10/31/20: The question we must answer
today, and voters must answer on November 3, is, “Is Donald Trump a monster?”
____________________
Trying to “teach an elephant ballet.”
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The short answer is: “No.” Trump may dehumanize his foes. He
has, for example, labeled Sen. Kamala Harris a “monster.”
Saturday, he said again that his political foes were guilty of
“treason.” The penalty for such a crime is death.
But this blogger does not deal in dehumanizing language. He
took an instant dislike to Mr. Trump the day he came down the escalator and
labeled Mexicans, almost without exception, as “rapists” and “murderers.”
So, when the president labels Sen. Harris a “monster,” we have fresh
proof that something is terribly wrong with this man. He’s not a monster. He is
a fundamentally, warped human being. He’s warped at his core.
Today, let’s clean up some of the wreckage from the last few
days, and get ready to hunker down and watch as votes are cast and counted. Tens
of millions of Americans have already made their choice, voting early in
person, or filling out a mail-in ballot, signing it, adding proof of identity (like
the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number), sticking a stamp
on the envelope and mailing it.
In other news, after Trump, lambasted CBS’s Leslie Stahl for
conducting an “unfair” 60 Minutes interview, she has received death threats. Stahl is currently shielded by round-the-clock
security.
If the president knows this, he doesn’t care; and if doesn’t
know it, he should, and should care.
*
“All the stars are aligned in the wrong place.”
A NEW “CRITIC” of the president has also emerged, namely Dr.
Anthony Fauci, who deals in scientific truth.
That makes him, ipso facto, a critic of this president. Friday, the
U.S. piled up 99,750 cases of coronavirus.
Saturday, we had another 80,932.
That’s scientists reporting science. You can believe the
experts, whose job it is to tame the spread. Or you can believe the president
who said months ago we were headed for zero cases soon and who insists with the
election looming, that we’ve “turned the corner” and should vote for him.
Dr. Fauci
pulled no punches when he sat down Friday for an interview with the Washington
Post. “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation. All the
stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season,
with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned
more poorly.”
As for
Trump’s latest favorite doctor, Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Fauci was blunt. “I have
real problems with that guy,” he admitted.
“He’s a
smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real
insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that
when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”
The Washington Post, doing due diligence, not only
interviews Dr. Fauci, but includes a White House response. Basically: “How dare
Dr. Fauci stab Trump in the back, when it was the doctor who gave the president
such terrible advice?”
Like, when Dr. Fauci said that the average American – in
February – did not need to wear a mask!
The Post, then published a list of 184 times the president downplayed the virus
threat. We can also look at a list compiled by NPR, to
see if there are any of the president’s “greatest hits” the Post might
have missed.
Here’s a quick sampling:
January 22: “We have it totally
under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under
control. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 24: “The
Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to
look very good to me!”
(Note the poor man’s misplaced focus.)
February 26: “When you have 15 people
[with the virus], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to
close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
February 27: “It’s going to disappear.
One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
March 9: “So last year 37,000
Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per
year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.”
(See: No worse that the flu!)
March 11: For “the vast majority
of Americans, the risk is very, very low.”
March 30: “Stay calm, it will go away.
You know it is going away.”
April 3: Responding to CDC
guidelines urging people to wear masks, Trump says, “You can do it. You don’t
have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it, but some people may want to do
it, and that’s OK. It may be good. Probably will. They’re making a
recommendation. It’s only a recommendation.”
(Dr.
Fauci and just about every other doctor is by this time saying: wear a mask!)
May 14: “If we didn’t do any
testing, we would have very few cases.”
May 19: Referring to the fact
that testing is ramping up: “When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that
as a bad thing. I look at that in a certain respect as being a good thing,
because it means our testing is much better. So, if we were testing a million
people instead of 14 million people, we would have far few cases, right?”
(A
few days later, we pass the 100,000-dead mark.)
June 15: “If we stopped testing
right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
(We could stop testing for cancer, then no
one would have cancer.)
June 18: The virus “is dying
out. The numbers are starting to get very good.”
July 6: Why isn’t the Fake News reporting that Deaths are way down? It
is only because they are, indeed, FAKE NEWS!”
July 19: Trump downplays the
danger, as case numbers continue to rise. “Many of those cases are
young people that would heal in a day,” Trump says. “They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test.” He adds that
many of those sick “are going to get better very quickly.”
July 19: “It’s going to
disappear and I’ll be right.”
August 3 (I added this example myself): Trump says in an interview with Jonathan
Swan that he thinks the coronavirus is under control. Swan seems surprised and
says, people are dying by the thousands every day. “They
are dying. That’s true,” the president responds…It is what it is. But that
doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as
you can control it. This is a horrible plague.”
