Insisting that schools open in the middle of a pandemic that is your fault is outrageous. Are you insane? Your lack of leadership has caused the death of over 135,000 people already. You and your goddamn Republican enablers have become angles of death, and a curse on the American people. Your insistence that schools reopen is just the latest of the outrages inflicted on us. Claiming that children are not generally susceptible to the virus is shocking, but what do you care? How many children are you and your fellow bootlicking Republicans willing to see die? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? You are willing to sit on your sorry ass while 135,000 people died. Are you willing to let 135,000 of our children to die also? How much death does it take for you to open up your eyes and realize that you are in charge? God help us.
There has never been such a lack of presidential leadership in the history of this country. You refused to implement a national policy to fight this plague. You have shirked your duty to protect America from this pandemic. You have failed to lead while the United States as led the world in infections and death from this pandemic. You said that you claim no responsibility for the virus spreading throughout our country. We know that. Your administration has pressured the states to virtually ignore the crisis confronting our nation. You and the goddamn Republican governors who kiss your ass like the craven shits they are have caused the worst public health crisis in history.
You have made the Republican party a death cult. It’s all about you, isn’t it? The virus is just a hoax, isn’t it? While you play golf and get tested three times a day, ordinary Americans are dying because of your malfeasance. Your Republican governors have fallen into a predictable pattern of denying reality until the dead bodies pile up until even they can no longer ignore the pain and suffering and outrage of their constituents. It is inevitable that Governors in Texas, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida will sooner or later be forced to shut down their states in the face of the deaths of thousands of citizens unfortunate enough to live in their states. How many will die first?
But no. There is no responsibility to be laid at your door, right? It doesn’t bother you a bit that 135,000 Americans have died, does it? It’s all about your reelection, isn’t it? Well, we are not stupid. Those of us who can afford to not send our children and grandchildren back to school are not going to do so just so you can continue to pretend that the virus does not exist. You don’t care for our children but we do. You won’t even wear a goddamn mask.
Mr. President, you and your fellow Republicans are responsible for this plague. An election is coming and you and your fellow Republicans are going to pay for yours and their malfeasance. It looks like you and your party are going to be flushed down the toilet like unwanted shit. I hope so. I hope I live long enough to vote against you.
The Washington Post has a schadenfreude-tastic article this morning where GOP strategists are concerned that Dear Leader’s baseless attacks against Mail-In Voting might leave the GOP baseless.
The GOP fears that enough dumbass MAGAhats will skip voting this year because their president is attacking the only safe way to vote during a pandemic. Republican candidates are getting blowback from their constituents whenever they advise on how to vote for them by mail. That’s fewer votes for Cory Gardner, Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue, Joni Ernst, Susan Collins, Thom Tills, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell. Suits the hell out of me.
The right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation came out with their most damning evidence about voter fraud in America. Their document Truth about Voter Fraud can be found on the White House’s website. In large-font all-caps against a scary red background, you the reader are first alerted with their summary of “1071 PROVEN INSTANCES OF VOTER FRAUD”. Since 1988… That averages out to what… about 67 per election? So?
Out of this list of 1071 voter fraud cases spanning over three decades, a whopping 70 of them relate to absentee voting. These charges include eye-popping crimes such as the 1988 crime of Mr. Ernest Newton, former state senator of Connecticut, who agreed to pay a civil penalty of $1,000 for assisting in filling out someone else’s absentee ballot.
In the 2016 election, there was precisely ONE case of mail-in voter fraud. The case was in Iowa, where Terri Lynn Rote pleaded guilty for voting for Donald Trump twice.
In contrast, 18,610 votes were not counted in Florida in 2000 due to dimpled or hanging chads. Katherine Harris’s “Scrub List” erred in kicking off about 26,000 eligible voters that were neither felons nor dead. The United States Commission on Civil Rights found that African-Americans made up 11% of Florida 2000 voters and 53% of the uncounted votes. Again, these numbers are for one election in one state. The comparison is not even close.
There are a lot of issues of ballot access in the United States. Voting by mail is a solution, not a problem. The evidence shows overwhelmingly and unambiguously that voting by mail is a great way to vote. Voter fraud is vanishingly small and insignificant in our election system. The embarrassingly low number of cases that The Heritage Foundation uncovered in their 3-decade nationwide search is proof positive. But Trump supporters are immune to evidence by definition. Dear Leader told them it was a problem, so now they think it’s a problem. Surely, politics are in play (gasp!), but according to a recent NYT/Siena College survey, 88% of Biden supporters support expanding vote-by-mail in a pandemic, and 72% MAGAhats oppose it.
