BarryLaverty Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 The Emperor has no clothes. Never has. The Trump Presidency Is Over It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. MARCH 13, 2020 Peter Wehner Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC BASTIAAN SLABBERS / NURPHOTO / GETTY Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent. To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look. That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity. “They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.” Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not." Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong. Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it. The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more. On and on it goes. To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As TheWashington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.” Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious. The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the wordsof Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes. The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation. It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over. 1 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Trump Presidency Is Over It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. MARCH 13, 2020 Peter Wehner Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC BASTIAAN SLABBERS / NURPHOTO / GETTY Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent. To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look. That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity. “They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.” Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not." Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong. Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it. The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more. On and on it goes. To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As TheWashington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.” Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious. The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the wordsof Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes. The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation. It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
Wild74 Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wild74 Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 President Trump and his team have been absolutely brilliant. The the covid19 threat is extremely dangerous but the situation is far from critical at this point and the media has way over hyped the “world is coming to an end” false narrative. President Trump is doing political ju jitsu on his opponents, who have badly overplayed their hands Covid19 will be big enough to be a problem for the next several months but situation should quickly resolve itself given President Trumps decisive measures. The US will come out looking much better at dealing with crisis than tye rest of the world and the Pres deserves the credit President will have awesome emergency powers to direct corona virus health care emergency for at least the next year and fall out will change our health case system for the better on lasting basis The politicization of the covid19 crisis to try to destroy President Trump is by far the biggest unforced political error they have done so far, and thats saying something. They have teed up the ball for President Trumps success and now he will pull out a driver and hit a hole in one. They created a serious crisis and The Pres is going to drive it for all its worth 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DannyZuco Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 Another op-ed from the guy who parrots everything negative about the President. Barry needs a cracker. LOL 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wild74 Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 A FRIDAY THE 13TH THAT MAY HAVE SAVED THE PRESIDENT Editorial by Kevin Ryan If President Trump ends up getting re-elected, today, Friday the 13th of March, might be remembered as the day that saved his presidency. Not because of the stock market’s big rebound this afternoon. Yes, the Dow rose 1,985 points — the largest single day point gain ever and the 9th highest percent gain ever. But yesterday the Dow fell by an even larger amount than it gained today. And the index is still down 21% from its Feb. 12th high. Today could have just been the proverbial dead cat bounce. Instead, what should give his supporters cause for optimism is that President Trump’s speech this afternoon not only outlined a plan to address the coronavirus, but also revealed for the first time an effective response to the political criticisms he’s received over the outbreak that have been threatening to derail his campaign. The plan he unveiled relied heavily on the private sector to help implement. And standing behind Trump in the Rose Garden were the people who will make it possible. CEOs of Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Target, and others each took the mic to express their commitment to put in place a coronavirus testing plan that leveraged existing retail infrastructure and even drive-through facilities to meet the burgeoning demand for testing. And instead of putting up a whole new layer of government bureaucracy to “solve” the outbreak, as so many other politicians would have, President Trump correctly pointed out that the problem WAS the bureaucracy. He announced he was giving the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services the power to essentially deregulate old, obsolete government rules that were making a rapid response to a rapid crisis impossible. And he pointed to the FDA’s record fast approval of a new test for the virus that took place within just a few hours of receiving the application from Roche Diagnostics — a process that would normally have taken weeks — as an example of how the process can be sped up by cutting back on the bureaucratic red tape that had been slowing the process in the first place. It wasn’t just a plan to address the coronavirus; it was a direct response to the politicization of the outbreak by his critics. ‘I’m not responsible for the slow tests; the government bureaucracy that my rivals actually want to expand is responsible’. It was a message that could be the first volley in a political counteroffensive that may come to include pointing out that Democrats are the ones who have prevented him from securing the border, and are the ones who tied up his administration with impeachment during the first two months of the virus outbreak. There was no martial law, no nationwide shutdown, no new massive Department of Pandemic Protection. None of the feared overreactions that had been rumored. The markets