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Birx Says Most Covid Deaths in US Were Preventable, So Ted Lieu Asks: Why Didn't You Challenge Trump?
"The malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former President and his enablers."
Mar 28, 2021
After Former White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said this weekend that hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the United States could have been avoided had the previous administration responded more quickly and purposefully, Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California slammed the official for enabling former President Donald Trump's "malicious incompetence."
During an interview featured in a CNN documentary titled Covid War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out, which aired Sunday, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta asked Birx to describe "how much of an impact" she thinks it would have made had public authorities taken earlier and more decisive action to mitigate the spread of the virus.
"I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge," Birx told Gupta. "All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
The national Covid-19 death toll is approaching 550,000, which means that, if Birx's assessment of the country's pandemic response is correct, more than 400,000 Americans died--and millions of loved ones suffered--unnecessarily as a result of political negligence. One journalist called the admission "utterly devastating."
Birx's acknowledgement that coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States could have been significantly lower provoked a sharp rebuke from Lieu, who criticized the former White House official for not publicly objecting to Trump's lethal mishandling of the pandemic.
"The malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former President and his enablers," Lieu said in a tweet. "And who was one of his enablers? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him."
As the Washington Post reported Saturday, "Last March, Birx praised Trump for being 'so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data' with regards to the outbreak."
In addition, the newspaper noted, "Birx had presented overly optimistic data several times," and she "also sat quietly at a news conference last April when Trump pondered whether people could be injected with disinfectant to 'knock out' the coronavirus."
In a Dissent article published earlier this month, historian Colin Gordon acknowledged that "the Trump administration's response to the Covid-19 pandemic set new standards for incompetence, defiance of basic science and public health precautions, and petty politicization of the smallest policy details."
Nevertheless, Gordon added, "the administration's failures marked a difference in degree, not in kind. Deep inequities in health provision, underinvestment in public health, and indifference to the punishing inequality hardwired into our economy and our social policies all preceded Trump and--without bold action--will certainly outlast him."
"An important part of this longer history," Gordon wrote, "is federalism: the abdication of national responsibility for basic social policy standards to state governments."
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, a new peer-reviewed study shows that as 2020 progressed, Covid-19 incidence and death rates became higher in states led by Republican governors--an outcome the researchers attribute to diverging approaches to public health policies that affected the spread of the virus.
"Republican governors... were slower to adopt stay-at-home orders, if they did so at all," while "Democratic governors had longer durations of stay-at-home orders," the researchers wrote. In addition, they pointed out that having a Democratic governor was "the most important predictor of state mandates to wear face masks."
As Gordon noted, "deference to state governments--many without the capacity or the willingness to make meaningful investments in public goods and services--also has significant effects on the broader social determinants of health."
Gordon's observation about the relationship between policymaking and well-being dovetails with other recent research documenting how union-busting and austerity--key components of the past half-century of neoliberalization--have worsened socio-economic inequalities, vulnerabilities, and coronavirus mortality.
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Dr. Birx Criticized for Failing to Speak Out on Trump's 'Parallel Data': Her 'Legacy is One of Sycophancy and Failure'
'Dr. Birx went out of her way to praise Trump and just straight up lied'
Jan 23, 2021
Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the Trump administration's coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force, said in a CBS News' Face The Nation interview that aired Sunday that ex-President Donald Trump had been reviewing "parallel" data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
"I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made," Birx said. "So, I know that someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president."
Birx said she doesn't know who gave the Trump competing information but "I know now by watching some of the tapes that certainly Scott Atlas brought in parallel data streams." She added: "I don't know who else was part of it, but I think when the record goes back and people see what I was writing on a daily basis that was sent up to White House leadership, that they will see that I was highly specific on what I was seeing and what needed to be done."
Birx was blasted after her comments Sunday for failing to speak out at the time to set the record straight about what she saw in the White House:
Birx also said that there were COVID-19 deniers at the White House.
"There were people who definitely believed that this was a hoax," she said. "I think the information was confusing at the beginning. I think because we didn't talk about the spectrum of the disease, everyone interpreted what they knew."
When asked what her biggest mistake was during her time in the Trump administration, Birx said she should have been "more outspoken," especially on the issue of COVID testing. "I didn't know all the consequences of all these issues," she said. Birx has been criticized for never publicly challenging Trump's suggestion to inject bleach, and after she warned of a dangerous "new phase" of the pandemic last August, Trump tweeted that her comments were "pathetic."
So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2020
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'This Is a Pandemic. You Cannot Hide It': Experts Denounce White House Secrecy in Private Warning to Cities to Take 'Aggressive' Covid Action
"The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we'll be."