New Jersey’s Primary this year was mostly by mail. Five states–Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Utah, are completely vote-by-mail. Utah voted for Trump in 2016. Arizona, which went for Trump last time, is about 80% vote-by-mail. Even before Before COVID changed everything, twenty-one states allowed voting by mail to anybody who wanted it. Access has only increased since voting by mail became the obvious public-health-conscious solution to preserving our democracy in a pandemic. Evidence shows that both Democrats and Republicans are elected by mailed-in ballots.
So a funny story about Trump supporters refusing to vote has extremely dire consequences. Trump is amplifying his message of two possible outcomes. Either Trump wins the election, or the election is fraudulent. And if recent surveys of vote-by-mail opposition approximate MAGAhats’ adoption of Trump’s worldview of the 2020 election, we will have a large bloc of people baselessly believing that the election was stolen from Dear Leader.
Absolutely nothing in Trump’s history gives any confidence that he will accept the results of an election where he is the biggest loser on the biggest stage on the planet. He still doesn’t accept the 2016 election that he lost by nearly 3,000,000 votes but still got the office.
Trump knows there is nothing wrong with mail-in ballots. He is attacking elections because he does not want an election. As was true for the past 3 and a half years, Trump fancies himself a dictator, and the dictator is attempting to pre-emptively nullify the election. He is actively, relentlessly, daily, attacking the very fabric of democracy. Nothing less than the peaceful transfer of power hangs in the balance. Trump is unambiguously clear on his position.
On July 7, Trump sent a letter formally withdrawing from The World Health Organization which begs the question: “Is Trump trying to lose the election?” Surely, he knows that the Democrats (maybe) and the Lincoln Project (for sure, for sure) are going to produce ads screaming about the idiocy of withdrawing from WHO in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. Tomorrow the United States will pass 3,000,000 cases of the corona virus. It just doesn’t seem possible that Trump doesn’t see that, whatever his complaint with WHO, the decision to pull out of WHO now is contra-indicated. Tomorrow we can look forward to the entire Republican party avoiding the question of whether or not they agreed with the wacko decision. Being the spineless sycophants that they are, they will brush the questions off while sucking up to Trump, just like they’ve done a hundred times before. “That’s just Trump being Trump”. “I can’t answer for everything Trump says”. “I’m late for a very important meeting”. It’s a tired script of excuses that you can write yourself.
Which begs another question: Has Trump decided to take the Republican Party down with him? Does he take a secret pleasure in watching his fellow Republicans debase themselves to grovel before him? His obstinate refusal to wear a simple mask when people are dying by the thousands every day is astonishing. The subsequent laying on of lips to Trumps ass from Governors like Abbot, Kemp and DeSantis is amazing. What loyalty do they feel for this damn fool and why? These Governors have denied science and the evidence right before their eyes to the point of their constituents dying just to appease Trump. And they are not alone by any stretch of the imagination. It has become a common theme among Republican officials: deny the virus until there are too many dead bodies to ignore, then proclaim: “Well surprise, surprise! We need everybody to wear a mask. We need everybody to maintain a social distance. Who Knew?” The Republicans have become a death cult. Governor Kemp will probably be the next Republican Governor to have reality bite him on the ass and he will soon be calling for mask; just like Abbot. How many more Americans have to die because Georgia voted for an ignorant douchebag is anybody’s guess.
And now Trump and Betty DeVos are calling for a reopening of the schools next month claiming it will be perfectly safe. Given the accuracy of their recent statements and DeVos’s track record, it is a pretty sure bet that they are lying. They have no empirical data or studies that show their reopening can be done safely nor are they prepared to support any such studies. Trust them they say. Forget the string of lies we’ve told you and trust us that we know best for your children in this life or death situation. Hopefully, people will be less gullible when it comes to the lives of their children than they were about voting for a psychopath for president.
Trump and DeVos are in for a rude awakening when they find how many American moms withhold their children from school because they think that DeVos and Trump are full of shit. There is no way it will be safe for children to return to most schools before the end of the year at least and American Moms don’t want their children to be volunteered by Trump and DeVos to be unwilling subjects in an experiment to see how many children they will let die in a quest to test Trump’s and DeVos’s magical and unsubstantiated theories on when it is safe to reopen schools.