August 11: “Many people get it and
they have – like kids, they get it, they have the sniffles – young kids,
almost none have a serious problem with it.”
September 4: “And by the way, we’re
rounding the corner. We’re rounding the corner on the virus.”
September 12: “I think the virus,
hopefully, is rounding the turn, rounding the corner. The vaccines are going to
be out soon.”
September 16: “I think by [the
election], covid will be even lower, it’s going to be very low.”
September 21: Hey, this virus isn’t so bad, Trump tells fans
at a rally. “It affects elderly
people, elderly people with heart problems, if they have other problems, that’s
what it really affects, that’s it. In some states thousands of people – nobody
young – below the age of 18, like nobody – they have a strong immune system –
who knows? Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune
system. It affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing – by the way, open
your schools!”
(The
next day the U.S. hits 200,000 dead.)
October 1: “The end of the
pandemic is in sight.”
October 6: “Flu season is coming
up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine,
die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned
to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most
populations far less lethal!!!”
(Again!
No worse than the flu! For some reason, he increases the number of flu deaths
to 100,000. On March 9, he said 37,000 died from the common flu last year.
Trump not only doesn’t get science he doesn’t get math.)
October
9: “In fact, we’re almost ready
to hit a brand new stock market high in the middle of a pandemic, and I say
rounding the corner of the pandemic.”
(Grandma just died, but the Dow Jones is up!)
October
10: “A lot of flare-ups. But it’s
going to disappear; it is disappearing.”
October 14: “We’re rounding the
turn ... but most people – 99-point-something percent, if you get it, you get better.”
October 16: “The light at the end
of the tunnel is near.”
October 19: “People are tired of covid.
People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.”
(Did “Fauci and all these idiots” make all these idiotic
predictions?)
October 26: “We are absolutely
rounding the corner, other than the fake news wants to scare everybody.”
October 29: “Our vaccine will eradicate
the virus. By the way, we have it, but whether we have it or not, it’s rounding
the turn. It’s rounding the turn.”
(We have a vaccine…whether we have it or not?)
October 30: And finally, we have this, from a Trump rally in Michigan on Friday. Note the “seriousness” with which the president takes mask-wearing. He scans the crowd, looking for one of his favorite Fox News “journalists.”
“I do believe Laura Ingraham is here someplace,” Trump says. He looks about. “Where is Laura? Where is she?”
Suddenly, his eagle gaze falls upon her: “I can’t recognize you. Is that a mask? No way, are you wearing a mask? I’ve never seen her in a mask. Look at you. Laura, she’s being very politically correct. Whoa!”
Look, at this point most Americans realize the
president is a numbskull. As someone said, trying to teach Trump about the
coronavirus has been like trying to “teach an elephant ballet.”
*
IF YOU MISSED this story, and you are a Trump fan, you must increase
the number of felons surrounding your Orange God by one.
It turns out that Rudy Giuliani (not yet a felon!) was working
with two alleged felons and one felon who just pled guilty, while gallivanting
around Ukraine, looking for dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden. The two alleged
felons, already indicted, are Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
The felon who copped a plea and agreed to cooperate with investigators was David
Corriea.
And this isn’t “Fake News.” It’s what happened in court. As the Washington Post
explains, Corriea admitted to “defrauding investors in an
insurance start-up that paid Giuliani for consulting work and to lying
to federal regulators investigating suspected campaign finance violations.”
 |
Corriea and the president. |
*
DEMOCRATS
in the House of Representatives have also called into question the Trump
administration’s planned $265 million “Defeat Despair” project, designed in
part by Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Caputo. In terms of
felonies, Caputo has none; but he did help set up a meeting with Trump advisor Roger
Stone, a man with seven felonies himself, and a Russian,
during the 2017 campaign.
The HHS plan
was to line up a star-studded celebrity cast to talk about how the coronavirus
wasn’t so bad – and how President Trump was handling it with aplomb – and how,
after we taxpayers paid for the project, we should feel better about the future
and reelect Donald Trump.
Documents
indicate that the thinking behind this mega-MAGA-size waste of money was that “helping
the president will help the country.”
The project ran into trouble when HHS officials tried to find celebrities who had not been critical of the President of the United States, and so, could pass the purity test and help us learn not to despair. Dennis Quaid made the cut. But after culling through the public records of 274 famous men and women, pickings were slim. Bryan Cranston, who starred in Breaking Bad, got nixed because he had “called out Trump’s attacks on journalists” during a 2019 speech. The actor Jack Black never had a chance. A disqualifying notation next to his name read that Black was “known to be a classic Hollywood liberal.” Also eliminated from participating in the fight to “Make America Feel Great Again,” were any celebrities, like the singers Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake, who supported gay rights. So, gay persons could just go ahead and despair.
