The main excuses shaping up to explain away Trump’s abysmal response to the pandemic are twofold.
First is the Condoleeze Rice defense — no one could have predicted this. This one has been underway for a while. Aaron Blake wrote on March 19:
“So there’s never been anything like this in history. There’s never been,” he said. “And nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
He added Wednesday: “Nobody ever saw numbers like this even with regard to testing.”
“I just think this is something … that you can never really think is going to happen,” he said March 6.
“It’s an unforeseen problem,” he added the same day. “What a problem. Came out of nowhere.”
See also Greg Sargent, Kellyanne Conway’s ugly deceptions preview the Big Lie to come.
First, this pandemic is hardly unprecedented. There was a big, honking precedent in 1918-1920 that killed Trump’s grandfather. The so-called “Spanish flu” infected a third of the world’s population and is estimated to have killed 50 million people. That’s some precedent right there. More recently another coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 (our Covid 19 is officially SARS-CoV-2), also was designated a pandemic in 2003, although it was far better contained through coordinated international effort. Our Center for Disease Control was a critical part of that effort. Obviously, that was before Trump gutted the agency and put some ass-kissing wingnut in charge of it.
And Trump was given plenty of warnings. I am grateful to John Haltiwanger and Sonam Sheth of Business Insider, who compiled all the warnings in Trump says ‘nobody’ could’ve predicted a pandemic like coronavirus. Here are all the times he was warned about it and refused to take action. This one’s a clip ‘n’ save, folks. Bookmark it and be prepared to trot it out whenver you encounter a wingnut claiming no one could have anticipated the pandemic.
The other excuse is that Trump was distracted by the Democrats’ impeachment effort. Trump was acquitted on February 5th, so what’s his excuse after that? But here he is on January 22, in Davos, a few hours after the first case in the U.S. had been diagnosed. (You only need to watch the first minute or so.)
He doesn’t seem that distracted to me. Just clueless. This video is the source of the quote:
Love that quote.
One other point Trump makes sometimes is that he inherited a “mess” and a “broken system” when he became POTUS. In other words, blame Obama. But the truth is that Trump inhereted a world-class pandemic fighting system from the Obama Administration — and dismantled it. See How America built the best pandemic response system in history – and threw it away by Will Dunn in New Statesman (h/t moonbat). From the article blurb: “The Trump administration destroyed an infrastructure, built over two decades, that may have been humanity’s most powerful weapon against new diseases.”
No country, least of all a vast land mass with 149 international airports, can ever be fully prepared for a pandemic – but in 2016, the US was, domestically and internationally, more prepared than it had ever been.
And then Trump became POTUS, and IMO it’s not going too far to say that he dismantled the entire pandemic-response infrastructure he inherited from Obama. What little was left of it was too gutted to be of much use. If the system is broken, it was Trump who broke it.
See also Paul Krugman, This Land of Denial and Death.
Update: See also Republicans say impeachment distracted Trump from coronavirus. But the president golfed and held rallies during his trial while downplaying the virus for weeks in Business Insider.
tRUMP, and his whole maladministration, followed "L'il Boot's" W. Bush's "ABC" policy (Anything But Clinton), only Baby Huge-ee's" "ABC" policy, is "Anything Barack Created."
Bill Clinton managed to keep doing his job while under another "political" impeachment., a little under 20 years earlier.
tRUMPleTHINSKIN couldn't (still can't, and never will) do his job as preznit, because that job conflicted with his FUX daily binge-watching: FUX & Fiends, Judge Jeanine "Hic-up" Pirro, MotherTucker, and Unibrow. All of that viewing, and Tweeting 100 or more times a day!
JAAAAAAAAAAAAYZOOS!
The sheer, unmitigated gall of these people!!!
After we're through this, the US House needs to conduct investigations and submit reports on their factual findings. Congress did ten investigations into Benghazi, where four Americans died. If we have only 100,000 Americans dead from Trump Flu, I'll consider us lucky. Republicans will of course, with straight faces declare that any investigation into what happened before or during the pandemic is political. Which the ten Benghazi investigations were not.
These investigations need to be factual and make conclusions. My questions:
1) Did the Intelligence agencies alert the WH to the pandemic threat? When? How specific were those warnings?
2) Was there an attempt to develop and stockpile less expensive ventilators which were thwarted by major medical manufactures who made three-times more expensive ventilators?
3) Did Congress suggest and was the offer of additional funds to prepare for the pandemic refused? When?
4) Was there a pandemic team dismantled by the Trump administration? Would they have been the team to alert Trump to the threat of a pandemic if they had existed?
5) Did the pandemic team have a "playbook" for dealing with a pandemic? Did anyone read it? (Who and when?) Were the suggestions in the playbook sound? (If someone in the Trump administration ditched the book, who and why? What did they do instead?)
6) Were the federal supplies disbursed fairly? Did favoritism play a part? Was there an attempt to extract favors and endorsements from Democratic governors which would have value in his re-election in exchange for supplies?
7) Should be near the top. WTF happened with testing. Why was the WHO test ignored? Why was a faulty test initially distributed? Was there a gap in testing promised and tests delivered?
8) What was the final death toll in context? Total, per capita compared to other countries? By states? By state population density? Urban vs rural mortality? What does that say about changing the response?
This week is too early – Next month will be too early but I want answers before November.
Spot on as the Brits would say.
"FUX & Fiends, Judge Jeanine "Hic-up" Pirro, MotherTucker, and Unibrow. "
Damn the spellchecker, this beats Shakespeare.
Sorry bit we just had a quick impeachment to no avail. Congressional hearings do nothing. I want indictments because this is criminal. He was being briefed in December and others were also briefed. There need to be charges brought. Falwell jr for instance. What he has done at liberty u is crimimal. Amazon having sick workers still working. Criminal indictments is all these venal assholes understand.
Trump is a Republican. Stand by for news that some Republican politician realizes that more deaths = bad.