Finally, we get to Tucker Carlson despicable statements on state run television about the hero and patriot Sen. Tammy Duckworth hates America. Duckworth, who lost both legs in Iraq when the helicopter she was flying was hit by a rocket propelled grenade, has more patriotism in her little finger than Tucker has exhibited in his whole worthless life. She should challenge Tucker to a dual. Even with both legs missing, I bet she would wipe the floor with his smug ass. Tucker doubled down the next day accusing Duckworth of being a “coward” a “fraud” and a “moron”. In the old days, decent republicans would have tarred and feathered the worthless son of a bitch. Instead they are either cheering Tucker on or disgracing themselves by remaining silent and complicit about his despicable ravings. What’s left of the republican party has sunk so low that they cheer Tucker on in his disgraceful slander of an American hero.
At this point, anyone who describes themselves as a Republican is proclaiming themselves to be either a proud supporter of white supremacy and anti-Americanism or too goddamn stupid to realize that they are being useful idiots for a regime that places party over country every time.
The only way to reclaim our country is to vote Blue in November up and down the ballot. Vote for America or vote for Republicans. The choice is mutually exclusive.
News broke that Russia is paying the Taliban bounties for killing American soldiers. Trump responded by attacking the New York Times for reporting it.
I hope that anyone who voted for this shit last time will think long and hard about that sequence before voting for this goddamn traitor again. There is not a lot of evidence that the MAGAhatted are capable of thinking. After all, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 19,128 times, I must be a Trump supporter.
But this one is simple. In the happy times before Trump received the fewest votes and became President, if we found out that Russia is paying a terrorist group to kill American soldiers, we expect the President of the United States to support America.
Not Trump.
“Nobody briefed or told me, [Vice President] Pence or Chief of Staff [Mark Meadows] about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an ‘anonymous source’ by the Fake News . . . Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us. […] nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump administration.”
Trump, via Twitter, June 28, 2020
As usual, none of what he says is true. And also, as usual, the facts are damning and worse than expected. It is not, to use the President’s word against him again, “possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax.”
The most generous explanation is that Trump didn’t know about any of this because Trump installed the two dumbest motherfuckers in America into some of the most critical positions in Washington.
His Chief of Staff is Mark Meadows, a Tea Party lunatic and the former chair of the House Freedom Caucus. His previous accomplishments include ousting John Boehner for being too moderate, shutting down the government thinking that Obama would end Obamacare, angling for the United States Congress to default on America’s debt, and then trying to shut down the government again. He thought that Republicans shutting down the government a second time would make the Democrats look bad.
His Director of National Intelligence is Trump’s lap poodle, John Ratcliffe. He’s an ambulance chaser turned Tea Party blowhard, turned Trump loyalist. Ratcliffe’s National Intelligence resume includes dramatically overstating his involvement in investigating money funneling to Hamas, and completely fabricating a story that he used to arrest 300 “illegals” a day. Ratcliffe was so comically unqualified to run America’s $60,000,000,000 National Intelligence infrastructure that Senate Republicans forced him to withdraw the first time Trump brought it up. Even amongst the Tea Party hivemind, Ratcliffe shows a nearly Trump-level immunity to facts, evidence, logic, and reason. It’s hard to think of a worse person in government to be the DNI, so he’s a perfect catch for the Trump administration. His disingenuousness and bad-faith approach to government fits perfectly.
It is entirely possible, if not reasonable, to conclude that these dumbasses were just too incompetent to receive the information. And if they did receive the information, it would be charitable to assume that they were just too incompetent to figure out what to do with it. In fact, that was precisely the opening party line, with a dig at the media, of course.
“We are still investigating the alleged interference referenced in media reporting and we will brief the President and Congressional leaders at the appropriate time. […] Unfortunately, the unauthorized disclosures now jeopardize our ability to find out the full story with respect to these allegations.”
“The selective leaking of any classified information disrupts the vital interagency work to collect, assess, and mitigate threats and places our forces at risk. It also, simply put, a crime.”
