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PORT CHARLOTTE Like the wives of other players across the majors, Kayleigh McEnany tries to keep up with her husbands baseball career while juggling family and work responsibilities.

So as Sean Gilmartin battles for a spot in the Rays bullpen, McEnany, a Tampa native, is busy making her own pitch as national spokesperson for President Donald Trumps re-election campaign.

Theyve been high-profile couple for a while now, starting dating in 2015 when he was a rookie with the Mets, getting married in 2017 shortly after she was named spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, following a stint as a pro-Trump commentator on CNN.

Im kind of used to it now, Gilmartin said. Every team Ive been with the past couple years, 'Oh, I saw your wife on TV the other day. Its cool. Its fun to see.

But this is a big year for both of them.

McEnany is working to try to help Trump win re-election, traveling the country with and speaking on behalf of the controversial president.

And Gilmartin is working to try to win a job as a multi-inning lefty reliever with the Rays, which would make a huge difference in their family life, as they live in Tampa, and now have a baby daughter, Blake.

Having Sean with the Tampa Bay Rays is what weve been hoping and praying for, McEnany said, via email. We always dreamed of this happening but never knew it would become a reality. With a 3-month-old and me in a different state on the campaign trail almost daily, having Sean in Tampa is incredibly helpful.

"Just (in a recent) week, I was in Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and California for the presidents rallies and television. Typically, my mom travels all across the nation with our baby and me.

Having Sean in Tampa means a lot more trips back to our permanent residence and the city Ive always known and loved.

McEnany grew up in and around Tampa, living for a while in Plant City, attending Academy of Holy Names from fifth grade on. Her family is deeply rooted in Tampa, owning the McEnany Roofing company, and, she said, holding Rays season tickets for close to 10 years.

McEnany, 31, likes to talk baseball.

I am so proud to tell my colleagues in politics and media about Seans career and his move to the Tampa Bay Rays, she said. I watch his games from the campaign headquarters, from airplanes, and all across the campaign trail.

Plus, theres another baseball connection inside the Trump campaign, as communications director Tim Murtaugh is the grandson of longtime Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh. Its nice to have a boss whos interested in and understands my husbands career, McEnany said.

Gilmartin, conversely, doesnt talk much about his wifes job in his workplace.

Politics are not often a topic of conversation in a major-league clubhouse, where there can be significant differences in opinion given the diverse mix of people based on geographical, ethnic, financial, societal and philosophical backgrounds.

I try to keep that separate because nobody really cares what I have to say about that kind of stuff, he said.

Especially how hot of a topic it will be this year.

Absolutely, I get it, said Gilmartin, 29, who signed a minor-league deal with the Rays. Going forward I wont get too involved.

When Gilmartin and McEnany are together, they do talk politics, and Trump.

Its always pretty much right at the forefront, which is fine, he said. We both have our opinions. We align fairly evenly on stuff like that, but thats probably as far as Im going to go right now with that.

Plus they get feedback anyway.

We get our fair share of criticism, for sure, he said. Just the comments people leave on Twitter or social media or whatever. All that kind of stuff. Its interesting.

Not so much to McEnany.

Neither of us has time to focus on social media feedback, she said. We both have a singular focus and a united purpose: For me, its re-electing President Trump. For Sean, its getting outs and helping the team win. Together, its raising our beautiful daughter and raising a family that walks in the footsteps of Christ.

There is something they dont seem to agree on: Who has the higher-leverage assignment?

She has a more stressful job than I have, Ill be honest with you,'' Gilmartin said. "Shes a go-getter.''

Being President Trumps campaign press secretary involves hard work and commitment and is truly the honor of a lifetime, McEnany said. But, stress-wise, nothing compares to a full count, two outs, bases loaded, and the game on the line.

Contact Marc Topkin at mtopkin@tampabay.com. Follow @TBTimes_Rays

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Rays power couple: One pitches strikes, the other pitches Donald Trump - Tampa Bay Times

The coronavirus crisis is a war against a disease, but its also the most serious battle yet in the war on truth. That much was clear from the start, as China moved to hush up the first outbreak and gag the doctor who had spotted it. It was a classic case of what we might call Chernobyl syndrome: the tendency of authoritarian systems to react to disaster by rushing to downplay or cover up the problem, focusing more on shifting blame than tackling the threat head on. Viewers of last years TV dramatisation of the Chernobyl nuclear accident could recognise the pattern immediately, as the priority of those in charge becomes avoiding embarrassment rather than saving lives.

