" Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response" - Page 182 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15112734
Godstud wrote::roll:

Yes, and if Covid-19 was as deadly and infectious as H1N1, we'd be dealing with it a lot differently. Thank you for pointing out the obvious. :knife:

You have a hard time reading and understanding. I pointed out that "H1N1 was less infectious and deadly than covid-19." :lol:
#15112737
Godstud wrote:Yes, @Hindsite Thank you for pointing out the fucking obvious.

What's your point???

According to recent comments made by the Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the coronavirus is ten times deadlier than the swine flu outbreak a decade ago.

“We know that Covid-19 spreads fast and we know that it is deadly – ten times deadlier than the 2009 flu pandemic. We know that the virus can spread more easily in crowded environments like nursing homes."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/heal ... 62896.html
The point is that President Trump has done a better job with preventing deaths in this pandemic than Obama and Biden did with H1N1 (swine flu).
#15112749
No. Trump has done next to nothing. He has not provided any leadership from the top and has left all the states to their own devices, regardless of what they want to do.

USA is a prime example of a failed leadership during this pandemic.

How the Pandemic Defeated America
A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.

Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.

Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.

The United States has correctly castigated China for its duplicity and the WHO for its laxity—but the U.S. has also failed the international community. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHO’s executive board, but left that position empty for more than two years, only filling it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, Trump has pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office in China, who could have warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded an American epidemiologist embedded within China’s CDC. America First was America oblivious.

Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.

Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, “so that when something like this happens, you’re moving quickly,” Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. “By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.” Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemic—not stop it. And they can create a harmful false confidence, so countries “rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up the health system,” says Thomas Bollyky, a global-health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That sounds an awful lot like what happened in the U.S.”

This was predictable. A president who is fixated on an ineffectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vectors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a first resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xenophobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea.

And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining COVID‑19. Although the disease first arrived in the U.S. in mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.

On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.

drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**

Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. The ensuing confusion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has created a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineffectual silver bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant or absent qualifications have found regular slots on the nightly news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump.

During a pandemic, leaders must rally the public, tell the truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeatedly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, and himself. He said that “nobody ever thought a thing like [the pandemic] could happen” and also that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Both statements cannot be true at the same time, and in fact neither is true.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... re/614191/

Reality itself, is the biggest argument against Trump having provided sound and reasonable leadership to the USA.
#15112756
Godstud wrote:No. Trump has done next to nothing.

That's a fair assessment. But it really doesn't matter that much. It may matter to be people psychologically, but in practical terms what Trump did wasn't that important. It was what happened at the State and City level. The States and localities really did have their fate in their own hands. It was the Governors, State Houses, State Senates, Mayors, State Courts, local councils (or what ever they call them out there) and local courts as well as all the State and local health care apparatus that mattered.

The big Federal aid packages mattered, but remember they didn't need Trump for that, Congress can easily override Trump even if he had wanted to veto them with a two thirds majority.

Were there things that in an ideal America a good smart President could have done to make a significant difference? Oh no doubt. But America is a million miles from its ideal self. This was always going to be politicised. In any crisis like this there is always extreme politician competition. And a lot of that competition is about pretending to non partisan. A lot of the competition is about blaming the other side for politicising the crisis. If there was a case for severe early lock downs it was in the big Democrat run cities. If you value those lock downs, if you believe in those measures then you should be thanking Trump. Because nothing could be better designed to get the administrative class in the big cities behind lockdown than Trump being against it.

For American Liberals this crisis is not about saving lives, its not about saving people from long term chronic illness. Its about taking down Trump. They don't even hide it. Some of them call it the Trump virus. They admit it. "For us this virus is all about Trump." Theey are not interested in working out how best to avoid Covid deaths. They are not interested in balncing the the three competing but interrelated priorities of reducing deaths and illness, keeping the economy working and stopping the healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. No all they care about is what Trump said in his Twitter feed and when how they can use it or distort it to reduce his chance of relelection. Nether mind sacrificing their own Grandmother, some of them would sacrifice their Grand Father and their parents as well if the could get rid of Trump in November.
#15113778
Don't worry guys. The guy who believes the pyramids were ancient grain storage silos for aliens and a former crack addict who sells bags filled with shredded memory foam at $50 a pop are on the case.



It's made from oleander, a poisonous plant, and as you probably guessed there is absolutely nothing backing this up.
#15113783
Atlantis wrote:But he got more Americans killed than any previous president.

If you're going by that standard, you have to include WWI and the Spanish Flu and Woodrow Wilson gets the credit. Presidents, however, do not spread germs among the population generally speaking. It's a novel idea among the political left to make this sort of argument now, and everyone already knows that this is even more absurd than the idea that Trump colluded with Russia.