Jul 23, 2020
A private warning about rising coronavirus cases made to leaders in 11 cities by White House official Dr. Deborah Birx on Wednesday is the latest sign that the Trump administration must end the secrecy surrounding its response to the pandemic, an investigative journalism group said Wednesday.
In an exclusive report about Birx's Wednesday phone call to city officials, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) revealed that Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have all been identified this week as cities where immediate, "aggressive" action is needed to mitigate their coronavirus outbreaks.
All the cities are seeing increases in coronavirus test positivity rates. Birx told officials that as soon as even a slight climb in positivity rates is detected, city leaders must begin mitigation efforts such as contact tracing, closing restaurants, and urging residents to wear masks.
"If you wait another three or four or even five days, you'll start to see a dramatic increase in cases," Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, said on the call.
According to Vanderbilt University researchers, Nashville's positivity rate has already been going up for several weeks.
Public health experts identified Birx's private call, which was closed to the press, as the latest evidence that the White House is keeping key information about the pandemic from the public--a trend that could continue to weaken the nation's ability to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
"This is a pandemic. You cannot hide it under the carpet," Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told CPI. "The best way to deal with a crisis or a natural disaster is to be straight with people, to earn their trust, and to give the information they need to make decisions for themselves and their communities."
The call came less than a week after CPI reported on a list of 18 states which the White House had privately identified as being in the pandemic "red zone," meaning they each had more than 100 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people in the last week.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, wondered why information about "red zone" states is not being disseminated to the public on a regular basis, allowing people to make choices about the amount of contact they have with others while cases are going up.
"The fact that it's not public makes no sense to me," Jha told CPI. "Why are we hiding this information from the American people?"
Neil Ralston, a journalism professor in St. Louis, also asked on Twitter why the White House would want to keep secret the need for aggressive action in his city.
CPI reported that while hundreds of emergency managers and political leaders from the states and cities in question were on the call, Baltimore's health department was not informed of the call. In order to get vital public health information promptly to the public, one epidemiologist told CPI, the White House must look beyond communicating with elected officials.
"It's not just people who are holding office who need to make decisions," Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins University said. "The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we'll be."
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President Donald Trump Culls the Herd
Here is the chilling truth: To win reelection Trump is willfully allowing the virus to kill more and more of us, especially our most vulnerable—the old, the infirm, the poor, and the essential low-wage workers.
May 07, 2020
President Trump has finally made public his fateful choice. He's all in on reopening the economy even if it sends the virus death count into the millions. Actually he made that choice long ago.
His logic is simple but cruel. Before the virus struck, his re-election hinged on taking credit for the robust economy he inherited. With unemployment at record lows he hoped to hang onto just enough votes in the key battle ground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to again turn his 40 percent-plus, rock-solid base into an Electoral College majority. But Covid-19 undermined his rosy game plan by forcing a temporary economic lock-down, sending unemployment to Great Depression levels, and maybe worse, almost instantaneously. Now the only option he sees is to let the death count soar while hoping the economy will rebound just enough so he can justify the carnage and claim credit for putting America back to work.
"The horrific truth is that the uncoordinated, slipshod economic reopening spurred on by Trump and his minions is likely to double our per capita deaths before Election Day. At that point we will lead the world both in deaths per capita and in the total number of Covid-19 deaths. He finally will have made America number one again. "Trump played along with the carefully calibrated health policies put forth by Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci as long as he could tout the relatively low death projections from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). For weeks that model had predicted the death count would stall at around 50,000 to 60,000. But as the number of deaths soared throughout April, anyone who could add and subtract knew the IHME projection was off--way off. Now the IHME model projects 135,000 deaths (with a potential range from 95,092 to 242,890) by the end of August, and this again is likely to err on the low side.
Well before the IHME announced its recalculation, Trump's advisors warned him that the number of deaths would climb much higher. As early as March 30th, Dr. Birx announced that she expected up to 200,000 deaths, "if we do things almost perfectly." Knowing that the effort was going about as perfectly at his Ukrainian shake-down call, Trump basically gave up on the idea of a slow and careful reopening. On April 16th he robotically read the Birx/Fauchi step-by-step plan which was supposed to be his plan to reopen the economy. Within hours he revealed his true intentions: He trashed his own plan by tweeting his supporters to "liberate" blue state economies. Fourteen days of declining cases before a Phase 1 reopening? Screw that. Better to egg on the militias who were challenging Democratic governors with their assault weapons. Now some red states, followed by more red states, are totally ignoring the the Birx/Fauci guidelines as they reopen willy-nilly. None of them have had fourteen days of declining cases.
