Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Captain N]

In summary, my guess is that the ks Supreme Court overturns the legislature, but is then contradicted by the us Supreme Court, but at least most of the damage will have been dodged.

This is kind of where I'm at too. There are arguments being made that this restrictions are unconstitutional and that the "Democrats War on Christianity" are preventing the churchgoers freedom of peaceful assembly. It may dodge the bullet for Easter but it won't for further issues considering our current SCOTUS.

[Zan15]

We talked about this before, but this is yet more of it.


This was a completely forseen outcome. And yes, other southern states are affected because that's how growing seasons work. This would have been bad enough no matter what. The fact that the completely optional trade war with China has already put farmers in a bad place, however, makes this especially dangerous. Donating food you can't sell to hungry people and getting a tax write-off is a win/win, but not as much of a win as actually selling the food (for the farmers). And you can only write off so many taxes, especially if you don't make any money.

well if they are smart and incorporated themselves or even LP...they can carry forward the losses for years on top of years till they have some income to write it off with.

Also if they were smart they have crop insurance with feds and privately.....

a lot of "if's".

[Rasulis]

In my own country this was explained that people out of fear of getting infected they stayed away, less trauma patients can be explained if the traffic and work did die down in that area. However we had cases with people delaying their complaints till it was too late.

It depends how serious this is taken where she is from, could be a fear that's grounded in fact if hospitals are not set up to split their patients into infected and not infected parts.

She is in San Francisco, a radiologist at University of California San Francisco medical center. They do have COVID-19 patients, but not as many as they anticipated. Their ICU beds are at around 20% occupancy. Most of the people that were diagnosed with COVID-19 at her hospital had mild symptoms and were sent home to quarantine themselves. Probably because SF population is relatively young with very low instances of obesity, hypertension and diabetes.

[Powerogue]

So newspaper (Washington post I think) has a running tally of he lies. Spoiler alert, it dwarfs the number of posts in this thread.

Googling it says 16,241 lies/misleading statements, but that was last counted in January. 41,880 would be what he'd have to hit to meet that criteria. He's been really on a roll with this "endangering the entire country with seeding misinformation on the coronavirus" thing, but it doesn't seem to quite meet your listing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...t-three-years/

Let's see though, they conveniently made that statistic exactly 3 years after his oath, that makes the math simple. Divide lie total by # of days in office.... 14.83 lies per day. Holy shit. I couldn't accomplish that if I actively tried.

On the other note of Kansas, I guess we'll see if I have to depend on my town of 12 churches to act sanely because the government won't. If they do not, well, it was nice knowing you.

[Spectral]

I do find that looking at Russia's interference into politics a the same light as Obama's birther issue to be unfair, there is evidence that this has been going on and not just the US also on the EU level, you may disagree about the impact it has had through social media adds but what we learned about the tactics employed by Cambridge Analytica is that such facebook aids when paired with psychological profiles do have an impact. For me personally that is mention worthy interference in an election.

Optics do matter to a point, because it will make a difference how people look at you and what context your words are seen in. That's the sad part in today's world that everything is so politicized, the argument i heard recently was is that you can't in today's world not even say Thank you to China for helping out with this crisis without people reading that as you absolving them of all their misdeeds and being in full support of all they do, it's absurd but that's the world we are in.
For that reason, as a person who considers himself conservative and part of a party i have stopped defending certain statements since you'll simply end up guilty by association, however what statements my party makes in comparison to what is heard from the trump administration it is mild to say the least.

If you stand on the right side of the spectrum i also find it really odd that you would stand with a person like dacien as they represent a lot of what's wrong in todays conservative movements and such people actually make discussions about policies even harder.

Thanks for the considered reply man, I appreciate your thoughts on this, I'll think about it and keep it in mind.

[alexw]

Oh god. My monday is going to be filled with delicious popcorn as I laugh at the people disregarding the safety of absolutely everyone and went to church, while making a waterfall of tears as I weep for humanity.

Why? Just... why?

The stupidity of this just astounds me.