DNI Ratcliffe, through a statement on Monday, June 28, 2020
The Director of National Intelligence should know that when the government so maliciously aligns itself against American interests that they’ll let Russia get away with paying terrorist groups to kill American soldiers, the American intelligence officers will go to the press. This is precisely why the First Amendment protects the press. And now we know that the truth, and the truth is horrifying.
We know from none other than John Bolton that the White House knew about this since March 2019. Trump was briefed again and again since February. Updates were in his PDB since this Spring. Trump has known for over a year… a year (!!!) that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill American Soldiers.
But the White House is playing dumb.
A specific message for Moscow? No, because he has not been briefed on the matter.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, June 30, 2020
Still not briefed? We’re supposed to believe that shit? Think of all of the times that Trump has protected Russia since March 2019. It feels like 400 years ago, but March 22, 2019, is when Barr received the Mueller report and March 24 is when he presented his “findings”. On May 3, Trump calls Putin and jabbers for an hour, braging about the end of the Mueller investigation. On June 28, Trump and Putin meet privately at the G20 for 90 minutes, and Trump proudly proclaims to the press that the topic of their conversation is “none of your business.” On July 25, the Republican-controlled Senate Intel report found that Russia penetrated all 50 states in their attack on our election. Trump’s response, that very day, was to call the President of Ukraine to extort them, in part, to invent evidence that rogue actors in Ukraine were behind the 2016 election attack instead of Russia. On July 31, Trump and Putin again share a phone call that nobody knew about until Russia reported on it. On August 20, Trump proclaims that Russia should be back in the G8, which is a call he has repeated and repeated up until just last month!
Trump’s propaganda network at Fox News can claim that there is “no corroborating” evidence, and our nakedly partisan DNI John Ratcliffe can bitch about the damaging “leaks”. None of their arguments stand up to actual financial evidence and the chorus of career intelligence professionals, both inside and outside the United States. The only damaging thing about the leaks is that it exposes, once again, that the President of the United States is the worst possible person in this country to hold this office.
We seriously need a change in November. The President, never fit for office, has demonstrated in the last few days a remarkable detachment from reality. While Mike Pence may think that Trump was selected by God himself to bring the country back from the brink of the collapse of civilization, let me say that though God works in mysterious ways, He ain’t that damn mysterious, fawning evangelicals notwithstanding. Charlatans and Emer Gantry wannabes like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Pat Robinson may be able to overlook the hate, viciousness, immorality, narcissism, dishonesty and corruption that defines Trump. And truth be known, they can follow him through the gates of Hell while Satan cackles in glee at the vacuous stupidity of those credulous minions for all I care. But Trump poses a clear and present danger to the soul of the United States.
Aided and abetted by his Attorneys General, Trump orders military police to attack peacefully demonstrating citizens and drive them with batons and teargas from a park for the crime of assembling to protest the murder of a black man. Trump, along with his jackbooted thugs could then march unmolested to a church to defile it for a photo op while carrying a book that he has never read. The one that contains both Corinthians. One and Two. He thinks he was projecting strength, but hiding behind rows of Secret Service and military police is not strength. It was just an extension of his fright that he displayed earlier the day before when he fled from threats that only existed in his mind to the safety of the White House bunker. Later, of course, true to form, he lied about the incident so as not to appear to be the sniveling coward that he is.
Unable to lead even the coterie of misfits, collaborators and cronies that he handpicked to torment us with, Trump now presides over a kakistocracy, a government led by the worst and least qualified people chosen from a cabal of the most unscrupulous citizens. Faced with a pandemic of unprecedented proportions, Trump abdicated the Federal government’s responsibility because he is incapable of coping with the existential crisis facing our country. His ignorance of practically everything is magnified by the sycophants and ass kissers who now surround him.
When America needs a leader with vision, we are left instead with a man who can only charitably be described as deeply and profoundly stupid. There are so many examples that I hesitate to start a list. These are not his normal string of random words which add up to nothing but the kind of pronouncements that make one question the workings of his deeply flawed mind. Where most people have a filter that so that their brains can handle two concepts like disinfectants and injections without suggesting that people inject themselves with Lysol, Trump apparently has no filter at all. Consider his suggestion that we nuke hurricanes. Imagine the stupendous historical ignorance to suggest that Revolutionary soldiers took over the airports. Remember his declaration that clean coal is coal that has been cleaned. His wonderment that Puerto Rico is surrounded by water, big water, ocean water. His utterance that the noise from windmills causes cancer and that the reason that the California fires were so devastating was that they did not rake their forest like the people of Finland did. And my personal favorite, that you cannot see a stealth fighter like the F-35 because it is invisible. A very stable genius. Breathtakingly, almost incomprehensively stupid.