But Trump also understands that the death count will hurt him politically as families all over the country experience first-hand that the virus is not a media hoax. So he must do what he loves to do--blame others. From the start, Trump downplayed the coming risks. He then passed the buck to the governors. It's their job to stop the virus, he claimed. It's the federal government's job only to provide guidance and to assist in helping the governors find equipment and tests. "I don't take responsibility at all" for the testing problems, he famously said on March 13th. He also feebly tried to shift the blame to the Obama administration for handing him "a broken system" for testing. But that ridiculous excuse crashed into the logic that 1) there was no test for Covid-19 during the Obama administration because there was no Covid-19, and 2) he'd been in office for three and a half years and had done nothing to fix what allegedly was broken. In fact two years before he'd disbanded the office that was supposed to prepare for this exact situation.
The latest pass-the-buck mantra is to blame China for the entire debacle. He got Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to gin up a report that says Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. No matter that his own intelligence agencies say that's not the case. No matter that the intelligence agencies of our allies say that's not the case. No matter that Dr. Fauci says the same.
As the election nears, Trump will proclaim again and again, "The Chinese did it and I shut them down with a travel ban early on. That saved millions of lives." And if the economy is slow to rebound, that's China's fault as well. It remains to be seen if China bashing works as planned, but we should not be shocked by an "October surprise" in which U.S. war ships provoke a confrontation in the China Sea to heighten the tension. Do any of us doubt that Trump is capable of moving us to the brink of war in order to win reelection?
Meanwhile he'll feed our hopes that increased testing and contact tracing (the responsibility of the governors, of course) will make going back to work feasible. He needs to get us to believe, at least for a few months, that we can safely return to our jobs, (assuming they are still there) if we stay six feet apart, get our temperature checked at the door and wash our hands repeatedly. Trump needs just enough of an economic bounce by November to help him slither through the piles of corpses.
All of this is justified by the well-traveled framework which pits our livelihoods against our health. We hear again and again that it's an inevitable trade-off--that to get our jobs back we must accept more deaths. As Trump recently said, "There'll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we're doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it's going to pass, and we're going to be back to normal." Trump surrogate, Chris Christie, got more to the point by saying we just have to get used to the rise in deaths if we want to save "the American way of life."
But is this "jobs versus health" trade-off really inevitable? Are other democratic nations with sophisticated economies also slaughtering their own people in order to reopen their economies?
As of this writing the U.S. leads the world in Covid-19 deaths--by far--with nearly 75,000. The next highest are England and Italy with about 30,000. But the more telling statistic is the per capita death rate which takes into account population size differences. As of May 6, we have suffered 2,260 deaths per 100,000 residents. But Trump's mishandling of the crisis has killed far more than Canada (1,120), Germany (830), Denmark (870), Finland (450), Norway (400), Australia (40) and New Zealand (40). We should pay close attention to Germany, a global economic power, which now is systematically opening its commerce including museums and its premier soccer league. Yet it only has about one-third the per capita deaths as the U.S. So yes, it is possible to reopen a major economy in a democratic country without letting the death rate soar. In fact, Germany is able to more fully reopen its economy precisely because it has kept its death rate so low.
The horrific truth is that the uncoordinated, slipshod economic reopening spurred on by Trump and his minions is likely to double our per capita deaths before Election Day. At that point we will lead the world both in deaths per capita and in the total number of Covid-19 deaths. He finally will have made America number one again.
We have to face up to the chilling truth: To win reelection Trump is willfully allowing the virus to kill more and more of us, especially our most vulnerable--the old, the infirm, the poor, and the essential low-wage workers.
It's on us if we let him get away with it.
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Coronavirus Pandemic: Science Sidelined in Trump Rose Garden Fiasco
Without scientific evidence to rally the American people, the White House was reduced to showcasing corporate cheerleaders.
Mar 16, 2020
Having paved over the science on pandemics, the Trump administration puts up parking lots. Literally.
It wasn't enough that President Trump's Rose Garden declaration of a national coronavirus emergency on Friday disintegrated into a self-congratulatory monologue. It wasn't enough that he trashed reporters who dared ask him if he bore any responsibility for one of the worst responses to a pandemic by a wealthy country in modern times, driving the United States toward a double collapse of human and economic health and the indefinite shutdown of normal life and movements.
The finishing touch was that Trump was flanked not by a wall of dedicated infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, triage managers, and heads of public university research labs but rather mostly by Fortune 500 CEOs whose hands he shook as they paraded to the podium--violating a primary public health directive to blunt the spread of infection.
