Trump Could Have Easily Saved Thousands of Lives During the Pandemic

If Trump has done one simple thing he would have changed the course of history.  

What if Trump has very simply worn a mask?  

If he hadn’t let what I can only assume is vanity guide him we could be in a very different place today. Possibly with little to no community transmission of COVID-19.  

It is easy to point to Trump’s continual denial of the facts as they emerged & were presented to him out of Wujan. To an earlier admonishment to socially distance. To having testing ready. To REALLY stopping travel from Wujan. 

Any, any one of those things would have saved lives. All were part of a playbook of items Ronald Klain had left the Trump Administration. And that were no secret to public health officials.
 (snip)

Trump also could have not scrapped nursing home regulations in 2017 called them too burdensome. Or forced meatpacking plants to work. Or made sure our stockpiles were modernized & complete. 

But by mid-March and April most of those ships had sailed. Most of those options were no longer available to Trump. Still he had one thing he could have done to stop the pandemic in its tracks & open the economy by mid-April. Wear a mask. 

Imagine if Trump has strolled out in the middle of March with a mask on his face. What would have happened? It’s easy to imagine the 35-40% of the country that are avid Trump supporters getting on board wearing masks. Much of the rest of the country already is. 

A number of scientists project that if 80% of the public wore a mask in public, the virus would have been very difficult to pass from one person to another. And when that happens every day for a period of weeks, the virus begins to rapidly die. 

Trump and the GOP Try to Destroy the US Post Office

What fucking assholes.

Trump Sparks Horror by Promoting Video that Says ‘Only Good Democrat is a Dead Democrat’

What a fucking asshole.

A Complete Abdication of Leadership from the President in a Time of Crisis

Trump is a fucking asshole.

GOP Put Pennsylvania Legislature At Risk by Hiding Member’s Positive Covid-19 Test

Assholes. 

Trump Is an Unfit Madman

At various times over the past three and a half years, many of us have asked what would happen if President Trump truly went over the edge or if his behavior became so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth could no longer be denied. 

But the human capacity for denial is apparently almost infinite. 

Let’s review what our president has been up to in the past few days: 

With the death toll from covid-19 about to top 100,000, Trump has offered almost nothing in the way of tributes to the dead, sympathy for their families, or acknowledgement of our national mourning. 

By all accounts he is barely bothering to manage his administration’s response to the pandemic, preferring to focus on cheerleading for an economic recovery he says is on its way, even as he feeds conspiracy theories about the death toll being inflated. 

This weekend, he went golfing. 

In a Twitter spasm on Saturday and Sunday, Trump retweeted mockery of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) looks, along with a tweet calling Hillary Clinton a “skank.” 

Eager to start a new culture war flare-up, he urged churches to open and gather parishioners in a room to breathe the same air, threatening that he would “override” governors whose shutdown orders still forbade such gatherings. The president has no such power. 

He all but accused talk show host Joe Scarborough of murdering a young woman who died in 2001 in the then-congressman’s district office, bringing untold torture to her family from the conspiracy theorists who will respond to his accusation. 

He has repeatedly insisted that the upcoming election is being “rigged” because states run by both Republicans and Democrats are making it easier to vote by mail, seeking to delegitimize a vote that has yet to occur, despite the substantial evidence that mail voting advantages neither party. 

The truth is that Trump is not much more despicable of a human being than he has always been; it’s just that standard Trumpian behavior becomes more horrifying when it occurs during an ongoing national crisis. It is reality that changed around him, and he was incapable of responding to it.

WHITE HOUSE MISLED PUBLIC, BURIED CDC REOPENING GUIDELINES AND IS NOW PREPARING FOR SECOND CORONAVIRUS WAVE

Fucking GOP death cult assholes.

Trump's Lawyers Argue Appallingly for an Unaccountable Tyrannical POTUS at SCOTUS

When Donald Trump ran for president and claimed he’d release his tax returns as soon as the IRS was done auditing them, it was an obvious lie. Since then, he has taken extraordinary steps to conceal what every president and party nominee in almost half a century has gladly offered to the public. 

But his desperate attempts to keep the public from understanding his finances may finally be reaching their end — though how long it will take to actually see the documents, or if we will at all, is far from clear. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in three separate lawsuits Trump has filed to stop officials from seeing those returns. The first two concern congressional subpoenas given to Mazars (his accounting firm) and Deutsche Bank (his bank). The third concerns an investigation by the district attorney of Manhattan. AD It was hard to tell how the justices might rule. 

But what the arguments did reveal is the almost limitless scope of immunity he seeks. Trump believes he should be excused not just from congressional oversight, not just from criminal investigation, not just from questioning by the press, but even from politics itself. 

It’s almost impossible to overstate how appalling the arguments by Trump’s lawyers have been. They have claimed kingly powers for the president — that while he is in office he can’t be prosecuted or even investigated. That, they say, applies to both Congress and prosecutors. 

In the lower court rulings as these cases (and others in which Trump has made similar sweeping claims of immunity) make their way up to the Supreme Court, Trump hasn’t just lost. Again and again, judges expressed shock and even outrage at the audacity of his claims before rejecting them out of hand.

GOP Senator Admits Goal To Eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, And Social Security

What an asshole.

During a Pandemic, Trump Asks Supreme Court to Destroy the Entire ACA

What an incredibly evil asshole.

Trump Ass Rapes Abraham Lincoln

via Daily Kos. 

The President Who Promotes Inflammatory Conspiracy Theories and Doesn't Like Intelligence

Trump contradicts US intel community by claiming he's seen evidence coronavirus originated in Chinese lab. 

President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence" the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but declined to provide details to back up his assertion.

The comments undercut a public statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued just hours earlier which stated no such assessment has been made and continues to "rigorously examine" whether the outbreak "began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan."

"Yes, I have," Trump said when asked whether he's seen evidence that would suggest the virus originated in the lab. Later, asked why he was confident in that assessment, Trump demurred. "I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that," he said.

What an asshole.

Actually, the whole GOP loves this conspiracy theory, so they can blame China for the attack and deflect from their own failures.