It's like

Republican Speaker : "Now lets vote on killing off our own voter base, hands in the air all those in favor!".

Idiots : "Me! Me! Me! Meee! (all hands go up)".

[D Luniz]

Googling it says 16,241 lies/misleading statements, but that was last counted in January. 41,880 would be what he'd have to hit to meet that criteria. He's been really on a roll with this "endangering the entire country with seeding misinformation on the coronavirus" thing, but it doesn't seem to quite meet your listing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...t-three-years/

Let's see though, they conveniently made that statistic exactly 3 years after his oath, that makes the math simple. Divide lie total by # of days in office.... 14.83 lies per day. Holy shit. I couldn't accomplish that if I actively tried.

On the other note of Kansas, I guess we'll see if I have to depend on my town of 12 churches to act sanely because the government won't. If they do not, well, it was nice knowing you.

huh, I would have thought it was way higher considering the rate he started at.

well I stand corrected

[Xyonai]

So it's starting to become a bit more clear as to why Trump's having the Fed Seize and intercept medical supply shipments while being stingy with the national stockpile.

It appears he's been more than happy to hand PPE out to Vulnerable GOP Politicians while making sure Democratic ones don't get their hands on them.

So whoever had money on 'Trump is leveraging the national stockpile to help himself and his buddies get Elected' can cash in now.

[Stormspark]

Googling it says 16,241 lies/misleading statements, but that was last counted in January. 41,880 would be what he'd have to hit to meet that criteria. He's been really on a roll with this "endangering the entire country with seeding misinformation on the coronavirus" thing, but it doesn't seem to quite meet your listing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...t-three-years/

Let's see though, they conveniently made that statistic exactly 3 years after his oath, that makes the math simple. Divide lie total by # of days in office.... 14.83 lies per day. Holy shit. I couldn't accomplish that if I actively tried.

On the other note of Kansas, I guess we'll see if I have to depend on my town of 12 churches to act sanely because the government won't. If they do not, well, it was nice knowing you.

If people gather in church and get each other sick, I have ZERO sympathy for them. In fact, I would actively laugh at them.

[Powerogue]

If people gather in church and get each other sick, I have ZERO sympathy for them. In fact, I would actively laugh at them.

I couldn't. As much as the old farts deserve it there's also children there dragged by their parents who would also be vulnerable.

[Rasulis]

If people gather in church and get each other sick, I have ZERO sympathy for them. In fact, I would actively laugh at them.

My father once said "Americans are very good at claiming their rights. Not so much when it comes to using those rights responsibly."

[Zaydin]

Well, according to John Hopkins COVID-19 map/data, the US has offically passed 20,000 deaths to COVID-19 as of 5:41 PM, the highest confirmed death toll in the world.

At least Trump finally made the US #1 at something. Too bad it's something no one wanted to be number one in. Is this winning, Trumpkins?

[Benggaul]

So it's starting to become a bit more clear as to why Trump's having the Fed Seize and intercept medical supply shipments while being stingy with the national stockpile.

It appears he's been more than happy to hand PPE out to Vulnerable GOP Politicians while making sure Democratic ones don't get their hands on them.

So whoever had money on 'Trump is leveraging the national stockpile to help himself and his buddies get Elected' can cash in now.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure most people here have been forecasting that result for a while now. To build on that:

Help from ventilator stockpile inconsistent as states appeal to feds, Trump

Florida, a state that has lagged behind others in their response measures but whose governor is close with the president, received all their requested supplies from the federal government within days of the request. When the president was asked why Florida had received 100% of its request for supplies compared to other states having difficulty, he said the state was “very aggressive in trying to get things.”

[Breccia]

I couldn't. As much as the old farts deserve it there's also children there dragged by their parents who would also be vulnerable.

Or, arguably worse, the other way around. After the kids go to Sunday School, and then visit Mee-Maw and PopPop...

- - - Updated - - -

So this is interesting.

Navarro sent out two memos, one of which on Jan 29th, warning how dangerous this virus was and that it could kill 1 or 2 million Americans.

