The Donald Trump Score Card

excellent

 

How many hundreds of false claims about the virus did CNN make?

 

I give up. Tell us.

 

Seriously that he said it?

 

Tell me again what you think he said in the first place, don't just link an article, the exact quote.

 

Why Trump was right about the Chinese tariffs

 

'Rejecting all oversight': is Trump purging government watchdogs?
President recently ousted two inspectors general, including one tasked with leading oversight of coronavirus relief law
Peter Stone in Washington
Sun 12 Apr 2020 06.55 EDT

'Rejecting all oversight': is Trump purging government watchdogs?

excerpt:

"Trump also drew fire for tapping a White House lawyer involved in fighting impeachment as a special IG to oversee a $500bn corporate bailout piece of the $2.2tn law. Days before, Trump had used the signing statement for the law to blunt two newly created IG posts, suggesting he would decide what information Congress receives about the aid package.

Trump’s sudden oustings of the two well-respected watchdogs, Michael Atkinson, the IG for the intelligence community, and Glenn Fine, the acting IG for the Pentagon, sparked special concerns given their timing and apparent political motivations.

Trump’s ousting of Fine, who was recently picked by his fellow IGs to run a critical oversight panel for the $2.2tn law, is seen as a broad slap at any oversight on the president and his administration since it rendered Fine ineligible to lead the watchdog panel.

Trump’s motives in firing Atkinson prompted other worries. After initially saying he had simply lost confidence in Atkinson, Trump used a pandemic press briefing the next day to unleash an angry torrent at Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint, slamming him as not “a big Trump fan”"

 

Yes.... Seriously.


You act like if something didn't happen yesterday, then it didn't happen at all. It doesn't work that way.

 

Coronavirus’ next victim: Populism
Quick fixes and crowd-pleasing politics won’t save you in a true emergency.
By Otto English
3/18/20, 10:54 AM CET
Updated 3/19/20, 9:53 PM CET

Coronavirus’ next victim: Populism

excerpt:

"Johnson might be a great turn on panel shows, but his unexceptional career in politics demonstrates a lazy man of limited vision, singularly unequipped to the task of steering the nation through a crisis. Like U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom he has far more in common than Churchill, Johnson is a celebrity politician whose electoral success is symptomatic of a different sort of virus. That disease is called populism, and much like coronavirus, it is nasty and rampant and has triggered the unsolicited self-isolation of a nation.

There’s a general acceptance that Brexit and the election of Trump were both, in part, side-effects of the fallout of the financial crisis in 2008. Ordinary people wanted to teach the elites a lesson. But that was not the whole story.

U.S. President Donald Trump is confronted by an enemy he has no playbook to tackle | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

America did well in the Obama years: The U.S. economy grew steadily during his terms of office and continued to do so through three years of Trump. As of December 2019, the U.S. was in its 11th consecutive year of growth. At the time of the Brexit vote in 2016, median incomes in the U.K. were on an upward trend, unemployment was at a near record low and the country had the fifth best performing economy in the world."

 

Coronavirus’ next victim: Populism

excerpt:

"Ironically, it was that very sense of economic exuberance that made the terrible decisions in the U.S. and the U.K. possible. As economies boom, perceived inequality is more keenly felt as the gap between rich and poor widens, offering fertile ground for populists.

But even more crucially, the twin indulgences of Trump and Brexit could only have happened in advanced, wealthy countries where a good proportion of the people felt secure enough to take the risk on political wild cards. Those who voted for Trump, Brexit and Johnson did so sensing that things could be shaken up a bit and everything would still be OK.

Enter the coronavirus. The outbreak takes a hand grenade to the conceit that everything is going to be alright — and thus it presents a very real threat to politicians like Trump and Johnson.

The essence of modern British and American populism is big personality politicians promising quick-fix solutions to complex or confected problems. It’s an approach that has its appeal in the good times, but when a proper emergency unfolds, populists and their crowd-pleasing politics are quickly exposed as ill-equipped to deal with the fall out."

 

Coronavirus’ next victim: Populism

excerpt:

"This crisis is a wake-up call to us all. The virus has no respect for borders, blue passports or sovereignty. It demonstrates, fundamentally, that we live in an interconnected world; that we need nations to work together in times of crisis as well as times of peace, and that to achieve all of the above we need serious, sensible politicians of good intent at the helm.

In the meantime, as the self-promoting popinjays in Downing Street and the White House plough on, let’s just hope that there are enough experts and grown-ups left to take back control from the virus."

 

The mindset at the White House and Downing Street early in the virus outbreak was that trying to achieve brute force herd immunity via no social distancing was a viable option to keep the economy going, albeit at an expense of about 1 to 2 million deaths in the U.S. and about a quarter million in the U.K.

Boris Johnson himself later contracted the coronavirus and ended up in the intensive care unit, where he could have become a member of the herd immunity wash.

Trump eventually abandoned his idea of letting the virus wash through the U.S. from its beginning, proposed a grand gala reopening of the U.S. on Easter with packed churches which would have created a secondary wash, and later gave up on that aspirational notion as the death rate in the U.S. was still rising near Easter at about 2000 deaths per day with social distancing in place.