There was some of that in the Iranian reaction to the virus, as the countrys deputy health minister coughed and sweated his way through a press conference called to reassure citizens, only later for it to be confirmed that he had himself been infected. (There were already suspicions, since Tehrans official numbers didnt add up.) And there was a grim logic to the fact that at the heart of the outbreak in South Korea is a religious sect similarly devoid of transparency.

Usually, the democratic world can contrast itself flatteringly with such closed, controlled societies, proud that its approach to calamity is openness and the free flow of information. Indeed, crises like this one can serve as test cases for the competing merits of free systems v authoritarian ones. True, democracies cannot match Beijings ability to lock down whole cities and build an entire hospital in a week. But when it comes to a global pandemic, its free speech, full disclosure and cross-border scientific cooperation that ultimately save lives.

The World Health Organization is recommending that people take simple precautions to reduce exposure to and transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus, for which there is no specific cure or vaccine.

The UN agencyadvisespeople to:

Despite a surge in sales of face masks in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, experts are divided over whether they can prevent transmission and infection. There is some evidence to suggest that masks can help prevent hand-to-mouth transmissions, given the large number of times people touch their faces. The consensus appears to be that wearing a mask can limit but not eliminate the risks, provided it is used correctly.

Justin McCurry

Except this time, the familiar authoritarian v democratic contrast has become muddled. Thats because the current leader of the worlds most powerful democracy, the US, has the same instincts as the authoritarian rulers he so admires, and those instincts have coloured his response to coronavirus. The result is that what for many must have seemed an abstract concern Donald Trumps assault on facts, experts and science is now a matter of life and death.

So while US medical officials have been at pains to brace Americans for the inevitability of coronavirus a matter of when, not if Trump and his outriders have worked hard to minimise the threat. On Thursday, Trump repeatedly referred to the figure of 15 cases in the US, when the actual figure was 60, and promised that that number would go down rather than up: Its going to disappear. One day its like a miracle, it will disappear.

Trumps chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, breezily assured the US public that the bug had been contained and that the country was sealed pretty close to airtight against the disease, when of course it is not. One of the administrations most influential propagandists for whom Trump paused his state of the union address this month so that his wife, Melania, might garland him with Americas highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling his vast audience that the coronavirus is the common cold, folks, and that it had been overhyped and weaponised to bring down Donald Trump.

Trump has nodded in a similarly conspiracist direction, tweeting that the media are doing all they can to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. That reference to the markets is key. Trump believes his chances of re-election in November hinge on his stewardship of the economy, betting that voters will back him if their pensions linked to the stock market are up. That the Dow Jones suffered the biggest one-day drop in its history on Thursday has him rattled.

And so his first instinct is that of the Manhattan hustler-hotelier loudly assuring guests that the strong smell of burning coming from the ground floor is merely the chef trying out a new barbecue rather than a sign that the building is on fire. Crucial to that effort is talking loudly over the fire marshals, or even gagging them altogether.

You could see that when Trump spoke in the White House briefing room, brazenly contradicting the experts by his side. But its now become formal policy, with Trumps insistence that all federal officials including those with deep scientific expertise are to say nothing that has not first been authorised by the White House.

Note the fate of Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. On Thursday he dared say that we are dealing with a serious virus with a higher mortality rate than regular flu. That was deemed insufficiently upbeat for the great leader. According to the New York Times, Dr Fauci has told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.

The new mantra, it seems, is to be one of Trumps favourite phrases: repeated again on Thursday: Nobody really knows. That could be the motto of post-truthists such as Trump, conveying the hope that voters will become confused, concluding that no truth is ever even possible, and that in the fog of information and rumour its best simply to trust the man in charge. Thats what Trump wants every American to believe, about coronavirus and everything else for that matter: nobody really knows.

Now Trump has put his slavishly deferential vice-president, Mike Pence, in charge of the coronavirus effort. Put aside Pences appalling record as governor of Indiana, when his response to an HIV outbreak was to veto a medically recommended needle exchange programme and to offer his prayers instead.

