American Horror, Starring Donald Trump

The coronavirus pandemic is spiraling out of control, largely because of the president himself.

By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist

July 12, 2020

I think I echo many Americans, and people of the world in general, when I say that I’m having a hard time fully grappling with the gravity of this moment.

It is still hard to absorb that a virus has reshaped world behavior, halted or altered travel, strained the economy and completely reshaped the nature of public spaces and human interaction.

It is also hard to absorb that this may not be a quickly passing phase, an inconvenience for a season, but something that the world is forced to live with for years, even assuming that a vaccine is soon found.

There’s this notion that things could turn on a dime, not because of a human action, but rather because humans are under attack.

The idea that years of planning for graduations and weddings, home purchases and retirement, might all come to a screeching halt is humbling and disorienting. The confusion over how and when children can safely return to school and adults can safely return to work is frustrating because it leaves people’s lives in the lurch.

The idea that face coverings and elbow bumps may be the new normal is a shock to the system.

It seems that on multiple levels, society is being tested, and often failing.

People are rebelling against isolation, and against science and public health. They want the old world back, the pre-Covid-19 world back, but it cannot be had. The virus doesn’t feel frustration or react to it. It’s not aware of your children or your job or your vacation plans. It’s not aware of our politics.

The virus is a virus, mindless, and in this case, incredibly efficient and effective. It will pass from person to person for as long as that is possible. The political debate over mask wearing is a human concern, one that works to the virus’s benefit.

And it is these politics, particularly as articulated by Donald Trump, that are allowing the virus to ravage this nation and steal tens of thousands of lives that should not have been stolen.

It is Trump’s politicization of the virus that has resulted in a new surge of cases in this country when many other developed nations have been able to shrink the number of cases among their people.

It is because of Donald Trump that America has now reported 3.2 million cases and has tallied nearly 135,000 deaths.

But, instead of centering on the sick, dying and dead as the true victims of his malfeasance, Trump casts himself as the victim of circumstances. As The Washington Post reported last week, Trump has adopted a woe-is-me attitude with visitors. As the paper put it:

“Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation’s turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.”

How are we supposed to comprehend this idea that the president is eschewing that responsibility for political purposes, and in the process, putting untold American lives in danger and actually costing some?

How did it come to such a pass that scientists and experts could be hamstrung, that governors and mayors could be bullied, that millions of Americans could risk their own well-being and the well-being of others to make a political point?

This is the America we are all now navigating.

We’ve witnessed scene after scene of minimum-wage workers in conflict with customers — many no doubt who came in search of conflict, in search of a stage on which to perform their drama of defiance — who refuse to wear masks inside stores.

Part of the issue is that the virus is not only being politicized, its effects are also racialized: Black and brown people are having worse outcomes. Some of the states now seeing the greatest surges in cases are those in the South and West with large Black or Hispanic populations.

The effects of the disease are also ageist: Older people are more likely to die from it. Florida not only has a large Hispanic population, it also has a large population of retirees.

I believe that these variances add to the political callousness America is seeing: If the disease is seen as disproportionately hurting others — a Boomer killer, or a Black “Brotha” killer, or an abuela killer — then some younger, healthier white people might believe that the threat to themselves is lower and the restrictions on them should be looser.

We have a situation in this country where a disease is spiraling out of control, largely because of the president himself, and there is little sign or hope that it will be constrained soon.

We are living in a horror film, one starring Donald Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/opinion/coronavirus-donald-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

**********

https://medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigkeit/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong-fce6db5ba809

Firstly, it was wrong to claim that this virus was novel. Secondly, It was even more wrong to claim that the population would not already have some immunity against this virus. Thirdly, it was the crowning of stupidity to claim that someone could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even to pass the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever.

But let’s look at this one by one:

PkrBum wrote:https://medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigkeit/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong-fce6db5ba809

Firstly, it was wrong to claim that this virus was novel. Secondly, It was even more wrong to claim that the population would not already have some immunity against this virus. Thirdly, it was the crowning of stupidity to claim that someone could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even to pass the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever.

But let’s look at this one by one:

Covid-19: When Polemics Substitutes for Science

Prof Beda M Stadler's solution of doing almost nothing is no solution at all, as Brazil’s numbers are showing.

Satyajit Rath 12 Jul 2020

"Professor Beda M Stadler (former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern) in his blog on Medium argues: “The coronavirus is slowly retreating...The experts have missed basic connections. The immune response against the virus is much stronger than we thought.” He also argues against lockdowns, masks, and seemingly advocates a policy of doing nothing and the pandemic will simply fade away. He even writes that SARS-CoV-2 is disappearing globally. For a piece written on July 2, 2020, to say 'the virus retreating’ and ‘is gone for now' as he writes, would be funny if it was not so tragically wrong.

Sadly, Stadler’s points, some which are reasonable, when converted into polemic, lose whatever accuracy they have to begin with. In the process, he sets up straw men, knocks them down, and jumps to conclusions not warranted by either data or arguments..."

https://www.newsclick.in/Covid-19-When-Polemics-Substitutes-for-Science

************

Testing positive currently does not equal new symptomatic cases. Results matter.

