5/16/20: The country is staggering towards a reopening and an uncertain
recovery. But, by God, we’ve got binders! The best binders. Not one binder. We
have two binders! Binders that prove Donald J. Trump is the best president
ever.
____________________
“The American public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other significant events occur.”
Playbook for Early Response to
High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents
____________________
President Obama? He left the nation binder-less when he exited the White House 1,213 days ago.
And because Obama left us in a bind, completely without binders, 88,000 Americans have died.
During a press conference Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany wanted to make this clear. Standing at the podium, she proudly displayed the fruits of three years of labor by Team Trump. “Binder 1” in her left hand! “Binder 2” in her right! Both filled with real ideas about how to handle the coronavirus crisis! I think she expected reporters and people listening at home to gasp.
Team Trump wasn’t slacking off. Not like Team Obama. These fantastic binders – and here she sneered at the work of the previous administration – could be compared to “this thin packet of paper [emphasis added]” left behind by the Obama folks, having to do with combating pandemics.
She held up the packet gingerly, by one corner, like a dead mouse in a trap, and handed it over to her “assistant, Wendy.”
Only, I didn’t gasp. My first thought: Taxpayers are paying this fool’s salary? And she has an assistant?
For
what?
My second thought was: This is so stupid, it’s hard to know where to begin. We supposedly learned on Monday, thanks to Sen. Mitch “Zero Charisma” McConnell, that the Obama administration was to blame for the spread of the coronavirus because they failed to leave behind “a game plan” to address pandemics. And – what? You thought Team Trump could have come up with a plan of their own in three years! Shows what you know. In a chat with Lara Trump, who probably knows less about pandemics than a panda, “Zero Charisma” grumbled, “They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years but what if that’s no longer true? We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.”
“That’s exactly right,” Lara Trump responded.
Sound of this blogger slapping his forehead, followed by primal scream….
“HOOOOOOOOOLY F***ING
S**T!”
Mitch wasn’t “exactly right.” He wasn’t even partly right. By Thursday, even Sen. Zero C. had been forced to acknowledge that he was wrong about what he claimed.
His attempt to pin the blame on a previous administration for the blunders (and binders) of Team Trump wouldn’t have made sense even had he been correct. The most obtuse person in the U.S. government should be able to recall the SARS outbreak of 2002. That virus spread to 26 countries.
A decade later, the MERS virus erupted in Saudi Arabia and struck across the Middle East. Pandemics don’t happen every hundred years. These threats are no longer rare. MERS struck again in 2015, this time in South Korea.
Trump called Obama a “psycho” during the Ebola outbreak.
If Team Trump didn’t understand that they might have to deal with a pandemic during their watch, then Team Trump would be entirely to blame. President Obama had to deal with the H1N1 virus in 2009. Then, in 2014, the Ebola virus began to ravage West Africa. We know Trump knew about that pandemic threat because he went berserk and said Obama was a “psycho” for the way he handled the crisis.
You could even say that Citizen Trump lost his nerve. He predicted that there would be “bedlam” in the streets after Obama allowed seven infected Americans, who had been working in West Africa, to return home for care.
As we have noted several times before, Trump – ever the hater – did say at one point, as Ebola spread:
 |
| What's worse? Trump's hate. Or the fact more than 8,000 Americans liked this idea? |
As Politico
reported in March, the previous
administration did leave behind a 69-page plan titled: Playbook for
Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and
Biological Incidents.
ABC News did a bit of digging, as good news organizations must, and noted that Mr. Trump had not once uttered the words “pandemic” or “preparedness” in any public way. ABC also noted the existence of the 69-page plan, as well as a similar plan prepared by the Bush 43 administration in 2006. As CNN pointed out, the Obama administration version “explicitly lists novel coronaviruses as one of the kinds of pathogens that could require a major response.”
The plan is also clear about where ultimate responsibility in a time of pandemic lies:
The
U.S. government will use all powers at its disposal to prevent, slow or
mitigate the spread of an emerging infectious disease threat. The American
public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other
significant events occur.
There’s even more you could say about how the Obama administration tried to prepare the Trump administration. If you’re interested, feel free to click the link above and read the document for yourself.
Something,
you can bet, Trump never did.
*
IN RELATED NEWS, the COVID-19 toll rises inexorably. As of Friday evening, Johns Hopkins reported the U.S. had 1,442,924 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 87,493 deaths.
Those numbers looked so bad I decided I had better doublecheck the math. The Centers for Disease Control posts new numbers every day. CDC also has numbers that look grim. The figure for May 15 is now up; and on that one day we piled up another 22,977 cases. And on May 14 the U.S. recorded 27,191 new confirmed cases of COVID-19, the worst daily total in the last week.
I’m hoping that figure won’t jump again; but if you remember Trump saying the virus would go away in April, that brought the total for May to 372,652 new cases. That’s more in just 16 days than any other nation on earth has totaled since the crisis began.
A kingdom lost for the loss of a binder, Ben Franklin might have said.
“If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”
Let’s end today with this nugget from the man we have to pray will lead the nation out of this mess, much of which he made himself. Asked by reporters about the alarming numbers of cases the United States has seen, President Trump said this: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”
Words of wisdom, from Donald J. Trump.
As we said at the top of this post, the stupidity we get from Team Trump is so profound, so all-encompassing, it’s hard to know where to begin or to end.
But, hey!
We have Binder 1 and Binder 2!!!
POSTSCRIPT: Here in Glendale, Ohio, where I live, people were out in force Friday and Saturday evening, eating and drinking at outdoor tables in the village square. I’m going to be diplomatic and say that, generally speaking, revelers seemed not to believe:
a.
Masks were a good idea.
b.
Six feet = seventy-two inches.
c.
People serving them food and drink might be nervous
about getting coughed on by patrons.
In any case, the country is opening up, for good or ill. It’s easy to understand why people want to get back to work, why business owners want to reopen. It’s also easy to understand why waiters and waitresses, and others going back to work might want customers to work a little harder to help them remain safe. Since I have three daughters in the medical field, I understand why frontline medical personnel are worried we might be opening up too soon.
The math will help determine whether we are making a mistake. Saturday, the CDC recorded 31,967 new cases of coronavirus. That would make it the worst single day since April 25. Could be an aberration.
Could be the start of a Trump Bump.
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