3/21/2020
My dear Friend & POTUS, DJT,
I feel for you. Being in charge when things fall apart can be so exasperating. You are doing your best to keep it together and then people question you & you lose your composure. It happens all the time to teachers, myself included.
I’m afraid it happened to you yesterday at your press conference when you started attacking the journalists. I wish you had taken Peter Alexander’s question, “What do you say to Americans who are watching you and are scared?” as a teachable moment, rather than snapping at him & accusing him of “sensationalism.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=true
I encourage you to ask Dr. Fauci (ASF) about his “precision of thought, economy of expression” idea about educating the public. He says that he doesn’t want to “razzle dazzle” people with his knowledge, he just wants them to understand. In this case, you might keep coming back to the idea that we are trying to avoid swamping our health care system with critically ill people coming in all at once. It’s not that CV is more deadly than other viruses, it’s that it’s new and spreading quickly. You could try to help people understand exponential growth but that might be a stretch. I’m sure that ASF was troubled that you were touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure yesterday. That was a time when economy of expression would be appropriate so you don’t spread fake news As MRP said yesterday, “we want to make sure the American people go to trusted sources for their information” & it would be great if they could trust you.
I hope you’ll be in touch with Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs who I told you about in Jan. As you’ll recall he’s been exploring giving poor folk $ (UBI) and it’s working well. The research team that’s evaluating his experiment suggest that payments of $2500/month to people who live paycheck to paycheck would be best. Andrew Yang knows a lot about this, too.
I was so happy to hear about your positive conversation with Sen. Schumer. I hope it marks the beginning of a new relationship.
HYITL,
