Trump 45

[Dandruff]

I hope SNL provides full coverage of that somewhat disjointed run-on sentence Trump gave.

[Ozlsn]

Just watched the (American) ABC late night news. Trump is totally getting tested, but only just because, not because he might be positive after multiple exposures or anything. Ivanka has more sense than this. Dutton (the Australian minister who was with Ivanka and whoever that other guy was) has more sense than this. Brazil's leadership, Canada's leadership, the rest of the damn world's leadership has more sense than this. And he's still shaking hands like it's all fine. Seriously, I'm just waiting for him to spread it to multiple people. 

[fraurosena]

The news on Trump is short, just a mention of what he has said or done that relates to Europe. Nothing more, nothing less. No comment on the substance -- at least in the news sites that I follow.

The news is geared towards what the current status of affairs with regard to the virus is more than anything else. It's all about which measures have been decreed (work from home as much as possible), answers to readers questions (today's: does corona affect pregnancy and if so, how), what's happening in other European countries (like: Catalonia in Spain is now in lockdown!), things you do or don't need to do (prepping isn't necessary) and which countries are more or less closing their borders (Ukraine, Cyprus, Kosovo, Czechia).

 

Edited March 14, 2020 by fraurosena

[formergothardite]

3 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

Trump is totally getting tested, but only just because,

And if he tests positive he absolutely will lie about it and refuse a quarantine until he gets so damn sick he has to stay out of the public eye. And then he will tweet that he is the most healthy president ever until he hopefully gets so sick it he can't use his phone. 

[mamallama]

5 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

Just watched the (American) ABC late night news. Trump is totally getting tested, but only just because, not because he might be positive after multiple exposures or anything. Ivanka has more sense than this. Dutton (the Australian minister who was with Ivanka and whoever that other guy was) has more sense than this. Brazil's leadership, Canada's leadership, the rest of the damn world's leadership has more sense than this. And he's still shaking hands like it's all fine. Seriously, I'm just waiting for him to spread it to multiple people. 

Kind of a weird coincidence that all these people Trump touched are getting sick.  Could he be patient 0?

[Xan]

It's a safe bet that Trump and his family have already been tested.  Not only is Donny a germaphobe, he's a lying liar who lies.  He's probably ordered a stockpile of tests so he can be tested every day.

[fraurosena]

Screams the man who did this:

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Here mainstream meadia (mostly television news) rarely report on tRump, the rare times they happen to do so they treat him as a semi-sane individual, just a bit quirky. Newspapers that have a more selected readership (people who can understand english) do much Better and more accurate reporting even if they also tend to treat him seriously instead of showing him like the clown he is. That said most Italians think he's a moron.

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, mamallama said:

Kind of a weird coincidence that all these people Trump touched are getting sick.  Could he be patient 0?

Zero is a good description of his personality and IQ,

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Xan]

Trump says he was tested for the coronavirus and the test results were negative.

Thinking about it, I'm not surprised.  Trump is so loathsome that even a virus doesn't want to have anything to do with him.  No self-respecting virus would take up residence in that pile of human excrement.

[Cartmann99]

On 3/14/2020 at 7:28 AM, mamallama said:

Kind of a weird coincidence that all these people Trump touched are getting sick.  Could he be patient 0?

Typhoid Mary lives!

[apple1]

Certainly doesn't have the ring of truth.

[Audrey2]

18 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Typhoid Mary lives!

Well, he's been infecting people's minds for four years, guess he's started infecting their bodies.

[fraurosena]

He has an unparalleled way with words, doesn't he?

 

As to self-awareness... that's unparalleled too.

 

[Dandruff]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

He has an unparalleled way with words, doesn't he?

He should have a chat with Bro Gary.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s rage at the media takes a dangerous new turn"

Spoiler

It’s bad enough that President Trump has relentlessly minimized the coronavirus threat for nakedly political reasons, disastrously hampering the federal government response to the crisis, with untold consequences to come.

