Let's fire Trump

Donald Trump Shared a Hilarious Story About Not Wanting to Help a Dying Man

https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story

"He was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him."

By Jay Willis
September 28, 2017
Image may contain Face Human Person and Head

Of the myriad groundbreaking firsts of Donald Trump's presidency—the first billionaire president, the first reality television star president, the first admitted sexual assault-committing president, and so on and so forth—few of them are stranger than his status as the first president to have hours of radio interviews with satellite radio shock jock Howard Stern, many of which haven't been revisited since his ascendance from occasional media personality to President of the United States. The good people at the Daily Beast have been going through some of the recently-published archival recordings, a task that I sincerely hope entails hazard pay. While uncomfortable anecdotes about his sex life with Melania or his wedding night with Marla Maples seem grimly unremarkable in the context of everything else we know about the president, this fun story, which Trump shared with Stern in July 2008 while discussing his lifelong aversion to blood, is a bit... different.

Once upon a time, Trump explained matter-of-factly, he was hosting a charity ball at Mar-a-Lago at which several members of the Marine Corps were in attendance, along with a host of rich people "eager to get their picture in the Palm Beach Post," as he put it. Lo and behold, at some point during the evening, an 80-year-old man—"very wealthy," Trump adds, but also, "a lot of people didn't like him"—fell off the stage and hit his head. Trump thought the man had died. "And you know what I did?"

How do you, a functional adult with the capacity for empathy and/or human emotion writ large, react when you see someone undergoing a bona fide medical emergency? Do you instinctively go to that person? Do you render aid, even if your lack of expertise limits that task to asking if they are alright, and if they need help? Even if you know you have a strong aversion to blood, perhaps you adapt to this idiosyncrasy by calling 911, or by asking if anyone in the immediate vicinity is a physician, or other medical professional, or just a non-hemophobe who might be able to provide more efficacious assistance. These are all rational, humane responses to the situation in which Donald Trump found himself, and yet, in news that will shock you, he did not choose any of them.

I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him.

As Stern and company yukked it up at this expertly-delivered punchline, Trump continued.

He’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible. You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red.

If you overheard a stranger on the bus saying these things aloud, you'd be wondering if you had stumbled upon the Law and Order: SVU set while they film the standard opening vignette that prompts a concerned bystander to summon Benson and Stabler to the scene.

And you have this poor guy, eighty years old, laying on the floor unconscious, and all the rich people are turning away. ‘Oh my God! This is terrible! This is disgusting!’ And you know, they’re turning away. Nobody wants to help the guy. His wife is screaming—she’s sitting right next to him, and she’s screaming.”

Ha-ha! An elderly person was maybe dying in front of me, and his wife was terrified and screaming, and I immediately wondered about the integrity of my flooring material! Isn't this HILARIOUS? I'm hilarious. The Marines in attendance, the president explains, swooped in quickly, forming a human stretcher to rush the victim out the room and get him badly-needed medical attention. Meanwhile, Trump adds with a delighted chuckle, he was signaling frantically for a cleaning crew.

I was saying, "Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!" The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he okay!

The President of the United States seems like a very well man.

It is worth pointing out that Plump was not a billionaire in 2016, when he campaigned. That was just more of his stupid self-aggrandizement. He cut a deal with the IRS in the 90s whereby they accepted his doubtful claim of having more than $900,000,000 worth of "un-salable" real estate on his hands, and he was able to take a loss each year and deduct it from the income tax he would have to pay. When the press brought this up, he even bragged about it. By now, he may have amassed that amount, on paper, at least, but even that is doubtful. The tax package passed soon after he was sworn in specifically targeted earned income, as opposed to capital gains, because Plump was never bright enough on his own to put significant amounts of his putative wealth in securities or other investments for which one pays the capital gains tax. With Wilbur Ross to advise him, I'll bet he's gone into capital investment in a big way, and other tax legislation suggests that that was the intent. The capital gains tax was reworked for 2020.



Source at Forbes-dot-com

This comment from Quora is also interesting:



A search for his alleged wealth in 2016 is very informative, especially with regard to his losses on campaign expenses. He rants insanely about fake news and the media, but they have done him great favors in covering his lunacy, which is the kind of attention that campaign contributions just can't buy.

Those are lies and propaganda. Only extremely stupid people would think all those are even near the truth. Carry on.

