes and tactics that history warns pose a violent threat to liberal democracy. Given the aims of fascist propaganda – to incite and mobilize – the events that followed were predictable.

Before decoding what the video presents, it is important to take a step back and discuss the structure of fascist ideology and how it can mobilize its most strident supporters to take violent actions.

I’ll let the article speak for itself. It’s very good, and very disturbing.

There’s still a lot about what happened January 6 that needs to be investigated and exposed. I trust the Biden Department of Justice will not drop that ball. But yes, the real problem is that we’ve got a large fascistic political movement on our hands.

A woman holds a QAnon flag as protesters gather outside Governor Kate Brown’s residence in Salem, Ore., on April 25, 2020, calling for novel coronavirus restrictions to be lifted so that people can get back to work. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Before any more time goes by, I want to point to this segment from the February 3 Rachel Maddow Show.

Is there a chance the stranglehold of the oil industry on our democracy is getting looser? See also The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem by Michael Patrick F. Smith at the New York Times. He does a magnificent job pointing out how much we are surrounded by petrochemicals, and how much oil industry jobs tend to be short-lived and dangerous. He’s a bit short on solutions, though. I don’t think returning to a hunter-gatherer economy is going to happen right off.

Yesterday I got a call from the county health department telling me I could have a covid shot if that day at a mass-vaccination clinic, if I could be there in an hour. So I hustled at got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Some advance notice would have been nice, but I’ll take what I can get. They gave me an appointment for the second dose in three weeks.

On to current events. The Senate worked through the night to pass a “budget blueprint” that will allow the covid relief bill to be passed through reconciliation.  The vote was 50-50, with Vice President Kalama Harris breaking the tie at five-something a.m. As I understand it, the blueprint will be used to write the Senate version of the bill.

Li Zhou and Ella Nilsen at Vox explain the next steps. There’s still a lot that needs to be done before the bill becomes law. Dems are aiming to wrap it all up by March 14, when current enhanced unemployment benefits expire.

The bad news is that the provision for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour was killed in the blueprint, probably to placate Joe Manchin. I feared that would happen. NY Times:

Proponents of raising the wage believe it can still be included in the final plan, forcing a tough vote for Democrats opposed to the increase but who won’t want to vote against the entire stimulus package.

“We need to end the crisis of starvation wages in Iowa and around the United States,” Mr. Sanders said.

He added that he planned to try to get the phased-in wage increase included in the reconciliation bill, which can be approved on a simple majority vote, circumventing a filibuster which requires 60 votes to overcome. But it is not clear whether the effort will succeed given the strict rules of the process, which mandate that any policy changes directly affect federal revenues.

The increase won’t pass in this Senate outside of reconciliation unless they kill the filibuster. Note that a considerable number of workers in West Virginia earn at or below the minimum wage, and that was before the pandemic. West Virginians would have benefited, big time. Way to go, Sen. Manchin.

However, other than the minimum wage provision, I don’t believe any serious damage has been done to the Biden Administration proposal.

Naturally, Republicans are outraged that Democrats would stoop so low as to pass all this stuff through reconciliation. Note that Republicans’ failed effort to kill Obamacare and successful passage of Trump’s tax cuts used reconciliation.

Greg Sargent:

The move does indeed pose a serious challenge to Republicans. But it’s one that runs deeper than merely moving toward passing this one package without them. It also suggests a reset in dealing with GOP bad-faith tactics across the board — and even the beginnings of a response to the Donald Trump era and the ideology loosely described as “Trumpism.”  …

… Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is already denouncing this move. The minority leader railed that Democrats have “set the table to ram through their $1.9 trillion rough draft,” adding: “notwithstanding all the talk about bipartisan unity, Democrats are plowing ahead.”

Get used to it, Mitch. Sargent reminds us that McConnell’s use of filibuster rules effectively destroyed bipartisanship in the Senate for several years. And here is the critical point, for Democrats:

Senior Democrats have begun to articulate the idea that the true way to revitalize faith in government — and in democracy — is by successfully delivering on big-ticket items. Achieving bipartisan cooperation for its own sake will do far less to address deep civic division and disillusionment than robust and effective action on behalf of the common good will.

Exactly. And I also want to quote something Sargent wrote last week:

As political scientist Stephen Skowronek recently told Michelle Goldberg: “The old Reagan formulas have lost their purchase, there is new urgency in the moment, and the president has an insurgent left at his back.”

The skunk at the picnic is Larry Summers, the centrist economist who was dumped from Biden’s economic team last year. Summers penned an op ed at WaPo saying that Biden is ignoring too many risks. However, President Biden doesn’t care.

I’m sure Marjorie Taylor Greene is blissfully unaware that she’s a bigger detriment to the Right than to the Left. It is significant that Mitch McConnell — evil but not stupid — put the word out Monday night that Greene needs to be kept on a short leash, if not in a padded cell. And tomorrow the House will vote on stripping Greene of her committee assignments.

But that’s not all. House Republicans also plan to debate Wednesday whether to retain Rep. Liz Cheney in her leadership position after her Jan. 13 vote to impeach President Donald Trump.