Determined not to be outdone by his own malice and depravity, Trump is taking new steps that threaten to make all of it worse. He’s telling millions of Americans to entirely shut out any and all correctives to his falsehoods. He’s insisting they must plug their ears to any criticism designed to hold his government accountable for the failures we’re seeing, even though such criticism could nudge the response in a more constructive direction.

Trump is now raging at the media for reporting on his botched claims about Google’s plans for a new website to steer people to testing options. Trump dramatically overpromised in this regard, forcing Google to scale down the expectations he had created.

But Trump is now blaming the media for supposedly getting this wrong, insisting the project is progressing just as he claimed. Trump tweeted: “Even in times such as these, they are not truthful.”

On the substance, this is nonsense. Trump claimed vindication based on a Google clarification that its efforts to develop the website are on track. This in no way contradicts what press accounts reported — that Trump vastly oversold how far along it was. This remains entirely true.

But also note Trump’s declaration that, in a larger sense, the media is not being truthful at a time of crisis. Trump is using his megaphone to tell the American people not to trust an institution they must rely on for information amid an ongoing public health emergency, all because that institution held him accountable for his own failures on this front.

Trump’s escalating attacks

This is part of a larger pattern that has escalated during this crisis. Early on, Trump raged at the media for supposedly hyping coronavirus to rattle the markets and hurt him politically. Here, too, Trump told the American people not to believe the press even as it accurately informed them about a severe public danger about which Trump himself was busy misleading them.

Then, on Friday, Trump unloaded in a fury at PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor. What triggered (dare we say it?) Trump was a perfectly reasonable question about whether he takes responsibility for the 2018 disbanding on his watch of the White House pandemic office.

“It’s a nasty question,” Trump sneered, before declining any responsibility for what his own officials do and heaping extensive praise on his own response.

But this was an appropriately aggressive question: As the former head of that office explains, this decision actually did make things worse, facilitating Trump’s decision to minimize the crisis without internal pushback and compromising efforts to coordinate the response.

Yet Trump in essence tried to place this decision beyond scrutiny entirely and lashed out at the media for trying to hold him accountable for it.

Trump rages at accountability

As it happens, Trump has repeatedly lashed out at reporters for the very same transgression — trying to hold him accountable for his own words and deeds.

In late 2018, Trump blasted Alcindor for asking if his rhetoric emboldened white nationalism, fuming that it was a “racist question.” But it was a perfectly reasonable one. Indeed, since then, some white nationalists themselves have rejoiced that Trump pushes their messages in coded form.

Trump also unloaded on Jim Acosta after the CNN reporter pressed Trump on his repeated lies about the “caravan” of migrants. This was a clear case where Trump’s demagoguery was utterly indefensible and threatened serious civic damage, yet Trump was enraged with Acosta for confronting him over it.

Trump vastly minimized a public emergency

These attacks on the media are even more potentially destructive than usual because of what has unfolded in the background: Trump’s relentless efforts to persuade the country that coronavirus is no big deal.

David Leonhardt has produced an exhaustive compilation of Trump’s many statements and actions along these lines. As Leonhardt summarized:

They show a president who put almost no priority on public health. Trump’s priorities were different: Making the virus sound like a minor nuisance. Exaggerating his administration’s response. Blaming foreigners and, anachronistically, the Obama administration. Claiming incorrectly that the situation was improving. Trying to cheer up stock market investors.

Crucially, these impulses on Trump’s part had serious consequences. They prompted health officials to mislead the public and fail to act with the requisite urgency.

The news media responded to this by informing the public about the gravity of the situation and by attempting to hold Trump accountable for those very same failures.

Yet all throughout, Trump has told the American people to dismiss what the media is telling them. First, Trump insisted initial reporting on the crisis was deliberately hyped to harm him. Now Trump is claiming efforts to hold him accountable for all the failings that flowed from that impulse are just more “fake news.”