And now we have arrived at the time when a President is challenged as all are. Faced with a pandemic he has no idea how to combat, he declares himself a war President while surrendering all authority to the Governors to escape responsibility for the 100,000 Americans who have died as a consequence of his denial and inaction. Without displaying a shred of compassion or humanity, he sequesters himself in his bunker. A war President who is a deserter. A weakling shirking his duties like a craven wimp.
If you vote for him again, you don’t love America.
This is an awful man, waving a book he hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign interference, exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity.
Father Robert Hendrickson Rector St. Philips in the Hills Epicopal Church Tucson,AZ
The President of the United States ordered the United States Military to fire tear gas and rubber ammunition into a crowd of peacefully protesting Americans, on American soil. Reporters, who Trump has decried as “The Enemy of the People” were assailed and beaten by his government. This is the lowest point of the lowest presidency in the history of our country.
Peaceful assembly and free speech is the cornerstone of this democracy. There is nothing more American and more cherished than the First Amendment of our Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees that the government cannot retaliate against its citizens for protesting injustice.
This administration’s outright disdain for the Constitution was featured on Monday. The top law enforcement agent in the United States, US Attorney General Barr, ordered the beating, shooting, trampling, gassing, and clearing of peaceful Americans so that the President could walk over to a church, unwelcome, and use it for a bible-clad propaganda fashion shoot. And then he left.
The President of the United States has no awe, no reverence, and no appreciation for the Constitution. He has no respect–at all–for the founding documents, our founding fathers, for our history, for who we are as Americans. We protest. In the exact same vein of the civil rights movement, of the gay rights movement, of the suffrage movement that gave women the right to vote. Americans protested until we ended the war in Vietnam. We now protest the government’s aggression and impunity in harassing, beating, and murdering black people. We protest institutionalized white supremacy.
We The People have the absolute right to protest and petition their government because We The People built this government specifically so the government answers to us. That is America.
As the world struggles to contain a deadly airborne disease, governments, international health organizations, and the media are now wrestling with a new question:
Did the World Health Organization’s subservience to China prevent a malignant narcissist from making an informed decision? Or, did the world’s premier global health organization do its job?
The eye-bleedingly frustrating pattern is starting to play out as expected. There is zero evidence of any of Trump’s claims. The facts of the situation turn out to be much more damning than most of us thought. Trump’s response is to viciously attack everyone that brings this objective truth to light, to the detriment of the country.
This is how dictators function. This is how cults are formed and this is how democracies die. Absent a boogie-man, a cult leader invents one. Those of us committed to the truth furiously aim to protect the attacked institution. Cult followers need only the insistence of their leader as proof. They see the fervent response of the defenders as evidence of their own righteousness. Facts be damned, and the pursuit of truth is viewed as an attack. A neutral entity is turned into a test of allegiance, and neutrality is lost. Cult leader’s followers become more hardened and impenetrable. Opposition hardens.
This is why demagogues are dangerous.
Donald Trump has committed so many bizarre atrocities that it is hard to keep track. As a sampling, he attacked John McCain after he died and then he fought his own administration to prevent our nation from honoring him. He viciously continues to attack the press as the “Enemy of the United States”, effectively proclaiming the First Amendment of the Constitution as anti-American. He has attacked the parents of American soldiers killed in service to our nation. He repeatedly praises Nazis, Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong Il, and Vladimir Putin. He has stripped infants and kindergarteners and school children from their mothers and fathers, terrifying a generation of people for no reason other than they have no power. But nothing has absolutely infuriated me to the white-hot edge of sanity than his attack on the World Health Organization. In a pandemic.
The power grab he is going for is nothing short of monstrous. There is a pandemic changing the world as we know it and we have no idea what it looks like on the other side. A deadly virus has forced the country closed. Donald Trump, after failing to maintain the systems that our government put in place for this exact problem, is now acting like the disease is just a choice.
