Today is the 28th of March, meaning its been over a month since I was back on the sacred soil in Japan. It seems like years have passed. That is all due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Where I work is down to minimal manning, and we are working a schedule that has no more than two people in the office at any one given time.
For this past week, the United States surpassed China and Italy to become the nation with the most COVID-19 cases on record. This was exactly as the experts predicted it would happen.
Now, the experts have been proven right all along since January. Unlike this supposedly stable genius.
The simple truth is that Trump is lying. He is blatantly lying – and he is doing it for petty and vindictive reasons. Given the context of real people dying every day, it may rank among the worst lies ( among the literally thousands he has told) he has ever said. And what makes it even worse is that his lies are so easily exposed. There can be no rational defense of them.
And we should remember that this probably did not need to happen in the United States. I remain convinced, the scale of the epidemic could have been much less in this country, and its worst effects ameliorated. That’s not an opinion as much as it as a valid conclusion.
This is especially true when you realize that the alarm was sounded well over two months ago.
United States intelligence agencies were warning President Donald Trump about an impending pandemic as early as January, The Washington Post reported.
Officials were giving Trump classified briefings on the matter at the same time that the president was publicly downplaying the risk of the novel coronavirus and insisting the US was well prepared to handle the outbreak.
The Post reported that intelligence documents closely tracked the virus’ spread in Wuhan, China, where it originated and as it later progressed through mainland China, but they did not specify when the disease would make it to the US.
“The system was blinking red,” one US official with access to the intelligence told The Post. Agencies “have been warning on this since January.”
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” the official added.
As news outlets have been reporting this fact and Trump’s refusal to take responsibility for it – the usual suspects have begun coalescing around their readily approved talking points. Blame it all on China, even though that’s pretty much irrelevant now. ( And to be clear, it’s possible to acknowledge China’s failures while at the same time making valid criticisms of the Trump administration – they are not mutually exclusive concepts.).
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Trump, however, did not get going, he did what he always does – he sent for the sycophants and laid blame elsewhere.
AS HE INCREASINGLY tries to shovel blame for the shortage of medical supplies onto the governors of states with densely populated areas that are suffering the most from the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump was asked on Friday what more he wants them to do. It was, he said, “very simple: I want them to be appreciative.”
If the United States had a real President, with competent people working for him, this would not have happened. Max Boot is right about that.
Because of Trump’s negligence, the United States lost two months of response time — precious days that should have been used to test the population, produce more N95 masks and ventilators and build new hospital beds. This past week, the Pentagon finally announced that a Navy hospital ship would be heading to New York — but it will take at least two weeks to get ready. Why wasn’t the deployment order given sooner? Even now, with the crisis upon us, Trump hesitates to use his full authority to order wartime production of ventilators needed to keep thousands of patients alive.
I weep in anger and frustration imagining what might have been if Hillary Clinton — a sane, sensible adult — had won. We couldn’t have avoided the coronavirus, but we could have ameliorated its effects. We could be South Korea (102 deaths) rather than Italy (4,825 deaths and counting).
Boot wrote this article on the 21st of March. The numbers now are higher – but South Korea’s trend is much better than that of the US.
Presidents, don’t threaten governors in a time of crisis. They don’t take to Twitter to whine about how much they hate female governors. They don’t try to second guess medical experts and tell the Governor of New York he does not need ventilators.
All of these things Trump did in the last 72 hours. Over a longer-term there is proven evidence that the administration is stacking the deck against the more populous states ( who therefore require the most aid).
And lets we forget, there were contingency plans for just this eventuality. The federal government developed a step-by-step playbook for combating a pandemic, but it’s been completely ignored by the Trump administration.
Taken all together, it constitutes criminal negligence the kind that used to allow individuals to sue the bejesus out of a company as they did against big tobacco in the ’90s. The Trump administration is literally perpetrating a fraud against the American people. And, though his negligence and narcissism, he is getting people killed.
And we have not yet even begun to discuss the variety of ways Trump is killing the rule of law.
It’s all wrong, and it is something that the American people should be furious about. The orange monster is an accomplice to negligent manslaughter. Even if the epidemic peaks in about five weeks as some experts predict, that conclusion will still be correct. This is not how a great nation does business.
In South Korea and Malaysia, thousands took to the streets and drove their leaders from office when this level of criminality occurred. When we finally can go outside again, the same thing needs to happen in the United States. After all, Amazon does sell pitchforks.
“Let us therefore have that salutary fear of the future that makes one watchful and combative, and not that sort of soft idle terror that wears hearts down and enervates them.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II 4.7