And we have an update.

In an exclusive article, the NYTimes reports that Trump, who has denied seeing Navarro's memos, is lying.

Quoting basically the whole thing, because paywall.

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”

His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.

Even after Mr. Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.

Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.

We've talked about that before, too. It's interesting how Trump when and how Trump swapped from "invisible enemy" to

CHINA VIRUS CHINA VIRUS CHINA VIRUS.

depending on whether or not he was expecting help from Xi. Funny how he's backed off that, isn't it, now that manufacturing and farms have nothing to work with.

The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.

But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

• The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
• Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
• The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
• Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
• By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.

He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.

And now we know why Trump wanted those briefings, even though he put Pence in charge a few days before. He wanted to control the narrative, and paint himself as doing the work. In fact, the next part of the article is called "The Containment Illusion". Skipping ahead a bit:

A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave — apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus — and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.

“Is this true?!” Dr. Kadlec wrote back to the researcher. “If so we have a huge whole on our screening and quarantine effort,” including a typo where he meant hole. Her response was blunt: “People are carrying the virus everywhere.”

The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump with a plan titled “Four Steps to Mitigation,”

which would eventually become this

telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history. But over the next several days, a presidential blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.

Dr. Kadlec’s group wanted to meet with the president right away, but Mr. Trump was on a trip to India, so they agreed to make the case to him in person as soon as he returned two days later. If they could convince him of the need to shift strategy, they could immediately begin a national education campaign aimed at preparing the public for the new reality.

A memo dated Feb. 14, prepared in coordination with the National Security Council and titled “U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” documented what more drastic measures would look like, including: “significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Widespread ‘stay at home’ directives from public and private organizations with nearly 100% telework for some.”

The memo did not advocate an immediate national shutdown, but said the targeted use of “quarantine and isolation measures” could be used to slow the spread in places where “sustained human-to-human transmission” is evident.

Within 24 hours, before they got a chance to make their presentation to the president, the plan went awry.

Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.

But Dr. Messonnier had jumped the gun. They had not told the president yet, much less gotten his consent.

On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily. Already on thin ice with the president over a variety of issues and having overseen the failure to quickly produce an effective and widely available test, Mr. Azar would soon find his authority reduced.

The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.

The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office. It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.

Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226. Since then, nearly half a million Americans have tested positive for the virus and authorities say hundreds of thousands more are likely infected.

Bolded for emphasis. Bolded and red for the reason I linked it. Fat and Orange for failure.

Trump is lying, and his lies are covering up his inaction, and his inaction has killed many, possibly most, of the twenty thousand Americans slain by COVID-19.

- - - Updated - - -

And speaking of China!

Suppose you wanted to blame China for this. Not everyone does.

Suppose you want to split off the US from China, economically at least, and believe the iron is hot now. Not everyone does.

Some people believe both, such as the author of this article. For the record, I don't agree with the entire thing...but this part really leaps off the page.

On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor. Trump’s ban on Chinese travel was better than nothing, but it did not prevent over 400,000 non-Chinese from arriving in the U.S. from China as COVID-19 was gaining momentum. It’s fair to say, I think, that after the immediate, unforgivable cover-up in China, a global pandemic was inevitable.

I’m not excusing Trump for his delusions, denial, and dithering — he is very much at fault — but the core source of the destruction was and is Beijing. Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off. I remember the old debate from the 1990s about how to engage China, and the persuasiveness of those who believed that economic prosperity would lead to greater democracy. COVID-19 is the final reminder of how wrong they actually were.

The Chinese dictatorship is, in fact, through recklessness and cover-up, responsible for a global plague and tipping the entire world into a deep depression. It has also corrupted the World Health Organization, which was so desperate for China’s cooperation it swallowed Xi’s coronavirus lies and regurgutated them. At the most critical juncture — mid-January — the WHO actually tweeted out Communist Party propaganda: “Preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel Coronavirus.” On the same day, another WHO official was telling the world that there was “limited spread” of COVID-19 by human-to-human transmission, and alerted hospitals about the risk of super-spreading the virus. And so the virus has forced us to accept another discomforting reality: Integrating a communist dictatorship into a democratic world economy is a mug’s game. From now on, conscious decoupling is the order of the day.

