monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It's doubtful that anything is the result of "Trump's sudden decision."

And so last Friday, the day before Mr. Pence was to speak at the Air Force ceremony in Colorado, Mr. Trump, never one to be upstaged, abruptly announced that he would, in fact, be speaking at West Point.

snood wrote:

To accommodate Trump’s sudden decision to speak at West Point, cadets will be called back, tested off campus, then isolated for 14 days in rooms with masks. They’ll eat in segregated groups. No decision on whether family members may attend.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-west-point.html

I suppose, if any of the cadets gets sick, they can just be considered collateral damage in service of Trump’s mission - to be re-elected.

It's doubtful that anything is the result of "Trump's sudden decision."


Probably lots of discussion has gone on about this issue, and obviously people are strategizing about how to create effective protocols for doing things in a way that minimizes viral spread, especially for people in the military and strategic positions who need to be able to meet in person to avoid the possibility of their electronic communications being hacked into.

Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
· 2h
Nancy Pelosi to Jake Tapper: "We spend a lot of time on what the president said ... and 'disinfectant in the body' -- you know what they call that? They call that embalming. That's the medical term."

By
Joe Scarborough

President Trump has been stumbling through a year of magical thinking. The consequences of this deadly state of denial have been catastrophic for pandemic victims and the U.S. economy.

In January, Trump said the coronavirus threat was “one person coming in from China”: “We have it totally under control . . . it’s going to be just fine.” But the president’s intelligence community had been warning him for weeks about the coming threat when he made that spurious claim.

In February, Trump predicted the virus would go away by April. “It’s like a miracle. It will disappear.” That reckless prediction also came weeks after White House staff warned the virus could imperil millions of Americans’ lives while costing the U.S. economy trillions of dollars.

In March, the president told worried Republican senators to “just stay calm” because “it will go away.” Trump spent much of that month ignoring Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, by declaring that the untested use of a malaria drug to treat covid-19 could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”

This week, the Food and Drug Administration had to warn Americans against the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus because it caused “serious heart rhythm problems.”

Throughout April, Trump’s magical thinking continued full force, with the flustered president assuring reporters this week that covid-19 “might not come back at all” this fall. Fauci again had to correct the president’s spurious claims. The next day, Trump publicly peppered his staff and medical team about imagined benefits of ingesting disinfectants and implanting lights for pandemic patients. Once again, Trump’s own administration had to warn the public against believing the president’s ramblings.

As the former reality TV host trotted out these baseless remedies and delusional denials at his afternoon news conferences, 53,000 Americans died from a disease that did not go away miraculously in April. Instead, as former vice president Joe Biden predicted in January, Trump left America ill-prepared for the coming pandemic. Trump and Fox News’s Sean Hannity were still claiming in March that the press was overblowing a crisis that Hannity declared was being used to “bludgeon Trump again with this new hoax.” A month after the cable news host pushed out that obscene and dangerous disinformation, covid-19 killed more Americans on a single day in April than died in combat during the United States’ 19-year war in Afghanistan.

These deaths do not rest solely on the president’s shoulders, of course. China’s communist regime bears much of the responsibility for refusing to warn the world of the horrors unfolding in its country. But even this raises the question of why Trump was praising China’s communist regime in late January.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” the president tweeted. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. . . . In particular, on behalf of the American People I want to thank President Xi!” Trump’s admiration of China’s “transparency” had to be particularly galling to administration officials who spent that month trying to get Xi’s regime to share virus samples and health-care data that could have greatly helped prepare America.

Even Trump’s toothless travel ban likely had little effect on the disease’s spread. At least 430,000 people have streamed into the United States from China since the outbreak, including some 40,000 travelers after the so-called ban was put in place. Making matters worse, Trump ignored health-care officials calling for the shutdown of European travel. He listened instead to his treasury secretary, who worried that a such ban could spook financial markets. It would be six more weeks before Trump stopped travel from Europe. The impact of the delay was devastating for New York.

While the president’s supporters frantically search for errant predictions among Democrats or members of the press, their efforts are undercut by Trump himself, who insists on proving every night just how ill-suited he is for his job. The man he will likely be competing against in November’s election warned Americans months ago that the coronavirus would get worse. “To be blunt,” the presumptive Democratic nominee wrote in USA Today, “I am concerned that the Trump administration’s shortsighted policies have left us unprepared for a dangerous epidemic that will come sooner or later.”

Biden’s warning was all too prescient. The United States now finds itself in the worst crisis since World War II with a leader less suited for the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the office. Any hope that Trump can somehow rise to this once-in-a-lifetime challenge with even a modicum of competence would be the same sort of magical thinking that has plagued this country since the outbreak of this terrible disease.

Four months of delusional decisions coming from the White House have not produced a miracle cure. Instead, the country is more vulnerable than ever to a deadly pandemic and a debilitating financial collapse. As long as Donald Trump remains in the White House, the crisis that stalks our land will only get worse.

He has in many ways. You do not listen to what he says, you listen to someone saying what he said and why he said it like they are mind readers. The only mind they control is yours..

Quote:

NEW YORK, NY—In a somber, heartfelt speech yesterday, Trump expressed his condolences toward Americans affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-says-i-dont-want-americans-to-die-nyt-quotes-as-i-want-americans-to-die

Quote:

Name one person on this site who's a Republican who opposed Trump in '16 and remains so today — you can't. Learn what a "NeverTrumper" is and use the term correctly.

I can.

The same cites you claim lie their asses off are the ones you quote.

6 + 7 + 5 = I'm speechless

That’s what lickspittles do.

Dude. You're citing a satirical website.

pink man -- funny!