Are you really going to argue that say, all alcohol-related deaths or all drug-related deaths are the fault of the president? How about cancer deaths? He hasn't come up with a cure for old age yet either. :knife:
#15113790
The funniest thing about the My Pillow guy is that he's just a straight up grifter and previously he had been doing the Evangelical redemption grift. I can believe he was a crack addict at some point, but redemption stories are porn for Evangelicals so anyone running that scam has to puff up how degenerate they were before they found Christ. Like claiming they had gay sex with demons during blood rituals and all sorts of stupid shit a person who wasn't an immensely sheltered weirdo would know is just a bald faced lie.

The My Pillow guy claims that he once spent a week straight up on crack and that his dealer refused to sell to him until he took a nap, and then called every crack dealer in town to tell them to do the same. Like, c'mon man haha.

And now he is one of the president's most trusted confidants lmao.
#15113794
SpecialOlympian wrote:The funniest thing about the My Pillow guy is that he's just a straight up grifter and previously he had been doing the Evangelical redemption grift. I can believe he was a crack addict at some point, but redemption stories are porn for Evangelicals so anyone running that scam has to puff up how degenerate they were before they found Christ. Like claiming they had gay sex with demons during blood rituals and all sorts of stupid shit a person who wasn't an immensely sheltered weirdo would know is just a bald faced lie.

The My Pillow guy claims that he once spent a week straight up on crack and that his dealer refused to sell to him until he took a nap, and then called every crack dealer in town to tell them to do the same. Like, c'mon man haha.

And now he is one of the president's most trusted confidants lmao.

Have you bought a My Pillow product? If so, which one and how did you like or not like it.
#15113816
Zoey141 wrote:This is the kind of uniform response the world is witnessing from most right wing nationalist governments. Healthcare, education and environment have been desecuritised from the realm of politics whilst pointing at a distant and non-emerging issue as an immediate threat.

Education is about the quality of the parents at the household. If we have not figured out how to teach then we never will.
The environment is not an issue when people have no jobs. It is the economy!
Otherwise, Healthcare is the best issue for the Dems.
#15113845
blackjack21 wrote:If you're going by that standard, you have to include WWI and the Spanish Flu and Woodrow Wilson gets the credit. ...


Could Woodrow Wilson have prevented WWI? If yes, he gets the blame. However, you don't need to be a historian to know that he didn't start WWI.

The standard is "avoidable casualties", not unavoidable casualties. A commander who sends his troops into an avoidable senseless battle in which they are bound to get massacred will get the blame.

There are a million measures Trump could have taken to avoid the catastrophic outbreak in the US. Starting at least 2 years ago, Trump did everything to undermine the US's pandemic preparedness. Under Obama, the US was the best prepared country in the world. Everything Trump did had the effect of worsening the US outbreak. By the time your economy has recovered in 10 years time, if ever, China will have replaced the US as the most important economy in the world. Trump likes to "dig ...", he failed to qualify that he was digging the US's grave.

It's mind-blowing that a single person was able to undo all of that and condemn the US to the worst pandemic outbreak worldwide. You have gone from the very top to the very bottom, all because of Trump.

Excess deaths data show that the real Covid-19 deaths figure is already well above 200k. By the time Trump has done with the country, you'll be at 300k. That's more that US casualties in WWII. And Trump will get the blame for every single one of them.
#15113852
Atlantis wrote:The standard is "avoidable casualties", not unavoidable casualties. A commander who sends his troops into an avoidable senseless battle in which they are bound to get massacred will get the blame.

Wilson didn't need to enter WWI at all. In fact, he promised voters he would not. So he broke his campaign promise.

Atlantis wrote:There are a million measures Trump could have taken to avoid the catastrophic outbreak in the US.

No. The only thing he could have done differently was shut off all travel. Politically, he was crucified for blocking travel from China, which bought us time. Then, the disease came in to the East Coast from Europe and spread from New York City to pretty much the rest of the country.

Atlantis wrote:Starting at least 2 years ago, Trump did everything to undermine the US's pandemic preparedness. Under Obama, the US was the best prepared country in the world. Everything Trump did had the effect of worsening the US outbreak.

That's rubbish. States like New York did not stock up on ventilators as recommended, and went squealing to the federal government asking for 30k ventilators they didn't need, spawning the federal government to invoke emergency powers to have manufacturers make more ventilators than were needed. Explain how Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and the UK were so unprepared. They all have government-run health care which you people keep telling us is so awesome?

Atlantis wrote:By the time your economy has recovered in 10 years time, if ever, China will have replaced the US as the most important economy in the world.

The US economy is already on the upswing. Both the EU and the US will be moving jobs back home, because there are very obvious strategic problems with pursuing absolute advantage over comparative advantage.

Atlantis wrote:It's mind-blowing that a single person was able to undo all of that and condemn the US to the worst pandemic outbreak worldwide.