The big story here is that we’re now seeing just how catastrophically unsuited Trump’s brand of autocracy truly is in the face of a crisis like this one. As Anne Applebaum details, Trump’s enforcement of a loyalty code against civil service professionals, and his retaliation against them for exposing inconvenient truths, paved the way for Trump’s pathologies to hamper the response, because “Trump has very few truth-tellers around him anymore.”

The relentless effort to discredit the very same news media that’s informing the public where he will not, and imposing a form of accountability on Trump that he would never dream of imposing on himself, is of a piece with all that. And we can only guess at how many people will be deceived and misled, at exactly the moment when they need good information the most.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Ozlsn]

10 hours ago, Dandruff said:

He should have a chat with Bro Gary.

Finally Trump would get to be the smartest one in the room! 

Well unless an amoeba rocks up.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Trump felt pandemia before it was cool

 

[WiseGirl]

Because I'm home and I was working online I attempted to listen to today's press conference with 45.  It was hard because of all the shouting. The shouting was me yelling "you're lying, you're fucking lying, and who believes anything you say?" Far be it for me to say I don't believe half of what came out if Dr. Birx's mouth. At least I had two people to yell at. I hate that they are trying to keep artificially low numbers and that 45 only seems to know 5 adjectives. Or should I call them "describing words" so he would understand?

 

Edited March 17, 2020 by WiseGirl
Added link

[GreyhoundFan]

I wasn't quite sure where to post this. It's an interesting read/mea culpa: "Republicans like me built this moment. Then we looked the other way."

Spoiler

Stuart Stevens is a writer and Republican political consultant who has advised a pro-Bill Weld super PAC in the 2020 election. His book about the Republican Party, “It Was All A Lie,” will be published next month.

Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.

But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.

Many of us heard a warning sound we chose to ignore, like that rattle in your car you hear but figure will go away. Now we’re broken down, with plenty of time to think about what should have been done.

The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

All of these are wrong, of course. But we didn’t get here overnight. It took practice.

Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say. But somewhere along the way, it became, “all government is bad.” Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. That’s awkward.

Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery. It was 2013 when former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party “must stop being the stupid party.” By 2016, the party had embraced as its nominee a reality-TV host who later suggested that perhaps the noise from windmills causes cancer.

The Republican Party has gone from admiring William F. Buckley Jr., an Ivy League intellectual, to viewing higher education as a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the young. In retribution, we started defunding education. Never mind that Republican leaders are among the most highly educated on the planet; it’s just that they now feel compelled to embrace ignorance as a cost of doing business. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, as an example, denounces “coastal elites” while holding degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and having served as a Supreme Court clerk.

The GOP’s relationship with science has resembled some kind of Frankenstein experiment: Let’s see what happens when we play with the chemistry set! Conservatives have spent years trying to cut funds for basic science and research, lamenting government seed money for nearly every budding technology and then hoping for the best. In the weeks ahead, it’s not some fiery, anti-Washington populist with an XM radio gig who is going to save folks’ lives; it is more likely to be someone who has been studying this stuff for decades, almost certainly at some point with federal help or outright patronage.

Finally, there is the populist GOP distrust and dislike of the other, the foreign. Yes, it is annoying that the Chinese didn’t come clean and explain everything to us from the start. But it appears that a Swiss company is helping to jump-start us in testing; and it is a German company that American officials reportedly tried to lure to the United States recently to help develop a vaccine for the virus. We talk about how we need to be independent even as we do all kinds of things that prove we aren’t.

What is happening now is the inevitable result of a party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia and regarded facts as dangerous, left-wing landmines that must be avoided.

Over the past few years, when ramming through conservative judges, Republicans have crowed, “Elections have consequences.” That’s true.

It’s something to think about when sitting at home not watching sports and wondering how long it will be until you can find out if that nasty cold you have is something more.

Yes, elections have consequences. Those of us in the Republican Party built this moment. Now the nation must live with those consequences.

You know, this op-ed is all fine and good, but he needs to step up to elect candidates who will swing away from the crap he describes.

