No wonder Trump is so hyped about "reopening" the country. Look at these packed restaurants in Wuhan this week, unleashing all that pent-up demand!
So he provides tough-guy red meat bulls*** for the FOX News base ("I HAVE TOTAL AUTHORITY") but with the governors gives them all responsibility so he can have someone to blame.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/15/coronavirus-economy-donald-trump-leaves-america-leaderless-column/2984589001/ Denial didn't get America past the Depression and it won't work for Trump on coronavirus It's terribly risky in a pandemic to have a president who is anti-fact, anti-science and without empathy. Bad leaders who ignore crises make them much worse. In March, the president, said the worst would be over in 60 days. Weeks later, he predicted that the economy would be back to normal soon. Later, he said “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.” While these remarks sound familiar, they didn’t come from Donald Trump. The president offering them up was Herbert Hoover during the first years of the Great Depression. The quotes come from Robert Caro’s magnificent “The Path to Power.” He observes that when asked about all the men selling apples on the sidewalk, Hoover responded, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” He was determinedly oblivious, in Caro's telling: “He couldn’t bear to watch suffering, so he never visited a breadline or a relief station; as his limousine swept past men selling apples on street corners, he never turned his head to look at the them." Caro finished off his devastating summary with this quote from Hoover: "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they’ve have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.” Spreading lies, ignoring warnings Eerily familiar, no? Trump has been in denial about the coronavirus crisis since day one. We know his quotes and tweets. It was nothing, it would magically disappear, it was under control, the economy was in great shape, the economy would come roaring back any minute. On Thursday, economic adviser Larry Kudlow implied working had gone out of fashion and said it has become cool again. On Friday, Trump touted the stock market rally as the biggest since 1974. That was the day after we had learned close to 17 million people were unemployed in the last three weeks alone and knowing full well that the St. Louis Fed has predicted nearly 50 million people would be out of work before this was over. To paraphrase the old joke, denial seems to be a river that runs through Washington. Bad leaders who refuse to see what doesn’t suit their ideology or political fortunes ignore crises and make bad times much, much worse. Step one to solving a problem is acknowledging it. But in this case, not only is the president in denial, not only is his staff in denial, but he is hiring new aides who made their reputation with him by saying things like incoming White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s line that under Trump, we don’t get epidemics like coronavirus. He has fired truth-tellers from Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, who warned of rapidly spreading COVID-19 on his ship, to the inspector general named to oversee relief funds for the pandemic. The president's men and women — Mike Pence and Larry Kudlow and Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner and Bill Barr — have spread the lies further. And of course, the centerpiece of his policy has been suppression of the truth about the crisis by slow-walking and then unfunding and then denying the need for testing … which is the only way we can ever know how deep the crisis is. Take it from a doctor:Fake news about the coronavirus is hazardous to your health. Don't fall for it. Less than 1% of Americans have been tested, and there's widespread agreement among experts that official counts underestimate the deaths caused by the pandemic. The number of people dying at home in New York City without a diagnosis is 10 times normal levels. It is not a coincidence that this surge is happening at this time of public health crisis. Ignoring warnings from the Obama team, from the intelligence community, from the Army, from his own economic adviser, are also a form of this denial. So are the Trump-led attempts right now to sell the line that we are ready to open for business. The facts show otherwise. On our own at a perilous moment Experts including the president’s own advisers, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, emphasize that we risk triggering another wave of the disease if we prematurely lift the lockdown that currently has more than 9 out of 10 Americans sheltering in place. Indeed, a second wave seems likely in any case and were it to hit a society that has unlearned the lessons of the past three months, the toll would be catastrophic. That is why Trump ignoring the constant drumbeat of warnings since he entered the White House is not simply a frustrating story of our recent past. It is one about a looming risk to our future on a par with that caused by the virus itself. The United States did not begin to turn the tide against the Great Depression until it elected a man who acknowledged and truly understood the depth of the problem, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He acted from his first 100 days onward with the sense of urgency and the scope of initiative that the crisis called for. And when programs faltered or failed, he admitted it and found new ones. You can’t be anti-fact or anti-science or anti-math or, for that matter, without empathy, and be a good leader. Closing your eyes to a disease that doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not won’t make it go away. On the contrary, it will only demonstrate that viruses like this one, like economic disasters, actively thrive on denial. As a consequence, today we face not one but three grave risks — from the pandemic, from the shattered economy, and from being leaderless at a moment of great peril. T_Man
Trump is killing me boasting about how we have tested more people than anyone in the world. Maybe because we have 500,000 more cases than any country in the world? SMH Just looking at today's figures I counted 41 countries who have tested more people per million. Bragging about more total tests, and ignoring the most important stat is just typical Trump. We can't even get enough tests in Houston, but all he talks about is opening back up and being past the curve. I guess having over 29,000 cases and still climbing today and over 2,100 more deaths is just nothing to worry about for him. The scary part is all the possible carriers who can't get tested because there aren't enough tests. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Jory Micah @jorymicah Do you know that Canadians are getting $2000 a month for the next several months? Also, they already have universal healthcare so they don’t have medical expenses at all. When will Americans stop celebrating the crumbs we are given by our so called “government?!” I know we are too poor. How you going to pay for it -- even after coming up with trillions primarily for the rich? The Canadian plan will upset conseratives, "libertarians" and contented Democrats as well as the tiny group of moderate Republicans. I suppose it is possible that the Corona economy with in excess of 20 million losing jobs and health insurance may make a few of the contented less content.