Just in case one of the resident cretins wants some documentation.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mcconnell-admits-he-was-wrong-say-obama-didn-t-leave-n1207616

2. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/fact-check-trump-always-knew-pandemic-coronavirus/index.html

3. https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-trump-china-travel-ban-45a2da12-8063-4ad9-ba28-61cdeb1ce0b3.html

4. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-to-us-governors-get-your-own-ventilators

5. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52553829

6. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-white-house-coronavirus-task-force-will-continue-indefinitely-2020-5

7. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177

8. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/politics/donald-trump-michigan-gretchen-whitmer-protests/index.html

9. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/07/trump-death-toll-coronavirus-241819

10. https://www.axios.com/trump-coronavirus-death-toll-d8ba60a4-316b-4d1e-8595-74970c15fb34.html

Link to a source that is not a proven liar. Those all have lied ( not sure on Business Insider). Most repeatably.

Polio was almost eradicated. Then came the coronavirus. Then came a threat from President Trump.
Source: Washington Post

Polio was almost eradicated. Then came the coronavirus. Then came a threat from President Trump.

By Emily Rauhala, Danielle Paquette and Susannah George
May 15, 2020 at 2:47 p.m. EDT

For decades, the United States has worked with the World Health Organization and others to quash polio, beating back to near extinction a merciless disease that once paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children each year.

That progress is in danger as the pandemic forces health-care providers to suspend door-to-door vaccination campaigns that have slashed the number of infections.

New cases have emerged in Niger and Chad, and fears have mounted about a resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although the number of new polio infections has been small — 155 confirmed cases since January — even blips are worrisome, public health experts say, because small increases can trigger explosive outbreaks, especially in poor countries without the resources to combat the virus alone.

“The polio virus is being let free,” said Abdul Qadir, a health worker who has spent the past eight years delivering the vaccine in western Pakistan.

The polio program also risks becoming collateral damage in a political controversy that could hinder eradication efforts long after the pandemic subsides.

Last month, President Trump threatened to cut U.S. funding for polio and every other WHO program over the U.N. agency’s coronavirus response, which he called “China-centric.” ...

-snip-


Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/polio-was-almost-eradicated-then-came-the-coronavirus-then-came-a-threat-from-president-trump/2020/05/15/ed9d26fe-831c-11ea-81a3-9690c9881111_story.html

Part of that is devout Muslims will not take those vaccinations. They think they will sterilize their women and children. Terrorists kill workers trying to give those vaccinations. The whole truth would be nice.

The rest of the truth

You think they left this on purpose because it makes Islam look bad? We may never know.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/24/pakistan-polio-female-health-worker-religious-leaders-vaccinations/

Fix the economy and not as much funding is needed. We are hyperdependent on high-levels of funding and resistant to reforms that would reduce funding-dependency and costs generally.

Democrats only want to ratchet up economic costs because that is how unions work: they want to always keep everyone's job protected and raise salaries.

By protecting certain jobs and salaries and not others, they create a situation where costs always have to rise to employ the unemployed. If salaries and other costs could be shared among more people, more good could be done with the same levels of economic activity or less, instead of always fighting for more growth and thus causing more inflation.

Fix the pandemic and there's no problem with the economy.

Sending people into the packing houses is greatly improving the economy for body bag suppliers and undertakers.

You posted about Trump cutting funding and I'm explaining that the Democrats block efforts to fix the economy so that more can be done with less money.

They always want to ratchet up salaries instead of lowering them so that more people can be employed with the same budget.

They don't want people to go through the discipline of budget cuts and figuring out how to live happily while spending less.

If Trump had been in charge during World War II, this column would be in German
By
Max Boot
Columnist
May 15, 2020 at 12:45 p.m. CDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/15/if-trump-had-been-charge-during-world-war-ii-this-column-would-be-german/

The 75th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany got me thinking about how World War II might have turned out if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had acted like President Donald J. Trump.

Picture the scene a few months after Pearl Harbor. The first U.S. troops have arrived in England, and the Doolittle raiders have bombed Tokyo. But even though the war has just begun, the Trumpified FDR is already losing interest. One day he says the war is already won; the next day that we will just have to accept the occupation of France because that’s the way life is. He speculates that mobilization might be unnecessary if we can develop a “death ray” straight out of a Buck Rogers comic strip. He complains that rationing and curfews are very unpopular and will have to end soon. He tells the governors that if they want to keep on fighting, they will have to take charge of manufacturing ships, tanks and aircraft. Trumpy FDR prefers to hold mass rallies to berate his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. He even suggests that Hoover belongs in jail along with the leading Republican congressmen — “Martin, Barton and Fish.”