The heads of Walmart, Walgreens, Target, and CVS, with a combined 2019 net income of $20 billion, stepped forward to proclaim that they would each do their part in this emergency. But their pledges were glaringly short of vital particulars such as how they planned to protect their workers or what kind of extended sick leave they might offer. Rather, they said they will reserve parts of parking lots for drive-in virus testing.
Dimming the laboratory lights
To be clear, glossing over the fact that access to COVID-19 tests remains woefully limited in the United States, the idea of drive-in testing itself is good. But it was hard to watch some of the wealthiest companies in the country boast on national television as though they were suddenly carrying the torch of Florence Nightingale, such as when Walgreens' president, Richard Ashworth, said, "When we have natural disasters, our stores are a beacon in the community."
It is a key part of the Trump administration agenda to be the lighthouse keeper for these corporate beacons, as it dims the laboratory lights of federally funded climate, pollution, food, and health science. Fifty years ago, Joni Mitchell sang about the madness of paving over the environment.
In 2020, we have a White House that has disbanded or paved over scientific advisory panels, disregarded and disparaged its own scientists, and shuttered the pandemic office in the National Security Council. The administration's appointments of industry lobbyists and political ideologues to top-level positions has driven out thousands of career scientists across several agencies. As recently reported, the administration held classified meetings on the coronavirus during which theyessentially cut out input from experts who could have helped shape a more orderly response.
Brusque and heartless answers
Beyond the dearth of hard science and the corporate glad handing, Trump's brusque, heartless answers to reporters were once again on full display. To one of them he refused to take any responsibility for the precious time lost to protect citizens from botched testing. The debacle has been marked by the still-mysterious reluctance of the United States to be among the 60 nations to adopt test kits from the World Health Organization, the defective early test kits distributed by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, and lack of flexible thinking to greenlight test kit production at university and state medical centers and private labs. For all that, Trump blamed, "rules, regulations and specifications from a different time."
When Yamiche Alcindor of PBS brought up the elimination of the pandemic office and whether the administration lost valuable time because of that, Trump snapped that she had asked a "nasty question."
Trump's nastiness to Alcindor was flagrant on two levels. One is that Trump once more attempted to humiliate a black female journalist as he has done previously by calling their questions nasty, stupid, or--almost laughably--racist. The other is that he knew that the question cut to the core of his administration's inexcusable dismissal of science.
Alcindor was the only reporter to directly interrogate the president on the White House's 2018 disbanding of the National Security Council pandemic preparedness office. By extension, the question brought into stark relief the administration's relentless dismantling of our overall federal public health science infrastructure.
It is noteworthy that Trump did not utter a single sentence of condolence to the families of any of the people who have died so far, nor offer a single best wish or prayer for recovery for the ill as the number of confirmed cases continues to climb.
Trump knew if he owned up to that even his most fervent followers would recognize that his White House was responsible for hampering preparedness and enabling the spread of the lethal virus in the United States. In an answer to Alcindor that was either a lie or a bald admission of ignorance and incompetence, Trump told her, "I don't know anything about it."
In this life-and-death crisis where we need not just a commander-in-chief, but also a compassionate national consoler, it is noteworthy that Trump did not utter a single sentence of condolence to the families of any of the people who have died so far, nor offer a single best wish or prayer for recovery for the ill as the number of confirmed cases continues to climb.
Exaggerated claims
In a Washington Post guest column that ran the same day of the Rose Garden fiasco, Beth Cameron, a former director of the disbanded pandemic preparedness panel--the White House's National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense--wrote that its purpose was to "rally the government at the highest levels" to avoid a six-alarm blaze of viruses that know no borders. She wrote that the absence of the panel now "is all too evident."
Without scientific evidence to rally the American people, the White House was reduced to showcasing corporate cheerleaders. And there was far less substance to this show of Fortune 500 generosity than even what President Trump proclaimed. He said Google had 1,700 engineers working on a website to direct Americans to the drive-in testing sites. Claiming that the engineers have "made tremendous progress," Trump promised Americans that the website will be "very quickly done." Coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx held up a poster showing how the site would work to bring quality testing "to the American people at unprecedented speed."
Google itself quickly squashed that promise, saying that a subsidiary with only 1,000 employees was merely working on a pilot website for the San Francisco Bay Area, with no timetable for launch. And, so far, none of the companies have yet offered any concrete information on when, where, or how drive-in testing will be done.
Richard Ashworth of Walgreens told those assembled at the Rose Garden event, "These are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary measures." He's right on that to be sure. But it will surely take more than pledges of corporate parking lots as a naturally occurring crisis is morphing into a humanmade disaster in the United States because of the Trump administration's sidelining of science and scientists.