:roll: This preparedness only exists in your imagination. Your ridiculous use of statistics is of similar dubiousness. Assemble the major powers of the EU and you have about 336M people, and about 1000 more death than the US for about the same population. In other words, the US is doing no better or worse than the EU. Yet, you have this amazing socialist health care system we're all supposed to envy. At least Sweden didn't destroy their freedom or their economy.

Atlantis wrote:You have gone from the very top to the very bottom, all because of Trump.

Oh gee wow! What compelling rhetoric. I think I'll vote for a massive tax increase, tons of illegal immigration, more jobs outsourcing, a green new deal and medicare for all including illegal aliens now. :knife: Get real.

Atlantis wrote:Excess deaths data show that the real Covid-19 deaths figure is already well above 200k. By the time Trump has done with the country, you'll be at 300k. That's more that US casualties in WWII. And Trump will get the blame for every single one of them.

Yeah, but they're mostly old Democrats who won't be voting in the next election.
#15113931
blackjack21 wrote: I think I'll vote for a massive tax increase, tons of illegal immigration, more jobs outsourcing, a green new deal and medicare for all including illegal aliens now. :knife: Get real.
These are all lies, and you know it. You have stopped making even slightly intellectual arguments and are now falling back on old, tired, and fake rhetoric from the Republican right-wing extremist base.

Trump is largely responsible for the problems in the USA. As another president said about the presidency, "The buck stops here.".
#15113961
Godstud wrote:These are all lies, and you know it.

Dude, why not just read the DNC Platform draft? Reading give you a headache?

DNC Platform Draft wrote:Our tax system has been rigged against the American people by big corporations and their
lobbyists, and by Republican politicians who dole out tax cuts to their biggest donors while
leaving working families to struggle.

Democrats will take action to reverse the Trump Administration’s tax cuts benefiting the
wealthiest Americans and rewarding corporations for shipping American jobs overseas. We will
crack down on overseas tax havens and close loopholes that are exploited by the wealthiest
Americans and biggest corporations. We will make sure the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.
We will make sure investors pay the same tax rates as workers
and bring an end to expensive and
unproductive tax loopholes, including the carried interest loophole. Corporate tax rates, which
were cut sharply by the 2017 Republican tax cut, must be raised, and “trickle-down” tax cuts
must be rejected. Estate taxes should also be raised back to the historical norm.

Democrats will reform the tax code to be more progressive and equitable, and reduce barriers for
working families to benefit from targeted tax breaks, including the Earned Income Tax Credit
and the Child Tax Credit. Our program of reform will provide immediate, marked relief for
working families, including more generous, refundable tax credits to benefit low- and middle
income families, and easier and more equitable access to tax provisions that help working
families build wealth, including by equalizing tax benefits for retirement contributions and
providing more accessible tax breaks for homeownership.

They are literally talking about raising capital gains taxes from 20% up to the top rate. Watch what the stock market does if that ever comes to fruition.

Joe Biden embraces Green New Deal as he releases climate plan
Can we trust the Washington Post?

Biden immigration plan grants citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants

We all know that Hunter got money so that Biden would favor China. Nobody is fooled.

Godstud wrote:Trump is largely responsible for the problems in the USA.

Man Kicked in Head, Violent Portland Assaults Caught in Graphic Video

We can all see the difference between Democrat-run areas and Republican-run areas--at least those of us who actually live here. You folks in Thailand have to rely on fake news to misinform yourselves. :excited: :D :lol:
#15113973
Removing tax cuts that helped only the very rich is all you are bitching about. of course, you've only ever cared about how YOU benefit, and no one else. Apathy is your middle name.

As for immigrants: You lie... As expected.

Fact check: House bill does not grant amnesty to immigrants illegally in U.S.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac ... 238214002/

Trump is not responsible for violence. I never said anything related to that, you pseudo-intellectual tool. He IS responsible for the shit response to the pandemic, and the people dying from that.


Ah, it only took a few posts and you are back to your irrelevant idiocy about where I am posting from. It is no more relevant than where you are posting from, as we have the same access to information. You are childishly trying to distract again, since that's the only tactic that you can come up with.

You're the one spreading fake news, :moron:
#15113981
SpecialOlympian wrote:I sleep on a pile of My Pillow pillows and I haven't had a good night of sleep in months because of the trapped crack fumes that rush out of them every time I lay down.

The advertisement claims that My Pillow can be machine washed. Give that a try.

blackjack21 wrote:Dude, why not just read the DNC Platform draft? Reading give you a headache?

I believe Godstud only trusts those sources that agrees with his local Chinese Communist Party propaganda. :lol:
#15114127
I saw a clip from a rally Trump held today and it was just a bunch of old people without masks standing together in the heat. It was 105-108 degrees or so, so probably too hot to even do those skin temperature readings.

Trump is just straight up murdering his dumbass base. Although they're not willing to die for him, they're willing to die for the racism he represents.
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