Even “better,” when a consulting contract for $15 million was awarded by HHS, to a company called Atlas Research, that company was informed it would need to hire three subcontractors. The first turned out to be a “one-person” company run by a Republican pollster.
The second also appeared to be a “one-person” operation.
Best of all, the third was a “platform owned by Den Tolmor, a Russian-born business
associate of Caputo’s.”
Unfortunately, the “Defeat Despair” initiative fell apart before all the money could be wasted. Mr. Quaid dropped out after reports began surfacing about the true intent behind the project. He admitted in an Instagram post that he was “feeling some outrage and a lot of disappointment” after having been duped.
Caputo crumbled under the
pressure of trying to defend an idiotic, boondoggle project. First, he posted a
rant on Facebook. He said people were out to get him and the election was going
to be rigged. He suggested Trump fans buy as many guns and as much ammo as possible
– not your typical Health and Human Services message. Then he announced he
would be taking a leave of absence, to fight cancer, and also – one might argue – because he was nuts.
*
AS FAR AS DEFEATING DESPAIR GOES, the expensive HHS initiative has now proven to be a flop.
But maybe if we all wore masks….
Dr. Fauci said this week that with cases rising rapidly, it might be time for a national mask mandate.
Maybe someone can get the message to the president, since we know he hasn’t attended a meeting of his Coronavirus Task Force in months.
POSTSCRIPT: The president is
spending his last few hours before the election insisting that the pandemic is
over, all thanks to him.
The Centers for Disease control reports that the
crisis is not over. Since we checked last, the U.S. has had:
10/31: 80,932 new cases
11/1: 77,398.
A total of 230,383 Americans have died.
We know that President Trump likes to compare
the current toll to the ordinary flu. Again, let’s check the facts. In
2010-2011, CDC reported 37,000 flu-related deaths, one for every 568
cases.
2011-2012 12,000 dead 1 death per every 750 cases
2012-2013 43,000 1 death per 791
2013-2014 38,000 1 per 789
2014-2015 51,000 1 per 588
2015-2016 23,000 1 per 1,043
2016-2017 38,000 1 per 763
2017-2018 61,000 1 per 738
2018-2019 34,200 1 per 1,038
CDC has also provided an estimate for the toll
from H1N1 pandemic, which struck in 2009. That virus infected
60,800,000 Americans and 12,469 died. That would be a mortality rate of 1 death
for every 4,876 cases.
According to the latest figures the U.S. has
suffered 9,182,628 cases of COVID-19. A total of 230,383 Americans have died.
That works out to 1 death for every 40 known cases.
BLOGGER’S NOTE
(7/27/22): In going back, and fixing minor errors in my posts, I return to this
list of terrible predictions by President
Trump. As of July 26, the last day reported, the U.S. was still averaging more
than three hundred COVID-related deaths per day. A total of 1,023,382 Americans
had died from the disease. President Biden had been infected, but was recovering.
This blogger had been infected twice, as had his wife. On that date, 37,531
Americans were hospitalized with the latest variant of the disease.
It never went away –
and may never go away – and it was never “just a flu.”
“That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself
a winner.”
BLOGGER’S NOTE #2 (same date as above): We know that Trump lost the election three days later, and that going on nineteen months later, he still refuses to admit it – and hordes of Trump fans refuse to believe it. We know his last two attorney generals, Bill Barr and Jeffrey Rosen both told him there was no significant voter fraud in 2020.
We also know, according to Steve Bannon, that Trump always had a plan for how to handle a defeat that most people knew was coming. In a call leaked, finally, in July 2022, Bannon could be heard explaining almost exactly what was going to happen, regardless of whether Trump won or lost.
Ironically, most of
his listeners were Chinese immigrants – at least one of whom recorded what
Bannon was saying. The recording was turned over to reporters for the
left-leaning magazine, Mother
Jones.
Bannon seemed amused as he explained the plan for Election Night. “What Trump’s gonna do,” he laughed, “is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” he told his listeners. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today,” Bannon said he expected Trump to build an early lead, as in-person votes were tallied. Biden’s strength would come later when mail-in ballots were counted. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” So, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’”
In fact, Bannon said Trump had a plan, even if he was losing in the early hours of the night. “If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock,” Bannon said, “it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states,’” he predicted.
“He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
At no point, of course, did Bannon suggest to his listeners that the president was actually going to win.
He simply said that Trump was going to claim he did – and that that was the real victory plan.
“So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a
firestorm,” Bannon continued. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media,
crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking,
tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’”
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