monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

If you still think trump tells the truth after four years of lies, you're a far bigger fool than I've given you credit for being, and that's a pretty big fool already.

There’s that thing again. When someone points out Trump’s shortcomings, or failings; in this case his lying - you supporters always point away. No politician or public figure has ever had their prolific daily lying as well documented as Trump, and you supporters will say that’s because he’s being unfairly scrutinized.

He failed in his response to the pandemic, stil tries to minimize its devastating effects, and lies daily about the efficacy of hydrochloroquine. You supporters point to Obama’s response to Ebola or swine flu.

To you Trump supporters, Donald Trump doesn’t bear personal responsibility for anything wrong in this country. Nothing. It’s always someone else’s fault.

If it was some kind of mental illness at least the rest of us could feel pity for you - but it’s not. It’s a choice you supporters have made - to defend anything he says and does; to deny the failure and lying so glaringly obvious to everyone else; to continue, with your support, to enable a dangerously incompetent and immoral man. If you were sick we could pity you. But by your choices you earn nothing but antipathy and disgust.

(...)

During a pandemic, leaders must rally the public, tell the truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeatedly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, and himself. He said that “nobody ever thought a thing like [the pandemic] could happen” and also that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Both statements cannot be true at the same time, and in fact neither is true.

A month before his inauguration, I wrote that “the question isn’t whether [Trump will] face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, but when.” Based on his actions as a media personality during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and as a candidate in the 2016 election, I suggested that he would fail at diplomacy, close borders, tweet rashly, spread conspiracy theories, ignore experts, and exhibit reckless self-confidence. And so he did.

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID‑19 pandemic. He isn’t solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” Ron Klain said. “It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”

In the early days of Trump’s presidency, many believed that America’s institutions would check his excesses. They have, in part, but Trump has also corrupted them. The CDC is but his latest victim. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and template for public-health agencies around the world. But during the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted COVID‑19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didn’t hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopening the country were shelved for a month while the White House released its own uselessly vague plan.

Again, everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contract—that the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the bafflement of health experts. “There are instances in history where humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID‑19.”

Instead, the U.S. sleepwalked into the worst possible scenario: People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soaring to record-breaking heights.

Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a “wartime president,” he merely presided over a culture war, turning public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that protect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public-health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats.

It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected populist leaders—Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom—also fumbled their response to COVID‑19. “When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what happens when trust is what you need the most?” says Sarah Dalglish of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who studies the political determinants of health.

“Trump is president,” she says. “How could it go well?”

(...)

The President of the United States should be elected only by TV and Radio commercials and yard signs!!!

How dare we want to see candidates interact which each other?

If it was some kind of mental illness at least the rest of us could feel pity for you - but it’s not. It’s a choice you supporters have made - to defend anything he says and does; to deny the failure and lying so glaringly obvious to everyone else; to continue, with your support, to enable a dangerously incompetent and immoral man. If you were sick we could pity you. But by your choices you earn nothing but antipathy and disgust.

As for removing the downthumb, I would be okay with that.

Asked by interviewer Jonathan Swan how history would remember Lewis’s contributions to the nation, Trump demurred.

“I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis,” Trump said in the “Axios on HBO” interview. “He chose not to come to my inauguration.

The source of the explosion was a major fire at a warehouse for firecrackers near the port in Beirut,
the state-run National News Agency reported.

Local news reported multiple people were wounded in the incident.

I think the reason for removing the down-thumb is because it just sets up a lot of negativity.

No politician or public figure has ever had their prolific daily lying as well documented as Trump, and you supporters will say that's because he's being unfairly scrutinized.

He failed in his response to the pandemic, stil tries to minimize its devastating effects, and lies daily about the efficacy of hydrochloroquine. You supporters point to Obama's response to Ebola or swine flu.

If it was some kind of mental illness at least the rest of us could feel pity for you - but it's not. It's a choice you supporters have made - to defend anything he says and does; to deny the failure and lying so glaringly obvious to everyone else; to continue, with your support, to enable a dangerously incompetent and immoral man. If you were sick we could pity you. But by your choices you earn nothing but antipathy and disgust.