To borrow again from Joni Mitchell, you don't know what you've got until the pandemic panel is gone.
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Warren Accuses Trump of 'Bungling Every Aspect of This Crisis' as WHO Elevates Coronavirus Threat to Highest Level
"This is a reality check for every government on the planet: Wake up. Get ready," said a top World Health Organization official. "This virus may be on its way and you need to be ready."
Feb 27, 2020
The World Health Organization on Friday raised the global risk of the new coronavirus to its highest level and reiterated the necessity of worldwide containment efforts as U.S. President Donald Trump continued to face widespread criticism over how his administration has handled the public health crisis so far.
Since the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak began in Wuhan, China late last year, it has infected more than 83,000 people globally, killing over 2,800, according to the Associated Press. A large majority of the cases have been in mainland China; however, the virus has reached more than 50 countries, with hundreds of confirmed cases in South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Iran.
"Our epidemiologists have been monitoring these developments continuously, and we have now increased our assessment of the risk of spread and the risk of impact of COVID-19 to very high at a global level," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained Friday during a press conference in Geneva with other officials from the United Nations agency.
"What we see at the moment are linked epidemics of COVID-19 in several countries, but most cases can still be traced to known contacts or clusters of cases. We do not see evidence as yet that the virus is spreading freely in communities," Tedros said. "As long as that's the case, we still have a chance of containing this virus, if robust action is taken to detect cases early, isolate and care for patients and trace contacts."
Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's Health Emergencies Program, told reporters Friday that "this is a reality check for every government on the planet: Wake up. Get ready. This virus may be on its way and you need to be ready. You have a duty to your citizens, you have a duty to the world to be ready."
Ryan added that it "unhelpful" to ask whether the outbreak is now considered a pandemic, because doing so would mean "we're essentially accepting that every human on the planet will be exposed to that virus. The data does not show that." However, he warned, "if we don't take action... that may be a future that we have to experience."
As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch has predicted that the virus could ultimately infect between 40 and 70% of the global population, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is encouraging U.S. residents to prepare for "significant disruption in their daily lives."
The CDC is tracking COVID-19 cases in the United States on its website. The federal agency has also published information about the virus and the national containment response, which includes deploying CDC staffers to dozens of sites across the country.
Despite the agency's efforts, Trump has come under fire for his administration's response to the outbreak. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted Friday that "we're looking at a serious economic downturn because of coronavirus--and the Trump administration is bungling every aspect of this crisis."
Trump announced Wednesday night that he was appointing Vice President Mike Pence to lead the administration's coronavirus task force--a move that was pilloried as "utterly irresponsible" by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The congresswoman and other critics highlighted Pence's problematic track record on handling public health issues, including while he was the governor of Indiana.
Pence announced early Thursday that he was appointing a global health official, Ambassador Debbie Birx, as the "White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator," a decision which Politico described as "installing a czar-like figure under him to guide the administration's response to the outbreak after a protracted public dance around how to display the power of the federal bureaucracy to the American people."
The New York Times reported late Thursday that the White House moved to "tighten control of coronavirus messaging by government health officials and scientists, directing them to coordinate all statements and public appearances" with Pence's office, citing multiple unnamed sources. According to the Times, "Officials insist Mr. Pence's goal is not to control what experts and other officials say, but to make sure their efforts are coordinated, after days of confusion with various administration officials making contradictory statements on television."
However, the news generated concerns among individuals and watchdogs groups--and came amid reporting that a whistleblower from the Department of Health and Human Services has accused the Trump administration of attempting to cover up possibly exposing federal workers to coronavirus by sending them to process Americans evacuated from Wuhan without providing essential training or equipment.
"There's nothing wrong with a coordinated process inside the federal government to make sure it is sending out clear, fact-based information about the widening coronavirus epidemic," said Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group. "But there's every reason to suspect something else is happening--that public health experts are being instructed to stay silent because they are sharing truthful information that the Trump administration finds inconvenient or that contradicts the random musings of the president."
"As we have seen in China's response to the outbreak, muzzling public health experts at a time of a potentially emergent public health crisis is reckless and endangers the public," Carmone added in his statement Thursday. "It should be obvious to the Trump administration, though perhaps it is not, that silencing truthful information about the coronavirus is likely to speed--not stop--its spread."
Trump and his allies, meanwhile, continue to tout the administration's efforts and dismiss critiques as politically motivated attacks. Trump's acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on Friday characterized news coverage of coronavirus as "an attempt to bring down the president" and downplayed its threat level. As Common Dreams reported, some critics responded by charging that Mulvaney was the one politicizing the crisis at the expense of American families.
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