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from George Conway: "There is no new Trump"

Spoiler

If you think you’ve been hearing a different President Trump this week — more accepting of the reality of the coronavirus pandemic — don’t be fooled. The new Trump is the same as the old Trump. He can’t help it. He’s incapable of taking responsibility for his role in this crisis — and thus incapable of leading us out of it.

After weeks of denial and deflection, a seemingly chastened Trump on Monday conceded that the virus was, in fact, “not under control,” and was, indeed, “a very bad one.” What caused the switch in tone? Who knows? Perhaps it was the largest one-day point drop in the Dow Jones in history on Monday. Perhaps it was a study the White House received saying that 2.2 million Americans could die. Perhaps it was that Trump’s beloved Mar-a-Lago is getting a coronavirus-necessitated deep cleaning.

But the sudden shift can’t conceal the fact that Trump has shown himself to be wholly inept at dealing with the pandemic. It doesn’t change the fact that he puts himself first, always. It doesn’t alter the fact that, as he once told top aides, he thinks of “each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” It doesn’t dissolve Trump’s compulsion to lie, even when truth would serve him best. It doesn’t diminish his incompetence, ignorance or propensity for administrative chaos.

And it doesn’t change his inability to accept responsibility. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said Friday. So too this week, even as he acknowledged the seriousness of the situation he had played down for so long.

On Monday, Trump said he would rate his performance in confronting the pandemic a 10 out of 10. Tuesday, he absurdly claimed, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Wednesday, he tweeted that he had “always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously.” He also continued to blame others, lashing out at Democratic governors who bemoan his failing federal leadership.

Of course, Trump will always take credit for positive developments — even those he didn’t cause, create or do — like the economy he inherited, an electoral “landslide” that never happened and the Christmas holiday he didn’t need to save. If it’s positive, then it’s “thank you President T,” as he once tweeted.

But responsibility? Never. Ever the blameless narcissist, Trump always insists that the buck stops wherever convenient — for him, personally. For Trump, success always has a single father — himself. Failure has a hundred — everyone and anyone else. The media. The Democrats. The “deep state.” Disloyal staffers. Prosecutors. Judges. Anyone who doesn’t do his bidding or sufficiently sing his praises.

And the common thread between his taking credit and shifting blame? Trump’s standbys: Lying, deceit and exaggeration. All have come into play throughout his presidency, and all now have come home to roost.

He mendaciously claimed that his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect.” Perversely but fittingly, he has compared his coronavirus response to that call: “The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.”

His absurd, repeated claims that the outbreak wouldn’t be so bad have been almost too many to count. Even as late as the weekend before last, Trump said at his infected Mar-a-Lago resort that: “They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s okay, as long as we can win the election.”

As long as we can win the election. That’s what it’s all about for Trump. It’s always about winning — winning for Trump, by making him look good in each day’s reality-television production. It’s never been about the country.

Which is why Trump wanted a cruise ship with infected passengers to be kept offshore: “because I like the numbers being where they are.” And why Trump kept pretending the virus crisis wasn’t a crisis — to keep the stock market from tanking, to win an election.

But the way a president actually can make himself look good is by being a true leader. By seeing the truth clearly, telling it bluntly and acting on it promptly and skillfully — not by dissembling, preening and careening from day to day. By behaving like Donald Trump, the president has shown himself incapable of leading the country.

Trump’s abject failure of leadership brings to mind the words, borrowed from Oliver Cromwell, that British Conservative backbencher Leo Amery used in 1940 to bring down Neville Chamberlain, a prime minister of his own party: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

The nation needs a credible, competent president, now more than ever. The surest and best thing Trump could do to come to the aid of his country — to save lives — would be to go, as the hapless Chamberlain did. But that won’t happen. Because that would be taking responsibility, something Trump has never done and will never know how to do. It’s too bad for us.

 

[Emma]

I listened to the press conference this morning and I think I know why trump has turned around on this. Somebody convinced him that we are not dealing with a public health problem but fighting a war against an invisible enemy, which means he is now a “wartime” president. Which is what he always wanted.