Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Trump is crazy as a loon
A whole-of-government mobilization to protect the president’s ego.
Unfortunately, you could substitute “Washington, D.C.” for “Wuhan” in that sentence and it would be equally true. So far, Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus combines the worst features of autocracy and of democracy, mixing opacity and propaganda with leaderless inefficiency.
From the beginning, Trump minimized the scale of the crisis, portraying it as a purely foreign threat that could be addressed by closing borders. At a Feb. 26 news conference, he claimed there were 15 cases in America, omitting those diagnosed overseas. “The 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said. As of this writing, there have been more than 210 cases confirmed across the country and 12 deaths.
Speaking to Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, Trump seemed to imply that it was OK for people with the coronavirus to go to work: “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better.” (He later wrote an angry tweet saying he’d never said sick people should go to work, but he certainly didn’t instruct them to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice and stay home.)
Within the administration, there’s strong pressure not to contradict Trump’s line. In February, when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned that community spread of the coronavirus in America was inevitable, the president was reportedly furious, and the director of the C.D.C. said she misspoke. Pro-Trump media figures like Rush Limbaugh suggested that she was part of an anti-Trump conspiracy because her brother is former Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein, often derided on the right as part of the Deep State.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/trump-coronavirus-us.html
A whole-of-government mobilization to protect the president’s ego.
Unfortunately, you could substitute “Washington, D.C.” for “Wuhan” in that sentence and it would be equally true. So far, Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus combines the worst features of autocracy and of democracy, mixing opacity and propaganda with leaderless inefficiency.
From the beginning, Trump minimized the scale of the crisis, portraying it as a purely foreign threat that could be addressed by closing borders. At a Feb. 26 news conference, he claimed there were 15 cases in America, omitting those diagnosed overseas. “The 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said. As of this writing, there have been more than 210 cases confirmed across the country and 12 deaths.
Speaking to Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, Trump seemed to imply that it was OK for people with the coronavirus to go to work: “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better.” (He later wrote an angry tweet saying he’d never said sick people should go to work, but he certainly didn’t instruct them to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice and stay home.)
Within the administration, there’s strong pressure not to contradict Trump’s line. In February, when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned that community spread of the coronavirus in America was inevitable, the president was reportedly furious, and the director of the C.D.C. said she misspoke. Pro-Trump media figures like Rush Limbaugh suggested that she was part of an anti-Trump conspiracy because her brother is former Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein, often derided on the right as part of the Deep State.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/trump-coronavirus-us.html