Buzzflash Four Days Ago, Trump to Americans: Drop Dead. You’re Losers and Just Collateral Damage. He Didn’t Say That, But It’s Probably What He Is Thinking.
March 18, 2020
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
According to a March 17 article in PoliticusUSA, Donald Trump justified his support for disbanding the White House pandemic team, from the perspective of a businessman, in a February 26, 2020 news briefing:
As the Coronavirus tsunami started to become a dire threat to people in the US, Trump said at the time:
“Some of the people we’ve cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money.”
He further rationalized the cut of the team:
“I’m a business person, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.”
Dr. Beth Cameron, who had run the pandemic team before Trump shut the program down, said his doing so directly corresponded to the slow reaction time the administration had in dealing with the present crisis.
“It is clear that eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Cameron wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
As US and UK projections of the possible deaths and infection rate in the millions were published, Trump adopted a more somber tone this past Monday, at a news conference. Most notably, he claimed that he had predicted the pandemic all along, and that he has no responsibility for the horror we are currently facing in responding to COVID-19. When asked how he would rate himself on a 1-10 scale in handling the Coronavirus, he said, without hesitation, a “10.” This is a mentally sick man. It’s as though his brain was put in a Mix Master and replaced in his head.
A commentary that BuzzFlash posted on March 15 highlighted Trump’s churlish insensitivity to his dismissal of a pandemic. The story was headlined: “PBS Reporter Yamiche Alcindor Challenges Trump to His Face to Accept Responsibility for Shutting Down WH Pandemic Preparedness Division. He Responded by Calling Her ‘Nasty’ and Cutting Off Her Mic.”
Yesterday, March 18, Trump sneeringly dismissed a question from Alcindor, one of a handful of DC press corps reporters who unabashedly challenges Trump, about his racist calling of the Coronavirus “The Chinese virus.” It was one of Trump’s set-ups, in this case getting the demeaning term “Kung Flu” into his racist narrative, associating the devastating Coronavirus with his four-year effort to consider non-white Americans “enemies” to be virulently attacked or mocked.
Of course, Trump’s transition team was thoroughly briefed on the likelihood of a pandemic occurring during Trump’s first term, and they were ignored.
However, the coup de grace to the American people was the Trump administration’s refusal to accept World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 test kits. This was a literally fatal decision that put the United States a couple of months behind identifying infected individuals. This has left perhaps hundreds of thousands of carriers who have been infecting people. Remember, even an infected person with no major symptoms of the virus can infect others.
How far behind the curve of the virus and an ability to keep it flat has Mr. “USA Is Number One” Trump put us? Just refer to a New York Times tweet dated March 17:
Despite Mike Pence’s multi-week promises of a million test kits, medical facilities are dismayed that so few kits have yet appeared, and that basic medical tools like swabs and reagents that are necessary are still in short supply.
Kaiser Health News posted an article about a for-profit drive through CV test site that opened on Monday, just a short distance from Mar-a-Lago. It was a “rocky” first day, according to Kaiser:
Despite repeated assertions from White House officials that tests will soon be available to anyone who wants them, residents here found the reality much different. Of the 6,000 people who called for an appointment and hundreds who drove up on Monday, just 65 were able to get tested. Testing officials said they had 80 test kits left for future patients and announced Tuesday they would not take any more appointments….
Jay Wolfson, a professor of public health at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said he sees the “potential irony” of communities close to Trump’s home struggling to meet testing demands after the president boasted earlier that anyone could get a test. But he said the situation here Monday showed how ill-prepared the country is for the pandemic.
The fatal decision made not to accept the reliable WHO test kits has led us into a nation that will likely entirely shut-down, an imminent surge of ill and dying Americans, and the collapse of the US economy. Yes, the COVID-19 virus would have hit us hard no matter what, but Trump unleashed a time bomb that may have have been largely unnecessary as the free mobile tests in South Korea have proved.
The publication Global Voices rightfully pegs the China explosion in CV cases to the lack of preventative measures. It reads like Trump’s catastrophic fail in the US. The article is headlined, “Study suggests that China could have prevented 95% of its coronavirus cases:
According to a recent study by the University of Southampton, China could have prevented 95 percent of coronavirus infections if its measures to contain the outbreak had begun three weeks earlier. However, China only took vigorous action in late January – weeks after police silenced a doctor for trying to raise the alarm….
The analysis – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – found that early case detection and contact reduction were effective in controlling the virus and combined measures can reduce transmission. They can also delay the timing and reduce the size of the epidemic’s peak, and thus buy time for healthcare preparations and drugs research.
Of course, the main failure by the Chinese government was to not begin early testing, as well as to play down the Coronavirus outbreak. Sound familiar?
Terrifyingly, Trump, despite his more “somber” news conference and his declaring a national “emergency,” he still doesn’t actually feel a sense of urgency. Trump is Mr. Hyde, the evil side of Dr. Jekyll. As Daily Kos reports, on Wednesday, he is still slow-walking a full-scale response to the looming disaster, in an article headlined, “'Wartime 'president' still waiting on 'worst case scenario' to boost medical supply production.”
It is four years beyond giving Trump excuses and normalizing his deranged, often racist adolescent behavior. This Queens-born mentally-unbalanced Mafia don is at best indifferent about Americans dying, including many of his grey-haired cult enthusiasts. He is still dithering in such a way that we will inevitably peak beyond a flattened curve that would be “manageable” — and that means he is indifferent to our dying. Is he truly sadistic, savoring his ability to create unnecessary death and cruel infection — precipitating the devil’s chaos.
He will rejoice as inmates in prisons and migrant detainees endure large-scale infections and die. They are disposable people to him
Of course, the Republicans trot out their cliched defenses of Trump — of a man who due to malicious negligence is responsible for so many unnecessary deaths?
On March 17, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) offered the standard Republican attack line, on “Fox & Friends,” to anyone who holds them accountable for their destructive actions: “Now is the time to act, to keep this from being worse than it needs to be, and we can't do that if we spend all our time taking political potshots or arguing over ideological purity.” In short, they say when the Democrats rightfully criticize Republican failures in a crisis that this is no time for "partisanship."
This is the same push back when there is a gun massacre and calls for gun control. The Democrats usually back off, and the Republicans escape unscathed. The Democrats usually back off, and the Republicans remold the narrative to make those responsible into decent, well-intentioned people, even if they are doing the devil’s work.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is allotted 1.5% of the Pentagon budget, but at this moment, what is the greatest threat to our national security; isn’t it the Coronavirus? Yet, Trump is essentially thumbing his nose as our nation shuts down like lights being turned off, largely because of his impaired and maniacal decision making.
If he were in the military, which “Bone Spurs” would never be, he would have been court-martialed and put in the brig years ago.
There must be an uprising of outrage over this criminal president, who gets high off of cruelty and people suffering, if we are to save ourselves and our democracy.
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