Plus, some House Republicans, who are basically spoiled six-year-olds, offered an amendment to a House bill that would remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from her committee assignments. I understand Rep. Omar is being accused of antisemitism, a charge that an opinion writer for the Forward (“Jewish. Fearless. Since 1897”) says is so much bovine effluvia.

I assume Greene can be removed from her committees by a simple majority vote, in which case she’ll probably be removed. Not that I’m a fan of Liz Cheney, but I do think that if Republicans remove her from her leadership position it would amount to them shooting great big bullets through their own feet. I’m betting Mitch is making some phone calls about that now.

At the Washington Post, Colbert King points to a time when the Republican Party was, relatively, sane, and their problem candidate was David Duke, the neo-Nazi former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. King writes,

“When someone asserts that the Holocaust never took place, then I don’t believe that person ever deserves one iota of public trust,” Bush said. “And when someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that such a person can legitimately aspire to leadership — in a leadership role in a free society. And when someone has a long record, an ugly record, of racism and of bigotry, that record simply cannot be erased by the glib rhetoric of a political campaign.

“So, I believe that David Duke is an insincere charlatan,” Bush continued. “I believe he is attempting to hoodwink the voters of Louisiana, and I believe that he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for.”

The Democratic candidate, Edwin Edwards, won. And the Republican party of the time seems to have been okay with that.

As recently as 2016, when Duke announced a run for a Senate nomination, no less than human anagram Reince Priebus, then the RNC chair, announced the party would give him no support.

David Duke was bad, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is the distillation of pure, toxic ignorance. And a lot of Republicans in Congress are rallying to her side. See also An ugly truth links Marjorie Taylor Greene to Trump — one the GOP won’t confront by Greg Sargent.

And then we come to the impeachment trial. This will amuse you —

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that he has offered to represent Donald Trump in the former president’s second impeachment trial, asserting that he would be willing to resign from his seat in the House of Representatives “if the law requires it.”

Please, oh please …

Marjorie Taylor Greene

I’m about halfway through the New York Times’s deep dive report, 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election. Sorry if it’s behind a firewall for you. If you can’t get to the New York Times even in an incognito window, a good alternative read is the “Off the Rails” series at Axios. They just published a bonus episode, Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency. Hysterical.

But back to 77 Days. One piece of information I did not know involves the Supreme Court suit against the Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. According to the NY Times, the suit itself was written by some lawyers aligned with the White House. Kris Kobach, of voter suppression fame, was involved.

Then the suit was “shopped” to Republican state secretaries of state, because only a secretary of state can file a suit in the Supreme Court against a state, apparently.  Paxton was not the Trumpers’s first choice, but he was the one willing to take it on. Note also that Bill Barr refused to have anything to do with it.

The Trumpers also networked through the Republican Attorneys General Association to get other AGs to sign on or file amicus briefs. There was huge pressure applied to state attorneys general offices to get on board. Many refused. Even some of the ones who did join the suit were extremely skeptical of the whole thing.

“The decision whether we join this amicus is more political than it is legal,” James E. Nicolai, North Dakota’s deputy solicitor general, wrote to his boss.

“I still think it is most likely that the Court will deny this in one sentence,” Mr. Nicolai wrote in a follow-up email, which was also sent to the attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

Other tidbits: The permit for the January 6 rally was for the elipse only, not a march. The event originally was organized and promoted by a group called Women for America First, but a couple of days before the event the White House took it over and turned it into a White House production. Many in the original lineup of speakers were rescheduled to speak at a smaller rally the day before.

The NY Times also tells us that Mitch McConnell was led to believe Trump was just blustering about the election being stolen. He didn’t want to mess with Trump before the January 5 runoff in Georgia. But he was also being given assurances that Trump wouldn’t really burn down the house, so to speak.

Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat

I bet Kushner and Meadows knew good and well they were lying.

On to the impeachment trial. Briefs have been filed by both sides.  I have only skimmed them, but note that the Dem brief is 77 pages long, and Trump’s is only 14. Trump’s new lawyers are mostly arguing that the impeachment is unconstitutional, that Trump didn’t incite violence, that he had a right to say whatever he said. They don’t appear to be arguing that the election was actually stolen. (Update: On closer reading, yeah, they did, in a kind of passive-aggressive way.) Axios is reporting that Trump’s first legal team walked because Trump blew up at their $3 million estimate for their services, even though he’d raised $170 million for his defense fund.

Lindsey Graham and Trump’s new head lawyer David Schoen are double daring the Dems to call witnesses.

But the threat, as enunciated, is rather strange and illogical.

Trump’s new lawyer David Schoen and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) both issued such warnings Monday night on Fox News. They suggested that holding a lengthy trial including witnesses could open up “Pandora’s box,” in Graham’s words, because Trump’s team could then call its own.

I’d say Pandora’s Box is already wide open, Senator, and your buddy Trump opened it. What we’re doing now is cleaning up the mess.