loved it. Indeed it was no coincidence that almost the entirety of the stock market’s two-thousand point record run-up today occurred during the half hour of the president’s speech. Investors… indeed Americans as a whole… were finally reassured by a plan put in place by a man elected to office specifically for his ability to tear down the burdensome government establishment that his supporters say has been holding the country back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveTV1 Posted March 15, 2020 Share Posted March 15, 2020 9 hours ago, Wild74 said: President Trump and his team have been absolutely brilliant. The the covid19 threat is extremely dangerous but the situation is far from critical at this point and the media has way over hyped the “world is coming to an end” false narrative. President Trump is doing political ju jitsu on his opponents, who have badly overplayed their hands Covid19 will be big enough to be a problem for the next several months but situation should quickly resolve itself given President Trumps decisive measures. The US will come out looking much better at dealing with crisis than tye rest of the world and the Pres deserves the credit President will have awesome emergency powers to direct corona virus health care emergency for at least the next year and fall out will change our health case system for the better on lasting basis The politicization of the covid19 crisis to try to destroy President Trump is by far the biggest unforced political error they have done so far, and thats saying something. They have teed up the ball for President Trumps success and now he will pull out a driver and hit a hole in one. They created a serious crisis and The Pres is going to drive it for all its worth The Wuhan virus is a big bag of nothing. He fell for the Democrat/MSM trap and helped create a crisis. That will hurt him in the long run with those that will lose their jobs or not have the business to survive even if they do have one especially in the service industry. It will all be blamed on him. If you notice both Biden and Sanders aren't stating what steps that they would take. They know that would hurt them in November. If you've seen an article or speech on how they would handle the issue, I would love to read it. They know that would give Trump firepower against them in the election after the virus goes away. We are treating this far quicker and faster than even HIV that has killed over 700,000 Americans. At the current time there are only 2,386 infected people in the United States, and it has caused all of this ? There have been 57 deaths for a recovery rate of 97.64 %. This is a pandemic, and causing disruptions to our economy at a much higher clip. If millions of service workers, gig workers, vendors, etc. do not have jobs are can barely survive on unemployment crime will go up. We need to remain calm, but instead businesses, local governments, and now the Federal Government are causing widespread panic. We need level heads, but instead it is now a political created hysteria. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarthDawg77 Posted March 15, 2020 Share Posted March 15, 2020 32 minutes ago, DaveTV1 said: The Wuhan virus is a big bag of nothing. He fell for the Democrat/MSM trap and helped create a crisis. That will hurt him in the long run with those that will lose their jobs or not have the business to survive even if they do have one especially in the service industry. It will all be blamed on him. If you notice both Biden and Sanders aren't stating what steps that they would take. They know that would hurt them in November. If you've seen an article or speech on how they would handle the issue, I would love to read it. They know that would give Trump firepower against them in the election after the virus goes away. We are treating this far quicker and faster than even HIV that has killed over 700,000 Americans. At the current time there are only 2,386 infected people in the United States, and it has caused all of this ? There have been 57 deaths for a recovery rate of 97.64 %. This is a pandemic, and causing disruptions to our economy at a much higher clip. If millions of service workers, gig workers, vendors, etc. do not have jobs are can barely survive on unemployment crime will go up. We need to remain calm, but instead businesses, local governments, and now the Federal Government are causing widespread panic. We need level heads, but instead it is now a political created hysteria. Indeed! Great post, Dave. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wild74 Posted March 15, 2020 Share Posted March 15, 2020 1 hour ago, DaveTV1 said: The Wuhan virus is a big bag of nothing. He fell for the Democrat/MSM trap and helped create a crisis. That will hurt him in the long run with those that will lose their jobs or not have the business to survive even if they do have one especially in the service industry. It will all be blamed on him. If you notice both Biden and Sanders aren't stating what steps that they would take. They know that would hurt them in November. If you've seen an article or speech on how they would handle the issue, I would love to read it. They know that would give Trump firepower against them in the election after the virus goes away. We are treating this far quicker and faster than even HIV that has killed over 700,000 Americans. At the current time there are only 2,386 infected people in the United States, and it has caused all of this ? There have been 57 deaths for a recovery rate of 97.64 %. This is a pandemic, and causing disruptions to our economy at a much higher clip. If millions of service workers, gig workers, vendors, etc. do not have jobs are can barely survive on unemployment crime will go up. We need to remain calm, but instead businesses, local governments, and now the Federal Government are causing widespread panic. We need level heads, but instead it is now a political created hysteria. I agree with most of what you stated, Waskom just shut its school down for a week, funny I don't know of a soul who has the virus in Waskom even though there is 3 or 4 in Caddo parish across the stateline. If Trump done nothing he would be blamed for not doing enough to save the children or old folks in this case of course he will be accused of doing to much by many especially in the service sector as you mentioned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mellon Posted March 15, 2020 Share Posted March 15, 2020 Great Googly Moogly....Barry, stop it for goodness sake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KirtFalcon Posted March 15, 2020 Share Posted March 15, 2020 President Trump's response to this manufactured crisis has been 1,000% better than Obama's pathetic, too little too late response to his virus epidemic .... tru storie .... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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