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Abby Zimet: Murderous Fail After Fail
So yes: Trump has blood on his tiny, stubby, murderous hands.
On Easter, as U.S. coronavirus cases hit over half a million and deaths soared past 22,000, the country’s alleged leader spent the day rage-tweeting and declaring, “I am working hard to expose the corruption and dishonesty in the Lamestream Media,” because it’s not like there’s anything else he should be doing even though The New York Times, the ever-sober, tightrope-walking Anthony Fauci, lawmakers on both sides, health experts and a raft of other media outlets are still consistently, horrifyingly revealing his multiple new “epic failures” that rendered the pandemic more deadly than it had to be. The Times story, appearing the same day all 50 states were for the first time in U.S. history under a major disaster declaration – which Trump bizarrely boasted about – offered a devastating look at Trump’s fatal delays starting in January. A week after the first case in the U.S. and six long weeks before Trump finally took action, multiple senior medical advisers, government figures, White House officials and intelligence experts were all sounding the alarm about an upcoming virus, feverishly warning, “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” Yet he did nothing – other than prattle, in Davos, “We have it totally under control.”
Other reports confirm the “absolute clusterfuck” that has been his repeated failures to act. While he blathered the virus “has gotten too brilliant” for antibiotics to work – he evidently still doesn’t get the difference between viral and bacterial – a damning House report found that, even once the virus hit, his administration didn’t give states supplies from the National Strategic Stockpile based on need. Protective gear was blindly, stupidly distributed – the same number of masks to Vermont (pop. 623,989) and Texas (pop 28.9 million) – and it quickly ran out, “leaving states to fend for themselves.” The House found Trump failed to bring in competent leadership, name a national commander, manage distribution, use FEMA and the Defense Production Act. And the only national plan that’s emerged is from a coalition of governors, mayors, tech officials, health experts and non-profits going around him. Alone among hotels and other businesses, he hasn’t even chipped in to help fight the outbreak. “It’s mind-boggling, (the) degree of disorganization,” said one medical expert of blunders ranging from testing to supplies. On Sunday, Dr. Fauci agreed, carefully but dramatically confirming the Times’ charge of fatal delays. If social distancing and other mitigating measures had started earlier, “You could have saved lives… But there was a lot of push-back about shutting things down.” So yes: Trump has blood on his tiny, stubby, murderous hands.
We’ll just leave these here:
BREAKING: Trump confirms NYT story is true.pic.twitter.com/68x7BTeqwE
— Stay-at-Home Jedi (@JediCounselor) April 13, 2020
DR. FAUCI on CNN: “You could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously no one is going to deny that … But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back [in February].” pic.twitter.com/KpUDCrkS64
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2020
The death notices of today’s Sunday @BostonGlobe are 11 pages long. #COVID19#Massachusetts pic.twitter.com/dxLobUKSwh
— Julio Ricardo Varela (@julito77) April 12, 2020
First published in CommonDreams.
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