There apparently are no depths below which Donald Trump won’t go in his desperation to claim a second term and avoid prosecution for the crimes he committed before he “won” his first term.
As president, he has never reached 50% approval in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of public opinion polls. With his approval rates stuck in the mid-40s, several points below his disapproval rates, and his pandemic response debacle widening the gap, Trump is increasingly desperate as he faces the upcoming election.
Trump is widely recognized as a narcissist and a sociopath who has made 18,000 false or misleading claims, by the Washington Post’s count, as of April 3.
Among those lies is Trump’s insistence that nobody could have seen the coronavirus coming. “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before,” Trump said on March 19. But Barack Obama and his administration not only saw it coming; they warned the incoming Trump administration to look out for a pandemic, and left a 69-page manual, which detailed strategies on obtaining personal protective equipment, and how the government should move quickly to detect and contain potential outbreaks, secure additional funding and invoke the Defense Production Act to compel private companies to produce needed medical supplies.
Instead, the Trump administration in May 2018 disbanded the National Security Council team that focused on pandemic preparedness and Trump repeatedly cut the CDC budget.
The White House ignored warnings from US intelligence in November 2019 about a deadly virus outbreak in China, ABC News reported April 8. Trump was not interested, but briefings were held with various government agencies, including the National Security Council, through December, culminating in a detailed outline of the threat in the President’s Daily Brief in early January, ABC reported. The Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) denied there was such a report, but Israeli TV Channel 12 confirmed April 16 that the intel was shared with Israel in late November.
US intelligence continued to report on the outbreak through Dec. 31, when China alerted the World Health Organization of several cases of an unusual pneumonia due to an unknown virus in Wuhan, China. US officials already were embedded with WHO, working full-time with the global organization on the virus from the very first day, Dana Milbank reported. On Jan. 30, WHO declared the coronavirus a global emergency as the death toll in China hit 170, and the virus had spread to all 31 provinces.
In early February, the White House rejected a request from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the depleted federal stockpile, the Washington Post reported. Instead, Trump proposed $700 million in cuts to the CDC and $3 billion in cuts to global health programs.
Trump on March 13 denied knowing anything about disbanding the pandemic preparedness team, calling it a “nasty question” at a White House press briefing. He played down the potential threat to the United States until late March, and then, even as he began to acknowledge the danger of the pandemic, Trump refused to take responsibility for the shortages of ventilators, personal protection equipment and other medical supplies, saying that obtaining them was up to the governors. Then governors complained that when they tried to buy medical supplies, they were often outbid by federal agencies, and state and hospital authorities reported federal agents seized shipments of medical supplies en route.
On April 15, Trump had the audacity to announce that he was suspending contributions to WHO because he claims it didn’t act aggressively enough to curb the spread of the virus and is too close to China. This despite the close cooperation of the WHO with US officials and the CDC having an office with 14 people in China “to contain infectious disease outbreaks before they spread globally.”
To cover his incompetence, the Great Misleader’s only hope is to shake things up by blaming others. If the COVID-19 outbreak showed how unprepared the Trump administration was to handle a pandemic, Trump now hopes he can mislead the electorate into believing that the economic catastrophe is the fault of Democratic governors and mayors who led the way in ordering businesses to shut down to prevent the spread of the contagion.
Lately, Trump has been undermining efforts by state and local officials who are trying to limit the spread of COVID-19. The shutdown has put at least 22 million Americans out of work as of mid-April, increasing unemployment to Great Depression levels. Most of those families are under financial stress, even with the increase of unemployment payments by $600 per week for up to two months. Businesses are at risk of failing, even with the Paycheck Protection Program, which provided more than 1.6 million forgivable loans for small businesses (and some mid-sized, publicly traded corporations) but exhausted $350 billion with 700,000 applications remaining to be processed.
So people may be desperate to get back to work, or shop, or eat at their favorite restaurant. But public health officials have few alternatives to quarantines, at least until medical researchers can come up with an effective vaccine and/or treatments and the federal government provides reliable tests to determine the extend of the pandemic. And people aren’t going to feel comfortable sitting down to eat a meal in a crowded restaurant anytime soon.
If Trump and his anti-shutdown “Covidiots,” succeed in pressuring governors to open up their economies too soon, it could enable a second wave of the coronavirus, negate the sacrifices of the March and April, including 42,094 Americans who had died as of April 20, among them many health care providers and first responders. The next wave could cost tens of thousands more lives.
Trump and the Republicans clearly hope for a repeat of the Tea Party movement in 2010 that took away Barack Obama’s congressional majority just as his economic recovery was beginning, but the odds are against Trump repeating his narrow 2016 victory. A YouGov/Yahoo News survey published April 20 showed 71% of respondents were more concerned about lifting the coronavirus restrictions too quickly, and said states should begin to re-open only when public health officials can adequately test people and trace outbreaks, compared to 29% who said the economy should re-open as soon as possible to prevent further economic damage, Trump’s approval rate was still 44.1% on April 20, which we attribute to the gullibility and stubbornness of his base, which he has clearly conned.
Trump and Republican leaders also intend to put every obstacle in the way of potential Democratic voters getting to the polls in November. That is why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is sitting on House bills that would make it easier for citizens to vote and make sure those votes are counted. And Republicans have determined it would be fatal lo their electoral hopes if voting by mail is authorized as a backup to voting in person, in case the pandemic continues through the fall.
Trump is clearly not up to the task of leading the country. Nor are his Republican enablers. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020
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