In other cases, the cold triumph of reality represented by the virus has been salutary. It’s been remarkable to observe something Donald Trump cannot lie his way out of. He tried. And he’s still trying. He’s gaming out various ways to get himself reelected in a pandemic, but the pandemic keeps reminding us that this is in its control, not his. His daily performances are not informing anyone about anything — they are failing attempts to impose a narrative on an epidemic which has its own narrative, and doesn’t give two fucks about Trump.

And this is the truth about reality. It really does exist (whatever the postmodernists might argue). It’s complicated. And even if it can be ignored or forgotten in our very human discourses, it wins in the end. This virus is, in a way, a symbol of that reality. It can be stymied for a while; it can be suppressed and avoided. It can be controlled so it doesn’t overwhelm us in one fell swoop, metastasizing the damage. But it is unbeatable and is winning this war, as it was always going to, and only a vaccine can make a real difference. The coming months will be an unsatisfying series of starts and stops as we struggle to live with it. We are not, in other words, fighting and winning this war — we are merely negotiating the terms of our surrender to reality. And there is nothing more humbling for humans than that. And nothing more clarifying either.

Again, I'm not sure I agree with the author on all of it -- in fact, I know I don't. But it is interesting to see how dictator Xi and dickless-tator Trump tried the same thing, flat-out denying reality. And you can't do that. At least, as Melania will tell you, not long enough.

[Xyonai]

And to tag in at the tail end of Brecca's post about how badly Trump is handling this, there's been a new report where Trump reportedly suggested a way to deal with the Virus during one of his briefings was, and I quote while quoting this Talking Points Memo article:

“Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”

So mister 'It's just a hoax, no wait I called it a Pandemic before anyone else did' suggested back in march to kinda just... let the virus do its thing. Because that's an idea a stable leader would have concerning the health and safety of his people.

[D Luniz]

And to tag in at the tail end of Brecca's post about how badly Trump is handling this, there's been a new report where Trump reportedly suggested a way to deal with the Virus during one of his briefings was, and I quote while quoting this Talking Points Memo article:



So mister 'It's just a hoax, no wait I called it a Pandemic before anyone else did' suggested back in march to kinda just... let the virus do its thing. Because that's an idea a stable leader would have concerning the health and safety of his people.

and Im sure just let with all the other "ok for me, not for ye" things, he'd stay hunkered down in the whitehouse
or as this GOP member did, tell the people everything is fine while in full ppe


www.facebook.com/watch/?v=576705336386460

[Breccia]

there's been a new report where Trump reportedly suggested “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”

There's something to be said about a nation with 100% immunity.

That something is "I miss the 2 million people we sacrificed to make that happen."

[Xyonai]

There's something to be said about a nation with 100% immunity.

That something is "I miss the 2 million people we sacrificed to make that happen."

It's not like the 'well some people dying is acceptable to get things back in order' sentiment is anything new, but there's something extra vile about the verbiage of 'wash over the country' even if it's not fundamentally different then the other outlook. It's just so much more... detached?

Like it's someone who's looking at human lives on a spread sheet, sees '1-2% death tolls if this Virus spreads unhindered' as acceptable and is completely unable to comprehend or doesn't even care that it means millions of people dead.

[Resurgo]

It's not like the 'well some people dying is acceptable to get things back in order' is anything new, but there's something extra vile about the verbiage of 'wash over the country' even if it's not fundamentally different then the other sentiment. It's just so much more... detached?

Like it's someone who's looking at human lives on a spread sheet, sees '1-2% death tolls if this Virus spreads unhindered' as acceptable and is completely unable to comprehend or doesn't even care that it means millions of people dead.

There's quite a few Americans I've seen that think in those terms, sadly.

[Xyonai]

There's quite a few Americans I've seen that think in those terms, sadly.

And those people are, frankly, lunatics.