The moments of aspirational notions of populists like Trump and Johnson have gone by the wayside one after another during the crisis.

Trump is now desperate enough to be making promises to the public that he will quickly make the economy better than it was before the coronavirus.

 

Back in 1995 the sci-fi show Babylon-5 predicted the Trump administration

 

Back in 1995 the sci-fi show Babylon-5 predicted the Trump administration

 

Isn't Babylon 5 set in the future? :hum:

 

Boris Johnson's Coronavirus Response Is a Fiasco
The British government and its advisers had the chance to learn from what was happening in Italy. They blew it.
By Ferdinando Giugliano
March 25, 2020, 3:00 AM EDT

Boris Johnson's Coronavirus Response Is a Fiasco

excerpt:

"For the past few weeks, anglophile Italians like me have looked at the British response to the Covid-19 epidemic with a mixture of horror and dismay. It was like watching a train crash in slow motion. Having lived through the past few weeks here in Milan, I could see exactly how this would end.

The British government had the privilege of more time to slow down the epidemic and to organize an effective response. The data suggest that Britain is a couple of weeks behind Italy in terms of the coronavirus’s spread and a week behind the rest of continental Europe. Yet Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his scientific and political advisers preferred to act gradually, only taking the blandest of measures. Unnamed senior government officials even had the gall to brief prominent journalists that Italy’s draconian measures were unscientific and populist.

Whoever said that looks utterly foolish now, indeed borderline culpable for what comes next. On Monday night, Johnson performed a U-turn, enforcing the kind of lockdown Italy put in place two weeks ago. These measures will take roughly two weeks to work, since they cannot stop the infections that have already occurred. The death toll was at 422 on Tuesday but will rise steeply. How many lives could have been spared had the government acted earlier?

Instead, Johnson preferred to toy with the idea of “herd immunity” — that is, letting the virus take its course to a large degree. The prime minister relied heavily on his “Behavioral Insights Team” (a so-called “nudge unit”) that would seek to pick the right response at the right time to minimize the risk of unintended consequences, and economic calamity."

 

A Pandemic in Search of an Establishment
Covid-19 could shake confidence in populist leadership.
By John Micklethwait
March 13, 2020, 8:55 AM EDT

A Pandemic in Search of an Establishment

excerpt:

"Or look at the response to the virus itself. Trump has followed the populist playbook. He first ridiculed the technocratic reaction, belittling the World Health Organization’s numbers and the advice of his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (trusting instead his own “hunches” over the data). He took a few swipes at immigrants and foreign countries, cutting off travel to China. Above all, he did little to gather experts, prepare test kits and so on. Then this week, he changed course, condemning the “foreign virus,” banning incoming travel from the EU, and warning Americans against visiting some of their oldest allies — without apparently alerting those allies of his decision. Rather than leading international cooperation, the president’s message is “America First.”

Not that Europe’s response has been especially impressive. To begin with, populists rushed to blame immigration for the virus. Hungary started turning back asylum seekers. In Italy, Matteo Salvini of the League linked the crisis to the docking of the Ocean Viking, a humanitarian ship with a couple hundred African migrants aboard. He demanded an “armor-plated” border and called on Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to resign “if he isn’t able to defend Italy and Italians.” More generally, the countries of the European Union have tended to compete rather than collaborate; with Germany grumbling about resources going to the south, there has been little attempt to marshal the power of the union to fight the crisis. At the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde seems stuck in a game of chicken with her governments, publicly urging them to add fiscal stimulus even as they push her to loosen policy further. So much for collaboration."

 

Coronavirus embarrassed Trump and Bolsonaro. But the global right will fight back
Science and welfare are at the heart of this crisis – which is bad for right-wing populists. But they won’t be wrongfooted for long
Paolo Gerbaudo
Wed 1 Apr 2020 05.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 1 Apr 2020 07.43 EDT

Coronavirus embarrassed Trump and Bolsonaro. But the global right will fight back | Paulo Gerbaudo

excerpt:

"The populist right has built their electoral strength on boisterousness and arrogant self-confidence. Yet, amid the coronavirus pandemic, figures such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro seem to be confounded. They are either desperately clinging to a narrative of normality (it’s just a flu), or have already been forced to make embarrassing U-turns acknowledging the gravity of the crisis.

Boris Johnson had to abandon the government’s “herd immunity” strategy when new scientific evidence made apparent its horrific human cost. He recently tested positive for the virus and is now accused of complacency and lack of leadership. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League party and former deputy prime minister, appears downbeat, unable to wear the robes of the responsible statesman this emergency calls for; his unabashed criticism of government has even earned him the label “unpatriotic”. In France, Marine Le Pen seems to have vanished altogether from the media, while Bolsonaro’s persistence in denying the crisis is leaving him increasingly isolated.

In the US, Trump’s strategy has been zigzagging. After downplaying the significance of the virus for weeks, he was forced to declare a national emergency. Having backtracked last week, asserting that the lockdown would end by Easter to avoid damaging the economy, he has now conceded it will have to last until the end of April. It is true that his approval ratings have gone up, paralleling what happened with George W Bush after September 11. But Trump is clearly worried about the electoral consequences of a massive death toll and a recession that could see unemployment of over 20%.".