Focus instead on the fact that Pence has been appointed over the head of the health secretary, Alex Azar, whom Trump deemed too alarmist. In that same spirit, Trump has gutted the very agencies that the US will now desperately rely on. In 2018, he slashed health spending by $15bn, binning the Obama-era programmes and teams established for the express purpose of leading the US response to a pandemic. Among those cut: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now in the frontline against coronavirus which was forced to reduce by 80% its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak. The consequences are clear enough: only eight of the USs 100 public-health labs are now even able to test for Covid-19.

This onslaught against the health agencies is of a piece with Trumps entire approach to data, science and truth. You might remember Sharpiegate, when the president all but got out a black marker pen and amended a map issued by the key US meteorological agency so that it appeared to support his tweeted, and false, claim that Alabama was about to get hit by a hurricane. Trump has installed cronies and business pals at the helm of a raft of agencies previously respected as providers of neutral, factual data, the better to ensure those bodies say only what he wants them to say. He has moved to shrink their budgets whether at the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps or the Census Bureau and allowed experts with deep knowledge to retire and not be replaced.

We cant say we werent warned. On Trumps first full day in office, he telephoned the head of the National Park Service, angered by photographs showing that crowds that had gathered for his inauguration the previous day were smaller than those for Barack Obama. The head of the NPS duly passed on the instruction from the president, and new, more flattering images appeared.

We laughed about it at the time because it was so petty, so vain and so trivial. But the mindset was clear. The US president is a man who does not want the facts or the truth. He wants only what makes him look good. That impulse might not have mattered much in January 2017. But it matters gravely now.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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Donald Trumps war on coronavirus is just his latest war on truth - The Guardian

Pennsylvanians went a different direction in 2016, voting Republican for president for the first time since 1984. They have been rewarded mightily for that decision.

The Democrat Party used to dominate presidential politics in the Keystone State, but times have changed millions of forgotten Pennsylvania workers turned to Donald Trump after being let down by Democrat politicians who consistently failed to keep their promises. For almost 10 years, our state suffered one of the weakest economic recoveries in history. President Obama told us to accept economic decline as the new normal.

But President Trump has given the Commonwealth hope it hasnt felt in decades. We are now in the midst of a blue-collar boom that has lifted our friends and neighbors out of poverty and restored their dignity through work. Our economic engine is roaring because President Trump and Congressional Republicans cut taxes for the middle class, saving Pennsylvania workers an average of $1,427 on their federal income taxes in 2018. Moreover, the presidents elimination of Obama-era regulations have led to massive growth, especially in the energy sector.

At the tail end of Obamas presidency, the number of jobs in the oil and gas industries had shrunk by 32 percent, but things quickly turned around when Donald Trump took office. By 2018, Pennsylvanias natural gas production was once again setting all-time highs. As a result, Pennsylvanians no longer depend on foreign nations to heat their homes, and theyre back to work producing natural gas for sale abroad, because America is now the worlds largest energy exporter.

Other sectors of the energy industry are also booming. Fracking, which supports thousands of jobs and generates tens of billions of dollars in economic activity in our state, has particularly benefited from this the presidents commitment to eliminating harmful regulations.

Speaking of exports, President Trump has successfully negotiated better trade deals that promote American workers with some of our largest trading partners. He promised to end the failed North American Free Trade Agreement that shipped so many Pennsylvania jobs to Mexico and Canada, and the ink is now dry on its replacement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The president also committed to standing up to China for its unfair trade practices, and he recently signed the Phase One agreement that is a first step toward re-balancing the U.S.-China trade relationship. Future trade deals with Great Britain and the European Union will yield even more gains for working families.

Predictably, all of these economic successes have had a transformative effect on the Keystone State. Pennsylvanias unemployment rate has plummeted. In fact, our manufacturing, construction, and mining sectors are all better off today than they were just three short years ago a clear sign that the economic policies of this administration are getting the results the president promised.

Of course, the ongoing blue-collar boom extends far beyond the Commonwealth. Nationwide, the bottom 50 percent of wage-earners have enjoyed a 47 percent increase in their net worth since 2017, outpacing net wealth accumulation of the richest 1 percent. The median household income has increased by more than $5,000, an all-time high. Workers are now experiencing greater wage growth than their managers and supervisors. The president noted this in a recent rally when he said: Under the Trump economy, the lowest paid earners are reaping the fastest gains of anybody!