It's a variable.

I'm still waiting for the screaming freak-out when Trump gets it.

Brazil's president played fuck-around-and-find-out and he caught it. He may survive it (would I be mean to say I hope not?), and who knows in what shape, since killing immediately isn't even half the damage this disease does. All around Trump, followers are falling like flies. Kimberly "Don't Ever Get Plastic Surgery, Folks, It'll Turn You Into A Funhouse Prop" Guilfoyle got it, and you'd think dating Don Jr. would be enough misery to deal with. It's bound to catch up to Daddy Trump at some point. Guarantee you he'll start caring about it when HE gets it. Until then, he won't care, because nobody he gives the slightest damn about will ever get it... because the only person he cares about at all is himself.

Thom Hartmann on FB:

Everything Trump Touches Dies - Including Trade & Bringing Jobs Home.

This just in from Lori Wallach, Director Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch - In his speech now underway at Whirlpool in Ohio, Trump claimed to have met all of his trade promises from 2016. NOT!

- Trump did not stop U.S. job outsourcing: The U.S. Department of Labor has certified more than 175,000 Americans as losing jobs to trade during the Trump administration’s first years. And Trump’s notion that the new NAFTA will restore hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have proved baseless as U.S. auto firms announced plans to increase production in Mexico from Ford’s Mustang electric SUV to GM closing U.S. plants and moving popular vehicle lines to Mexico.

- Trump did not eliminate the trade deficit, its higher than when Obama left office: Instead, Trump’s trade deficit is higher than when Obama left office in 2016. Based on Census Bureau data released yesterday, we know the U.S. trade deficit in the first half of Trump’s fourth year in office remains 6.5% higher than in the same period in Obama’s last year, despite a 15% overall fall-off in trade flows related to the global pandemic. Even with trade flows dropping the past six months, the NAFTA trade deficit jumped 88% under Trump.

- Trump talk, not action on Buy American: Trump has not used authority he has to end massive Buy American waivers for companies and products from 60 other countries. These waivers, which apply to countries with which the United States has trade agreements and trade preference programs, require U.S. government agencies to waive Buy American preferences for all but the lowest-value government contracts. Effectively, these rules offshore our tax dollars rather than investing them to create jobs and innovation at home. Every president has statutory authority to unilaterally end these waivers.

- Trump did not hit China as a currency manipulator: In 2016, Trump repeatedly pledged that on his first-day in office he would declare China a currency manipulator. Instead every six months since then, his administration has made an affirmative decision not to do so.

************

America’s Chief Grifter Strikes Again

Trump says he is going to boost unemployment payments by $400, stop evictions, cut payroll taxes, and extend student loan relief.

In fact, these are all lies. As usual, it’s a new con job, a grift from our grifter-in-chief.

On the unemployment payments, he lacks the authority to appropriate money for people from the Treasury Department like Democrats did with the cares act, so he’s taking $44 billion still left in the FEMA budget and saying that he will pass that money out to unemployed people - if states match $300 from FEMA with $100 from the state.

If every state took him up on that, the FEMA budget would be exhausted in a few weeks, just as we are entering what may be the worst hurricane and wildfire season in decades. It’s a scam. It also was not an executive order: it was merely a directive to the emergency agency.

On student loans, he merely issued a “memorandum“ requesting that the Education Department study the feasibility of doing something about the student loan crisis.

On evictions, he actually issued a presidential executive order, but it doesn’t require evictions stop. Instead, it asks the department of Health and Human Services to investigate the possibility and feasibility of stopping or slowing evictions at the department level, something that HHS has no authority to do outside of its own low income housing. Another scam.

And on the payroll tax, he does not have the authority to turn on or off Americans owing taxes, so he says you will still owe the payroll tax every paycheck, but the government just won’t bother to collect it… until the end of the year, a month after the election. Then you are going to owe all the payroll taxes that were not collected, and you’re going to have to pay it by April 15. You know, when the next guy is president.

Donald Trump has pretended to be a billionaire for years by laundering money for foreign oligarchs and living on borrowed cash from Deutsche bank. He looks like a billionaire, lives the lifestyle of a billionaire, but in all probability, according to David Cay Johnston and other reporters and economists, he is broke and deeply in debt and has been since the late 1990s.

This executive order and three memorandums basically continue that scam he’s been running ever since he burned through the last of his daddy’s money, only now he has the federal government running it, too.

There will not be extra money in your paycheck this month, you can still be evicted, your student loan banker will continue to demand payments and interest, and even if your paycheck, if you’re employed, goes up 6% between now and the end of the year, you will owe back every penny of that money on April 15th.

Meanwhile, we have no national testing, our schools are in chaos, our elections are under attack from both foreign governments and the Post Office, a quarter-million Americans will be dead by election time and 5 million are already sick, and Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate are on vacation.

Trump continues to live the life of a grifter, and is applying that to the federal government. Abraham Lincoln famously said that you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Trump figures all he has to do is fool “some of the people all the time” and get enough of them to vote while he prevents everybody else from doing so. He calls those people his “base.“

The fate and future of America, and democracy around the world, hangs on whether he gets away with this latest grift.

--Thom Hartmann



(from FB)