It's for Canadians that lost their income. Not so different from unemployment "benefit" except their is so streamlined and fast while our is a nightmare of paperwork to go through (see FL). Personally, I prefer a "sustain" some 75% level of wages for those that lost it through a period of time and extra help for certain risks pool and front line worker including hazard benefits and wages, not a blanket check to everyone with certain income (there isn't any "stimulating" in this economy, there should only be "sustaining" some basic livelihood during this shock) and a huge half a T pool of money that has little transparency and check which in the hand of this admin is going to be abused bigly and beautifully.
He boasts out so much BS that you can't believe anything he says. For the love of God, why would he even say that? It's mind blowing. We've done much more than South Korea how? Today's stats show this: Cases/Deaths per million S. Korea 207/4 USA. 2049/105 Testing per million S. Korea 10,658 USA. 10,306 The only more we have done is 890% more cases and 2525% more deaths than S. Korea. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Always showing leadership, butthurt-in-chief trump is going back to attacking United States Governors again...
grandpa rantypants is off his meds today. Maybe melanie should spend some time with him (yea, I know, I wouldn't want to either)...
Egads... now he is blaming the states for his failure to meet the promises he lied about months ago... When: Friday, March 6 The claim: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We—they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.” The truth: The country’s testing capabilities are severely limited. Many states have experienced a lack of testing kits, as my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported. Trump made this claim one day after his own vice president, Mike Pence, admitted that “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.” When: Wednesday, March 11 The claim: In an Oval Office address, Trump said that private-health-insurance companies had “agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billing.” The truth: Insurers agreed only to absorb the cost of coronavirus testing—waiving co-pays and deductibles for getting the test. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the second coronavirus-relief bill passed by Congress, later mandated that COVID-19 testing be made free. The federal government has not required insurance companies to cover follow-up treatments, though some providers announced in late March that they will pay for treatments. The costs of other non-coronavirus testing or treatment incurred by patients who have COVID-19 or are trying to get a diagnosis aren’t waived either. And as for surprise medical billing? Mitigating it would require the cooperation of insurers, doctors, and hospitals. When: Friday, March 13 The claim: Google engineers are building a website to help Americans determine whether they need testing for the coronavirus and to direct them to their nearest testing site. The truth: The announcement was news to Google itself—the website Trump (and other administration officials) described was actually being built by Verily, a division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The Verge first reported on Trump’s error, citing a Google representative who confirmed that Verily was working on a “triage website” with limited coverage for the San Francisco Bay Area. But since then, Google has pivoted to fulfill Trump’s public proclamation, saying it would speed up the development of a new, separate website while Verily worked on finishing its project, The Washington Post reported. When: Tuesday, March 24, and Wednesday, March 25 The claim: The United States has outpaced South Korea’s COVID-19 testing: “We’re going up proportionally very rapidly,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall. The truth: When the president made this claim, testing in the U.S. was severely lagging behind that in South Korea. As of March 25, South Korea had conducted about five times as many tests as a proportion of its population relative to the United States. For updated data from each country, see the COVID-19 Tracking Project and the database maintained by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