Furthermore, the Council of Economic Advisers recently highlighted that real total nonprofit and household net wealth in America has increased by more than $12 trillion in the first 11 quarters under President Trump yet another economic record.

Remarkably, Democrats are telling workers that they arent really better off. Nancy Pelosi tore up a copy of the presidents recent State of the Union Address, calling it a manifesto of mistruths. Her desire for power and disdain for this president have led her party to deny the obvious fact that this is the best American economy in half a century.

Instead of working with Republicans to build on this success, they want to repeal and rescind the policies that got us here, throwing tantrums along the way. We cant let that happen. Americans finally have a president that keeps his promises and believes in them, and he is promising now that the best is yet to come.

If we continue these policies, he will be right. We must keep Pennsylvania red and re-elect President Donald Trump in November. He is standing up for our values and fighting harder than any previous president to make America - and the Keystone State - great again.

Mike Kelly is a U.S. Representative for Pennsylvanias 16th congressional district and is running for re-election.

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We must keep Pennsylvania red and re-elect Donald Trump | Opinion - pennlive.com

Pence, meanwhile, took time out from overseeing the administrations response to the coronavirus outbreak to address the conference Thursday afternoon.

It is no accident that CPAC has become a stomping ground for those with presidential ambitions: Many believe the confab helped to catapult Trump to the White House. The New York businessman first started attending the event in 2011, long before he was taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Trump became a regular, bringing a large entourage and a celebrity aura that over time helped turn him into a conservative favorite.

Trump was just the latest in a long line of Republican figures who made presidential forays at CPAC. Then-California Governor Ronald Reagan made his first appearance at the conference in 1974, and as president more than a decade later, he would remark that returning to the conference was an opportunity to dance with the one that brung ya.

Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist who worked on Trumps 2016 campaign, said the conference gives potential future candidates a rare opportunity to make a lasting impression on the GOP base.

Just ask President Donald Trump, Surabian added.

When Trump first started showing up at the conference, it seemed like a novelty act," said Seat, the former George W. Bush aide. But here we are. Hes not Mr. Trump. Hes President Donald J. Trump and it started here at CPAC.

The early 2024 activity hasnt been limited to CPAC. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is set to headline a New Hampshire political dinner in May. Pence has made several trips to South Carolina over the past year, even though the state has scrapped its 2020 Republican presidential primary and wont have another one until 2024.

And before last months Iowa caucuses, Florida Sen. Rick Scott raised eyebrows when he ran an unusual face-to-camera TV ad in the state in which he savaged Joe Biden and defended Trump.

Matt Mowers, a Republican congressional candidate from New Hampshire making the rounds at CPAC, said hes been in touch with some potential 2024 contenders. He said he wouldnt be surprised if early-state activity ramps up soon after the 2020 election.

Mowers, a longtime operative in the state who for a time served in the Trump administration, said his advice to would-be candidates is to focus on the presidents reelection first.

But he added: Its never too early to make friends.

Former Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a conservative radio show host who waged a short-lived 2012 White House bid, offered a word of caution for those making the 2024 rounds. You dont want to look too eager while a sitting president is still running for reelection, he said.

The former congressman recalled some advice he once heard from a friend.

If youre gonna campaign, he said, dont look like youre campaigning.

Read more from the original source:
GOP scramble is on to succeed Donald Trump in 2024 - POLITICO

Donald Trump may be the most erratic and intemperate man ever to occupy the Presidency, but, when it comes to protecting the public health of Americans, his actions have been unfailingly consistent. Since the day he took office, Trump has worked tirelessly to limit funding, dismantle teams of experts, and interrupt nearly any strategic-planning initiative necessary to defend the country against the type of inevitable biological assault that we now face.

Viruses are infinitely more abundant than humans; they have no interest in politics or geography, nor do they have any respect for Trumps assertions of American exceptionalism or his desire to build walls. Sharply limiting our ability to inhibit the spread of organisms that first appeared on earth at least a billion years ago, and that, collectively, have always presented the most persistent threat to humanity, can most generously be described as an act of radical myopia. (Most estimates suggest that smallpox, the only human virus that we have eradicated, killed up to half a billion people in the twentieth century alone.)