In reality, of course, Roosevelt focused with single-minded devotion on defeating the United States’ enemies until the day of his death. Old political battles and agendas fell by the wayside. “Dr. New Deal” had been transformed, he explained, into “Dr. Win-the-War.”

Trump, by contrast, cannot focus on a single subject for the length of a paragraph. So it is no surprise that he has already gotten bored with a war against the coronavirus that isn’t going his way. He is taking his cues not from FDR but from Sen. George Aiken, the Vermont Republican whose plan for the Vietnam War was summed up as “declare victory and get out.” In Trump’s case, that means getting Americans out of the home whether it’s safe to do so or not.

Coronavirus deaths are surging past 86,000 and unemployment claims past 36 million, but Trump sounded on Monday as if the pandemic is already over. “We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” he declared. It’s as if Roosevelt had declared Victory in Europe before D-Day.

Medical experts argue that it’s necessary to dramatically ramp up testing, but Trump has no national plan to do so, and said on Thursday that testing might be “frankly overrated.” “When you test you find something is wrong with people,” he declared. “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” The mind reels. This is akin to FDR saying that if no one reported the attack on Pearl Harbor, it wouldn’t have happened.

Rather than turn into “Dr. Defeat the Virus,” Trump has become Dr. Demento trying to distract the public by replaying golden oldies. Have you heard the one about Joe Scarborough killing an aide (who actually collapsed because of a heart problem)? Play it again, Sam.

And rewind “Obamagate” while we’re at it. “This is the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country. ... People should be going to jail for this stuff,” Trump thundered on Thursday, even though a few days earlier he was unable to explain what law President Barack Obama supposedly violated. “You know what the crime is,” he told a Post reporter. “The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”

Actually no one knows what the crime is, because there isn’t one. As the Bulwark’s Tim Miller explains, Trump’s theory seems to be that a high-level cabal framed him for colluding with Russia but neglected to make the information public before the election when it could have helped Hillary Clinton. When stated so concisely it sounds preposterous — so Trump prefers not to spell it out. Instead he darkly suggests that routine occurrences — such as Obama officials “unmasking” surveillance transcripts that revealed future national security adviser Michael Flynn speaking with the Russian ambassador — are worse than Watergate.

The scandal is not that Flynn was unmasked or prosecuted. It is that Attorney General William P. Barr is now trying to drop charges to which Flynn already pleaded guilty and acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell is releasing information about the unmasking requests. They are politicizing the Justice Department and the intelligence community to save Trump from his own misconduct — which included (lest we forget) welcoming Russian interference in the U.S. election.

It remains to be seen whether the “very stable genius” will succeed in distracting the public. He has definitely distracted himself. The Post reports: “Trump has been distracted recently from managing the pandemic by fixating on Flynn and related matters, ranting in private about the Russia investigation, complaining about Comey and others in the FBI and making clear he wanted to talk in the run-up to the election about law enforcement targeting him, according to one adviser who spoke with the president last week.”

If FDR had taken Trump’s approach, this column would be in German.

Could a RWer explain Trump saying "If you test for Covid19, then then we have more Covid." Please!

The job of testing isnt to cause corona-virus. Its supposed to reveal corona-virus

He thinks if he ignores the numbers he can present a better face on his dibbling.

But I wonder, if we quit reporting the pregnancy of unwed mothers if we can lower the birthrate.

I can't speak for Trump, but there are several ways that can be true:

1) the statistics are dependent on testing, so the more you test, the more cases you find and cases you don't test go unreported.

2) assuming people behave more cautiously in the absence of information and take more irrational risks when they have access to information that they can use to rationalize risk behaviors, the virus will spread more due to more testing.

This second dynamic is really interesting to consider as a factor influencing social-economic behavior. People don't know whether there are false positives and false negatives; and they also don't know how many cases are not yet exhibiting symptoms and thus already contagious but not yet tested, so if you have access to infection rates in a certain area and they seem to be low, people might take less precautions in that area, and then the moment the virus starts spreading there, it's going to spread more because of the level of precautions being lower there generally.

It's basically the same as when people in North America were looking at Europe and Asia and not expecting it to become widespread, but then when the numbers started climbing, people suddenly began taking more precautions, i.e. because it seemed subjectively 'closer to home' once it had spread from an overseas continent to the one where they live, even though geography really wasn't a barrier.

E.g. for a virus, New York is closer to Paris than some small town in the midwest, maybe, but many people in the midwest probably didn't worry as much about the virus when it was spreading in Europe as when it started spreading in NY.