Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment


He has a remarkable ability to infest, corrupt, and destroy even the most reputable institutions. Will you ever believe a doctor’s report on the health of a president ever again? Do you still wishfully hope that Mr Smith Goes to Washington accurately portrays how an honest man can shape the Senate? Do you believe any more that “CDC” stands for “Center for Disease Control”?

Of course, he had help. It would be nice if the poison in the body politic had a single name and we could just boot the creep and get back to having trust, but I just can’t get out of my head the fact that 43% of the electorate think he’s doing a good job coping with a medical crisis.

Comments

  1. Larry says

    What’s missing, of course, is to lay the blame for this clusterfuck on your predecessor. Which is exactly what he did yesterday.

  2. sparks says

    And 43% of the electorate wouldn’t be allowed to vote if passing an IQ test were mandatory. One has to have a license to drive in this fucked up country, and how many are competent to do even that much?

  3. blf says

    (Cross-posted from poopyhead’s current Political Madness All the Time thread.)

    Oh good grief, Trump administration reportedly won’t let states use Medicaid to respond to crisis (current Grauniad live States blog):

    States experiencing dramatic coronavirus outbreaks are unable to use Medicaid more freely to respond to the outbreak by expanding medical care, the Los Angeles Times is reporting.

    The White House has tools it can use to assist states looking to bolster their healthcare efforts, but so far, the Trump administration has not made any moves to ease the burden on states.

    As coronavirus has intensified in the US over the last few weeks, Trump has tried to downplay the effect that the illness will have on Americans. He called the illness Democrats’ new hoax and has compared it to the flu, which has a far lower mortality rate.

    Additionally, as the LA Times point out, Seema Verna, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been a champion of conservative states who have been trying to cut the number of people on Medicaid.

    Here’s more from the LA Times:

    Months into the current global disease outbreak, the White House and senior federal health officials haven’t taken the necessary steps to give states simple pathways to fully leverage the mammoth safety net program to prevent a wider epidemic.

    That’s making it harder for states to quickly sign up poor patients for coverage so they can get necessary testing or treatment if they are exposed to coronavirus.

    And it threatens to slow efforts by states to bring on new medical providers, set up emergency clinics or begin quarantining and caring for homeless Americans at high risk from the virus.

  4. microraptor says

    My mom has gone straight to libertarian looneyville over this. She thinks we’re all going to be fine because the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is busy making test kits, which proves that Private Enterprise can solve any problem and the CDC’s lack of preparedness for this is because government workers are lazy and not because their entire pandemic response department was cut by the Private Enterprise President.

    She also doesn’t get that producing test kits is not the same as having an organized response to the number of people who are going to be flooding hospital ERs or being able to organize quarantines to prevent the virus from spreading.

  5. blf says

    microraptor@4, “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is busy making test kits, which proves that Private Enterprise can solve any problem”. That’s probably the first time I’ve encountered their foundation as being “private enterprise” (read: for-profit). I assume then she’ll also approve of this:

    The Jack Ma Foundation, the charitable foundation set up by the founder of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, has announced plans to donate 500,000 testing kits and a million masks to the United States.

    Ma said in a tweet […]

    Same-ish thing, right? (Yes, it it is. Thanks, Mr Ma!) Stand-by for xenophobes in 3… 2… 1…

  6. blf says

    (Cross-posted from poopyhead’s current Political Madness All the Time thread.)

    The sick joke of Donald’s Trump’s presidency [sic] isn’t funny any more:

    The coronavirus outbreak has revealed the full stupidity, incompetence and selfishness of the president [sic] to deadly effect

    […] The humanitarian crisis about to unfold will consume what’s left of this president [sic] and the Republican party that surrendered its self-respect and sense of duty to flatter his ego and avoid his angry tweets.

    Trump was right about one thing, and only one thing, as the coronavirus started to spread across the world. The sight of thousands of dead Americans will hurt him politically. It will also hurt many thousands of Americans in reality.

    Multiple reports have detailed [Trump’s mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis] how Trump did not just ignore the growing pandemic; he actively sought to block his own officials’ attempts to track and stop it. Why has there been such a disastrous lack of testing? Because the president [sic] didn’t want to know the answer, and because his staff were too busy fighting each other to do the right thing.

    […]

    How could we have known that Trump would deny the resources to deal with a disaster, deny the truth about the death toll, and denounce anyone daring to tell the truth?

    It wasn’t hard to know. After Hurricane Maria devastated the American island of Puerto Rico in September of his first year in office, Trump gave himself a 10 for his response to the devastation. He also said he couldn’t keep the military in Puerto Rico forever, which was news to the national guard.

