• TrumpVirus / Racist Cops / The Depression Is Trump's Fault - But He's A

    From Dave Merrick@21:1/5 to Byker on Tue Mar 8 12:46:23 2022
    XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics
    XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, soc.culture.usa

    Byker wrote

    This Is Trump’s Fault

    The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures


    don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the
    Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph
    of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.

    To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.

    Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going?
    By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the
    9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may
    have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present
    trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam.
    Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump
    now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

    The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying,
    and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably
    developed country.

    Read: How the pandemic will end

    That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter
    unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The
    loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal
    government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national
    arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states
    for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for
    ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That
    was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault
    again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure
    to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is
    more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could
    have stopped it, and he did not. More by David Frum

    Donald Trump various faces
    Trump Has Lost the Plot
    David Frum
    Michael Flynn
    The Secrets Flynn Was Desperate to Conceal
    David Frum
    A demonstrator in Maryland protesting the state's closures
    Trump Brings Religion Into the Coronavirus Culture War
    David Frum

    The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative
    talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope
    of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he
    told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of
    the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if
    he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser
    and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips
    were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact
    that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by
    mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical
    supply chain? Trump’s fault.

    For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way
    through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or
    later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be
    evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed
    Trump.

    Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

    The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump
    administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed
    in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the
    first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to
    have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in
    the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By
    March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its
    first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin
    marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks
    between January 3 and March 21.

    Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over

    Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there
    was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered,
    because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost
    weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.

    Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the
    path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.
    Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the
    accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the
    unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great
    Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.


    LOL!

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