Graham wants to call witnesses who would testify that a lot of people who attacked the Capitol had decided to do so before they came to Washington. Therefore, they couldn’t have been incited by Trump’s speech at the rally. However, the Democrats’s brief accuses Trump of inciting people over many weeks with baseless claims of a stolen election. It’s not limited to what he said on January 6. Graham’s witnesses might actually help make the Dems’s case.

Clerk of the House Cheryl Johnson along with House Sergeant-at-Arms Tim Blodgett lead the Democratic House impeachment managers as they walk through Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill to deliver to the Senate the article of impeachment alleging incitement of insurrection against former President Donald Trump, in Washington, Monday, Jan. 25, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, Pool)

There is one issue that could be uniting people across the political spectrum, and that’s covid vaccine distribution. It’s a mess.

I live in Missouri, which recently has had the distinction of the worst vaccine record among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We’re Number 51! I’m also well over 65, am on three waiting lists, and still don’t have an appointment for a first vaccine. The word from everywhere is, Don’t call us. We’ll call you. Yet I’m also hearing of healthy 30-year-olds who don’t work in teaching or health care but who are getting vaccinated already.

To add to the confusion, about every three days the state unveils a new vaccine distribution plan. They unveiled another one today, according to the Idaho Statesman, although the details are not posted on the state covid information site. As near as I can tell from news stories, over the past week the state has diverted vaccines from chain pharmacies to sites run by National Guard, and then from the Guard sites to select hospitals, although I can’t find out which ones. The vaccines are getting around a lot more than I am; whether they’re getting into arms is another matter.

It’s February 1. I’m asking myself how long I should wait before I get on the phone and make a nuisance of myself to get an appointment. I’ll give it a couple more weeks, I guess. I know people in their 90s who haven’t been called yet, either.

We’re learning more and more about how the Trumpers royally screwed up vaccine distribution. See, for example, Trump officials actively lobbied to deny states money for vaccine rollout last fall by Nicholas Florko at Stat.

Top Trump officials actively lobbied Congress to deny state governments any extra funding for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout last fall — despite frantic warnings from state officials that they didn’t have the money they needed to ramp up a massive vaccination operation.

And why not? In September the CDC allocated $200 million to the states and territories for covid preparedness and vaccine distribution, and as of late October most the of states had not yet spent all that money. And that was possibly because there was no vaccine to distribute at the time. Just a guess.

Even I can figure out that $200 million divided among 50 states and 14 territories wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of distribution. But Trump Administration officials were certain that if they gave the states more money they’d just squander it on covering budget shortfalls caused by their frantic efforts to buy PPE and ventilators on the black market last year because of the bleeping Trump Administration’s incompetence.

Speaking of which, the Government Accountability Office recently discovered that Trump spent $200 million to send 8,722 ventilators to other countries during the coronavirus pandemic last year.

The Trump administration spent $200 million to send more than 8,700 ventilators to countries around the world last year, with no clear criteria for determining who should get them and no way to keep track of where many ended up, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

The effort, driven by the Trump White House, was an unusual top-down initiative with little decision-making by experts at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which carried out the administration’s orders. President Donald Trump last year boasted about U.S. success in manufacturing the machines and declared the U.S. “the king of ventilators,” promising donations to foreign countries.

This was apparently some kind of public relations effort.

Throughout last year, USAID and White House officials frequently publicized the donations on social media, sharing pictures of large boxes plastered with USAID’s logo ready to be shipped out.

But neither USAID or the State Department appeared to have any input into where these ventilators were going. I take it the decisions were made by somebody in the White House pulling a number out of a hat and throwing darts at a world map.

El Salvador received 600 ventilators when it had 74 new cases a day of COVID-19, while Honduras, which had 161 cases a day or more than twice as much as El Salvador, received 210 ventilators.

It’s also the case that some ventilators went to places where nobody was trained how to use them. And at this point USAID doesn’t know where most of the ventilators are right now. One suspects a lot of them ended up on the black market. Maybe Illinois bought them.  Who knows?

And it’s not clear whether these ventilators were among those that were scooped up by the feds last year and, as far as we know, never seen again. See, for example, The Great Ventilator Flap from March 27;  Are the Trumps Engaged in Profiteering? from April 4; from Talking Points Memo, What’s Up with the Feds Seizing PPE Shipments to States and Hospitals?, also April 4; and Now We Know What “Ours” Meant, April 9. I suspect there will be more interesting revelations out of the GAO over the next few months.

But back to vaccines. The Biden team took over with a 200-page plan for distribution that, as I understand it, turned out to be dead on arrival because of the absolute mess left by the Trumpers.

After a week on the job, Biden’s team is still trying to locate upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — a mystery that has hampered plans to speed up the national vaccination effort. They’re searching for new ways to boost production of a vaccine stockpile that they’ve discovered is mostly empty. And they’re nervously eyeing a series of new Covid-19 strains that threaten to derail the response.

The “transition” had been little help.

“Nobody had a complete picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”

I am hopeful that by March 1 the Biden team will have matters well in hand. However, by then the state of Missouri will be on its thirty-fourth distribution plan, and it will involve trained squirrels.

Close-up medical syringe with a vaccine.