On Sunday, initially at least, there was no White House briefing on the president’s public schedule. But the bad news kept coming. Coronavirus deaths continued to climb and reports of the heartland being unprepared for what may be on its horizon continued to ricochet around the media.
In the words of one administration insider, to the Guardian: “The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He’s killing his own supporters.”
Members of the national guard, emergency workers, rank-and-file Americans: all are exposed. Yet Trump appears incapable of emoting anything that comes close to heart-felt concern. Or just providing straight answers.
Rather, he is acting like Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America: repeatedly letting governors know the burden of shoring up their sick, their doctors and their people falls on their shoulders first. The national government? It’s the world’s greatest backstop.
Remember when the Republican party freaked out about Barack Obama and the US “leading from behind” abroad? Remember the howls that evoked from GOP leaders? Those days are gone. Welcome to what Martin O’Malley, a Democratic former governor of Maryland, calls the “Darwinian approach to federalism”.
Trump is telling NFL owners he wants the season to start on time. He is disregarding Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice on wearing facemasks in public. And he is touting untested coronavirus cures live on national TV.
Think Trump University on steroids, only this time we all stand to be the victims.
When Dr Anthony Fauci says there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims surrounding hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, pay attention. The fact Jared Kushner is on the case is hardly reassuring. He’s the guy who thought firing James Comey was win-win politics and promised Middle East peace in our time.
While all this is going on, the Wisconsin Republican party is giving America a taste of the campaign to come in the fall. Right now, the Badger State GOP is fighting in the US supreme court efforts to extend mail-in voting for this Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
In other words, voters will be forced to choose between foregoing their rights and risking their lives. Democracy shouldn’t work that way.
Back in the day, Republicans looked upon absentee voting as a valuable adjunct, a key piece in the party’s election day arsenal. Not anymore. Instead it is a dreaded foe, a fact readily admitted by Trump on Fox & Friends this week. If the US were to adopt mail-in voting, said the president, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.
For good measure, Trump later declared from the White House: “I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting.”
For the record, Trump voted by mail in 2018. In March, the Palm Beach Post reported that he had requested a mail-in vote for the Florida Republican primary.
There is nothing like populism marinated in wholesale contempt for the populace. In case Trump and the Republicans forgot, “We the People” are the constitution’s first three words. …
whenever someone is like ‘why do burger-flippers deserve to make the same amount as x?’ and i just ask ‘have you considered that maybe x deserves to be paid more?’ because it never occurs to people that if these people are being underpaid, then there is a chance that so are they.
I see this all the time with people bringing up paramedics. “You want 15$ an hour as a burger flipper! I made less than that as an EMT!”
Yeah and it was wrong to pay YOU that little too. You got overworked and underpaid and the amount of money the McDonalds employee in the drive through gets has no bearing what so ever on what an EMT makes. Pay the EMT more too.
it distresses me that anyone whose job it is to save my fucking life is making less now than i was in an office job in 2007.