The United States is trying to rescue an economy through an emergency spending of $2,000,000,000,000 and we have no idea if it will work. Jobless claims are an order of magnitude higher than they were just a couple of weeks ago and unemployment percentages are approaching the Great Depression. The $349 Billion SBA paycheck protection loan program ran out of money in days. The United States reports COVID-19 infection numbers that are 3 1/2 times higher than the next highest country, and that’s with the President of the United States blatantly refusing to create a testing plan. “Now they scream ‘Testing, Testing, Testing,’ again playing a very dangerous political game. States, not the Federal Government, should be doing the Testing.”
Fantastic. Now his followers have a new foe. The “they” who play a very dangerous political game. On this point, I agree. However, the difference between the President’s position and mine is that I can name the “they”.
He is averse to a national plan for a national problem, even though national organizations used to be supported and national programs used to be maintained by every one of our past Presidents, all of which actually liked this country. And the reason he does not try to protect our nation is either that he does not want to do his job, or he is incapable. Neither are acceptable.
This incompetent fuck is blind to the fact that a national testing plan is the only chance of getting the economy back running before a vaccine is available. And now we’re stuck with a president that has a history peddling anti-vaccine talking points.
In the middle of that atmosphere, against the advice of the medical professionals in his own administration that are trying to advise him of the best course of action for the country, Donald Trump has decided to turn the World Health Organization into a boogie-man as a test of loyalty. It is the largest test of loyalty he has pressed for.
If Donald Trump gets away with attacking the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, there is literally no floor to the depth of his depravity. He is betraying the country, betraying our foundations, and now betraying his most loyal supporters by enlisting them to endanger their lives by demanding that they “LIBERATE.”
In the same breath that his administration made the absurd claim that his fomenting domestic rebellion is “not fomenting domestic rebellion”, the White House made sure to clarify that governors are “more concerned about controlling the populations than protecting them.”
Donald Trump will always find the worst possible course of action. It’s not a superpower, nor part of any grand strategy. It’s just a natural outcome from his insatiable need to feed his ego by grabbing headlines anyway possible, married with his need to find someone, anyone, anything at all to blame for his outrageous, incompetent, un-American, illegal, or traitorous behavior.
That’s why he makes up shit like he has “Total Authority” to open the states before some poor bastard has to remind him that he is not a dictator, despite his best wishes and efforts, and the Constitution is still in effect. And they may have informed him, that before it became inconvenient for Dear Leader, most Republicans champion the 10th Amendment. And then the same poor bastard probably had to tell him what the 10th Amendment is. And Trump probably got bored with it after the words “can’t” and “Constitution”, since he stopped reading long ago after he concluded that Article II gave him “the right to do whatever I want as President.” But then, Trump was informed that everyone would ignore him and he would look weak. So he graciously retreated from his new and inventive anti-American banana-republic power grab by simply pretending that he has power over them. “The governors are responsible. They have to take charge. If we disagree with it, we’re not going to let it open.” Got it both ways. Neat trick.
Still chafing against the Constitution, now Donald Trump’s grand plan is to call on his followers to “LIBERATE” themselves against the government isolation efforts that each one of our states has put in place to protect their citizens. Trump wants states to open their economies “very quickly”, and yesterday he boldly proclaimed that “America wants to be open.”
No shit that America wants to be open. This is hard. Nobody wants this virus and nobody wants to see an economy on-hold. Nobody wants the unemployment numbers at the Great Depression levels and nobody wants to have to wear a mask and live in fear if they go to the grocery store.
Today there are 2,240,000 people infected with COVID-19 and cases in the United States just topped 700,000. That’s a quarter million people since my post 2 days ago. 34,180 Americans are dead, and yesterday posted the largest single-day death count of 4,591 Americans.
For reference, terrorists killed 2,977 Americans on 9/11/2001.
What Trump doesn’t get is that he cannot change reality through his sheer force of will. He can’t just demand that the virus goes away. This virus is vying for the leading cause of all American deaths. Americans, by-and-large, do not want to die. He could, however, coordinate a national testing program that governors of all parties have been begging him for, but his government continues to fail to develop a national testing plan. It’s fucking malpractice.
So what will happen if we re-open too early without data and without testing and without control? We are sheltering in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. So if you reverse that, there’s an obvious, non-partisan answer. Brian Kemp gets it. “We’re going to have new cases pop up.”
Trump wants to kill Americans so that he has a sliver of a chance of improving the economy before November. He does not have direct authority to do it, so he’s trying to get it anyway by directing his followers to mount an insurrection against their state governments.
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.