The President knows so little about infectious disease that, on Wednesday, during a news conference in which he named Vice-President Mike Pence as his coronavirus czar, Trump acknowledged that he was shocked to learn that influenza kills between roughly thirty to seventy thousand people a year in the United States. Trump said that in public, while standing next to Anthony S. Fauci, who, for decades, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been the governments most prominent and reliable authority on subjects ranging from AIDS to SARS, Ebola, and influenza. Fauci is a discreet man, but the look on his face could not hide his shock at hearing the President, a self-described germaphobe, brag that he knows nothing about the diseases that constantly threaten the people he was elected to lead. (Always a calm but honest spokesman, Fauci was booked to appear this Sunday on all the major television news shows. On Friday, Pences office told him to withdraw from each of them. In response to a question at a press conference on Saturday, Fauci said that he had resubmitted for clearance, and could now go on the shows.)

Neither warnings about future biological threats or evidence of those that we have already faced, such as SARS, MERS, and influenza, have limited the Trump Administrations compulsion to end health programs designed to protect the public. Less than a month ago, and weeks after COVID-19 had been recognized as a virus with pandemic potential, the Administration proposed a budget that called for the Department of Health and Human Services to cut twenty-five million dollars from the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, and also eighteen million dollars from the Hospital Preparedness Program.

Most notably, the Administration is also attempting to cut more than eighty-five million dollars in funding for the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. Zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, SARS, and MERS are caused by viruses that jump from animals to humans. Novel viruses are particularly threatening because we have no antibodies to defend against them. This week, I asked three senior public-health officials about the cuts to these programs. None would speak on the record, for fear of retribution, but each readily agreed that the programs are both essential and already severely underfunded. Even on those occasions when the White House has earmarked small amounts of money for global health security, it has taken those funds from other essential programs. (In 2019, for example, the Administration cut fifty-eight million dollars from the basic U.S. AIDS funding mechanism, the Ryan White program, to add funds for the opioid epidemic.)

Fighting epidemics is not a zero-sum game; you cannot ignore one to defend against another. Such a response is dangerous but, from this Administration, not unusual. In 2018, as Laurie Garrett points out in an informative essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy, the Trump Administration fired the governments entire pandemic-response chain of command, including the White House management staff. In fact, one of John Boltons first acts, upon becoming the national-security adviser, wasto dismissthe National Security Councils global health team, led by Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a widely respected public-health expert. A new outbreak of Ebola was declared in Congo on May 8, 2018, his last day in office. He has not been replaced.

That same year, the Trump Administration began to tear down a foreign-disease-surveillance program that the Obama Administration had established in response to outbreaks of Ebola in Africa. That program serves as an early-warning system for detecting global pandemic threats, and it helped limit the extent of the 2017 Ebola outbreak in Congo, which, along with China, was one of the countries that the Trump Administration decided its no longer necessary to monitor. As with many public-health programs, preparedness requires policymakers to focus on the future. Naturally, such investments do not generate immediate returns or obvious results. But neither do missile-defense systems. Nonethelessand this does not apply solely to the current Administrationwe are continually caught between our theoretical need to protect against future risks and our very real indifference to things that do not seem to threaten us now.

The Trump Administrations response has been both remarkable and unsurprising. Vice-President Pence, the man now in charge, has a well-documented history of scientific denialism. The public-health action that he is best known for occurred in 2015, when he was the governor of Indiana. Facing the worst H.I.V. outbreak in that states history, which was being spread by intravenous-drug users, Pence rejected federal health officials advice to introduce a clean-needle exchange program. It wasnt until more than two months later, during which time the epidemic became more serious, that he finally authorized a program.

On Friday, in a particularly callous act of political indifference to the epidemic in our midst, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, characterized the medias reporting on the coronavirus as an attempt to bring down the President. At some point, a member of the Trump Administration will have to acknowledge that scientific factssuch as the number of people infected, sick, or dyingare not the creation of a media cabal. Until then, and as long as Trump and his team continue to lie about our ability to contain a virus that we do not yet even fully understand, the number of people who fall ill and die can only grow.

This piece has been updated to include Faucis comment at a press conference on Saturday.

Read more here:
Donald Trumps Anti-Globalist Response to a Global Coronavirus - The New Yorker