    At the very time he was bragging about his response and trashing his own citizens, more than 3,000 Americans were dying on the island because of Trump’s botched response to the hurricane. Those Americans were our most vulnerable citizens: the sick and elderly, who lost power, lacked medicine or needed a hospital bed when the hospitals were stricken.

    Those are the same Americans who face the greatest peril in the coming weeks from the same toxic mix of callousness and incompetence from the same sociopathic president [sic].

    […]

    This is a president [sic] who can’t formulate a coherent coronavirus policy, and can’t even read the words written for him on a prompter.

    One paragraph from Wednesday’s disastrous Oval Office address managed to only worsen the political pathogen that is his presidency [sic].

    There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings, he explained about his new travel ban from Europe, ignoring the reality that he limited all testing so there are no appropriate screenings.

    […]

    These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom. Ah yes, the British immunity to coronavirus is a well-documented medical fact. British people who play golf on a Trump course are especially healthy individuals.

    If Trump was trying to reassure the markets, he failed, like he always does. Even the Federal Reserve magicking $1.5tn out of thin air could not stop the stock market from suffering its worst single day since the 1987 crash.

    […] Joe Biden’s response on Thursday was a stark reminder of what presidents and vice-presidents used to sound like.

    “We’ll lead with science,” the former vice-president said. “We’ll listen to the experts. We’ll heed their advice.” It all sounded so shockingly novel. […]

    In the meantime, before January 2021, the world faces two deadly diseases: a pandemic and a pathetically incompetent president [sic].

    […] Instead of thinking about preparing thousands of new hospital beds, or millions of virus tests, Trump has probably committed the largest part of his brain to thinking about that number [32 deaths in the States]. That very tiny number, so small compared to the rest of the world, that represents the full measure of his compassion.

  7. Forrest Phelps says

    As to the 43%:
    • this is why the fight against Creationism (and other pseudoscience) has always been, and always will be important important.
    • they are already saying the Democrats and Liberals and Commies are going to sabotage their great leader’s efforts to save ‘Merica, so no matter how many die, they won’t blame him
    • does anyone really think Fox news, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and others will change into an actual reality based worldview? When so many of the elected leaders are so venal, even up to the highest courts, the system is in deep kimchee

    If you asked most liberals: would you be happy with minimal deaths and no real damage to the economy, even if Trump got all the credit?, almost all would grumble but be joyous that so many who could have died, didn’t.

    If this same crisis had occurred during the Obama administration, the rightwing would have been profoundly disappointed. They actually would have been happier with more deaths, especially if it had occurred during Obama’s first term, so they could have made him a one-termer.

    How these people see themselves as the moral bastions and “real” patriots is beyond reason.

  8. Chris J says

    Sparks @2:

    Passing an IQ test was tried before. It was called a Literacy Test, and the results made the remaining voting populace a lot more monotone.

  9. Saad says

    Forrest, #7

    does anyone really think Fox news, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and others will change into an actual reality based worldview? When so many of the elected leaders are so venal, even up to the highest courts, the system is in deep kimchee

    Ted Cruz certainly won’t. He’s busy enjoying his paid sick leave.

  10. wzrd1 says

    I consider my choices for Dear Leader, the god-king and Emperor. Biden, who will vote for something I feel most strongly about, yet again, ignoring a vast sector of voter’s views and desires.
    Trump and the preferential extinction of his very base, via his incompetent addressing of any and every emergency that comes down the pike.

    As I said before, there are times when it’s best to let idiot drink and breathe their own swill. They wanted the swamp drained by pumping in sewage, what they breathe now is entirely on them and those who enabled the antithesis of what a sizable voting block, which hasn’t been shy about explaining their previous vote.
    Immerse your bed in a cesspool, enjoy breathing shit.

  11. anchor says

    Well, somebody doing polls keeps saying that something like 43% approve. Drowning in a tossing ocean of bullshit news and alternative facts, but that bit must be completely reliable. Doesn’t even seem to fluctuate like any sensible statistic would. Must be an absolute Constant of Nature.

  12. microraptor says

    blf@5 My mother approves of everything billionaires do with their money. The fact that they’re so rich proves that they deserve to be so rich and we should be thankful that they’re around to spend tiny amounts of their fortunes on the rest of us.

    And by her logic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is private enterprise because a billionaire founded it so private enterprise.

    Also, she believes that the CDC’s lack of response is because government agencies are inherently incompetent and has nothing to do with the president being a braindead shitgibbon who slashed the agency’s budget, eliminated its pandemic department, actively stopped it from mustering a response months ago, and appointed an incompetent crony to lead it.

  13. publicola says

    Comrade Trumpski probably got a memo from Putin telling him that by letting thousands of elderly Americans die he could achieve tremendous savings in Social Sec. and Medicare expenses, and then take credit for being such brilliant economist by having decreased the surplus population.