When Donald Trump got the fewest votes and was elected, God help us, the whole country wondered out loud about what he would do in a crisis. The majority of us assumed correctly that he would be an absolute nightmare, but not in my wildest dreams did I think he could possibly be this bad. At least not at the time.
But now we have a familiar pattern that some hoped would be set aside by the gravity of the situation. Unsurprisingly, “The buck stops with everybody” president that we are stuck with for another couple months has stayed true to form. Dear Leader’s godlike brilliance and foresight were hampered only by someone, anyone, else. And in showing us all the leadership we have come to expect from this walking disaster, on his very first address to the nation about this growing pandemic, he grabbed his lectern and bravely proclaimed that “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Now we’re in the middle of the fourth month since “Coronavirus” took all the headline space away from Dear Leader. Confirmed Global COVID-19 cases just topped 2,000,000, with the United States taking a full 30%, and more than 26,000 Americans are dead.
Our president assured us that our nation’s tragic response to the pandemic did not at all lie in his deliberate mismanagement of the White House and his breathtaking incompetence, but was instead the fault of China, past Presidents, Obama, the Media, Governors, General Motors, and Hospitals. And on the same day that he fired his first shot against Dr. Anthony Fauci, he unleashed his bold plan to defund the World Health Organization. In the height of a pandemic. To assuage his fucking ego.
How any American can support this fucking terrorist is beyond my comprehension.
Since it is becoming abundantly clear that the right-wing echo chamber will follow Dear Leader’s orders to trash the one organization chartered to coordinate the global response to this pandemic, it’s important and infuriatingly futile to point out that Trump’s words are, per usual, entirely fabricated.
Trump’s newfound aggression to the WHO ignores entirely that Trump’s high praise of China’s response to the Coronavirus was central to his own downplaying of the Coronavirus threat all the way through February. It ignores that the WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30, the same day that Trump told the country that “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for it. So that I can assure you.”
Trump’s current excuse is that the WHO is subservient to China, therefore something, so he’s cutting their funding. Highly sighted by Dear Leader is that the WHO “missed the call” about human-to-human transmission by initially calling it unconfirmed.
A silly point since this fucker doesn’t understand how science or words work, I’d like to point out that “unconfirmed” means “not confirmed” and nothing more. Furthermore, scientists and science-based organizations, like the WHO, change their tune based on facts and evidence.
On January 14, when just 41 people were confirmed infected and the world was scrambling to figure out as much as they could about the virus, the WHO declared that human-to-human transmission remained unconfirmed, but their lead technician on the Coronavirus stated that, based on SARS and MERS, human-to-human transmission would be unsurprising. On January 19, the WHO reported on confirmation of human-to-human transmission and on January 21, the WHO declared that sustained human-to-human transmission will make the Coronavirus difficult to stop. The very next day, our great and glorious leader assured America that “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
In holding firm in always being the last person on the planet to figure something out, Trump was busy telling America that “We have it totally under control. It’s going to be just fine.” (Jan 22, 2020). “I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine.” (Feb 10, 2020). “I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.” (Feb 19, 2020). “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” (Feb 24, 2020). “When you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (Feb 26, 2020). “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (Feb 28, 2020). “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.” (Mar 7, 2020). “Just stay calm. It will go away.” (Mar 10, 2020). “I think we’re going to get through it very well.” (Mar 11, 2020). “So it could be right in that period of time where it, I say, wash — it washes through. Other people don’t like that term. But where it washes through.” (Mar 16, 2020). “This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” (Mar 17, 2020).
And even if we do take the absurd position that Trump was misinformed or underinformed by the WHO, it was Donald Trump who left the United States’ seat on the WHO Executive Board vacant since 2018. And as he rants that China didn’t inform the United States fast enough, Donald Trump defunded the American embedded at the Chinese Center for Disease Control in July of 2019.
But now Trump fancies himself as a wartime president. His visionary leadership has let the nation’s stockpile of respirators fall into disrepair by refusing to renew the maintenance contract in 2018. He failed to stockpile protective equipment making states compete against each other for face masks. He caused an international panic by declaring that all flights to the United States would be stopped but forgot the piece about Americans being able to get home, immediately overcrowding international airports with COVID-19 carriers heading to the United States.
Despite killing the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, the organization President Obama created in response to the latest Ebola outbreak, which was specifically chartered to inform the White House of any emerging pandemic and biodefense hazards and coordinate a national response, Trump was officially briefed on the Coronavirus on January 3rd. He did nothing but spread false hope, completely on-brand with zero evidence, and rage against his own administration for telling him things he did not want to hear. He didn’t order any tests, he didn’t order any face masks, he didn’t form a plan, he didn’t do anything at all for 70 days. And then we got Jared Kushner. And then he fired Captain Crozier for trying to protect his crew.
What a goddamn failure. His disdain for Obama destroyed the infrastructure that Obama built to protect us from this exact problem. This is what the President of the United States sounds like when they aren’t spitefully fucking up the country:
And now Trump strips the WHO of its single largest funding source. The WHO’s role is to coordinate the global response to the Coronavirus, analyze cases and responses from different countries and governments around the world, centralize coordination between doctors and technicians developing a vaccine, oversee the production, distribution, and administration of the eventual safe and effective vaccine, coordinate testing and testing protocols, administer healthcare to poor and underdeveloped nations, and on top of all that, is still fighting to eradicate polio. We know how our white supremacist president feels about brown people in Shithole Countries, but it is obvious that this organization’s work is in our national interest. But Trump’s ego needed a scapegoat, and we are all lambs to the slaughter.
Fuck Donald Trump.