The Trump Presidency

[jfb]

The surest sign that the Republicans are preparing for a Trump loss is that they're making noise about the deficit.  They're prepping the field so that if Biden wins, absolutely nothing gets out of the Senate without massive cuts to SS and other social programs.  Oh, and even more tax cuts, because tax cuts are magic and fix everything. 

Remember kids, the deficit only matters when a Democrat is in charge. 

[Bryanpoprobson]

 "When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing we would have very few cases."

Seriously? The man needs to be committed to an asylum.

[JayUtah]

See, I took that ham-fisted remark to mean the only reason the U.S. sees so many cases compared to other countries is that, according to the President, we do so much more testing than other countries.  Which, of course, is demonstrably false.  The U.S. doesn't "lead the world" in testing, or even come within social distance of the podium.  But the President wants his followers to believe that he alone is saving the country while his predecessor whiled away uselessly and left us unprepared.  So it's more likely the U.S. infection rate is being underreported due to lack of testing.  But Donald Trump is trying to spin an alternate narrative that makes him look good as long as you don't look at all the facts together.

But I could be giving him too much credit.  Whether he realizes it or not, he's tapping into a habit that's all too common:  if you don't know the facts, then you don't have to deal with them.  It's why you have people showing up to the doctor suddenly with Stage 4 cancer, because they figured if they ignored all the previous warning signs then the problem would just go away on its own.  This is what the President seems to want to happen overall.  If not in this respect then certainly in others he is pressuring states to underreport the bad news.  He wants us to normalize to high infection rates, high mortality rates, so that we stop blaming him and accept that this terrible state of affairs was inevitable.

[LunarOrbit]

"When you test, you find something is wrong with people."

Which is why he doesn't want his school records released. They tested him and discovered that he is a moron.

[gillianren]

Lots of people inside the White House are starting to test positive, and they're following all the precautions they insist the rest of us don't need to.

[JayUtah]

Which is why he doesn't want his school records released. They tested him and discovered that he is a moron.

Almost certainly.  His former teachers have said he wasn't a good student.

This is what's so excruciatingly Trumpian.  It would be okay if he weren't a good student.  Harry Truman left college without a degree, mostly because he was too poor to pay for it.  But he has a reputation as being one of our smarter presidents because he did all the right things to compensate for a lack of formal education.  He read widely and often.  When he needed to know something, he would host private debates among suggested experts and then make his decision.

Donald Trump could have done something similar.  More specifically, he could have owned his poor grades and spun it to say he had street smarts instead -- the kind of stuff they don't teach in schools.  He could have drawn that as a contrast to Barack Obama (who had much academic success) and said that we need people of action to lead the country and not ivory-tower college professors.  The art of punditry has always suggested repackaging your weaknesses as if they were strengths.  And that's not to say that Trump didn't try something like that in his campaign.  But his overwhelming narcissism compels him to say that he is a "very stable genius," and that he got top marks in school.  He not only has to be good at everything, he has to be the best at it.  His whole branding business was based on the maxim that if you slap the Trump name on it, people will think it's the best of breed.  If it's possible to win or lose at something, Trump has to believe he won -- or would have won but for others' failure.

[JayUtah]

Lots of people inside the White House are starting to test positive, and they're following all the precautions they insist the rest of us don't need to.

And even going so far as to insist that it's now acceptable for everyone else to return to work.  I wonder if a time will come when the present administration stops trying to just manage the optics of this crisis and starts taking it seriously.  At every step they seem to be doubling-down on the denial.

[Jason Thompson]

Lots of people inside the White House are starting to test positive, and they're following all the precautions they insist the rest of us don't need to.

And even going so far as to insist that it's now acceptable for everyone else to return to work.  I wonder if a time will come when the present administration stops trying to just manage the optics of this crisis and starts taking it seriously.  At every step they seem to be doubling-down on the denial.

I think they're too far down the rabbit hole, and with that thundering cockwomble of a President, who is pathologically incapable of admitting any mistakes or accepting responsibility for anything not going well, I am very much afraid that until and unless he is removed the US is doomed to stumble through this crisis with no leadership whatsoever, regardless of the human cost. The thig that surprises me is that it seems obvious there is going to be an economic cost way over and above the lockdown, because if the current administration don't get their finger out, the rest of the world is going to socially distance itself from the US for fear of contamination.
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[gillianren]

At least some of the governors, including mine, are doing things right.

[JayUtah]

I'm not sure about our governor anymore.  But it's more a topic for the COVID-19 thread, so I'll post it there.

Note how various states are forming regional coalitions and consortiums to pool their resources?  Absent a functional central government, the States are uniting in useful ways.

[JayUtah]

I think they're too far down the rabbit hole...

And it's not like their constituents will hold them accountable.  Thanks to entertainment masquerading as news, some people are absolutely convinced that Trump's allies are helping him "drain the swamp."

The lawful ways to remove a President are painfully few.  There's no Thundering Cockwomble provision in the Constitution, and Donald Trump has already proven that impeachment is useless.  People are talking about the 25th Amendment, governing presidential incapacity, but that still requires Congress to act and agree.  There is no way that testudinate hemorrhoid of a Senate Majority Leader will let a vote happen that ousts Trump.  (I'm still trying to figure out how a people who hold an office that is not mentioned in the Constitution, and which is -- by definition -- a partisan office, can be allowed to wield so much power in the various Houses of Congress.)

Even Sen. McConnell tried to jump on the bandwagon of blaming the previous administration.  That indicates they are accepting the inevitable consequences of pandemic-level mortality across the country, and are trying to salvage their politics by finding someone to blame.  It's no longer "It's a hoax," or "We're doing great."  The message is, "Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, and we want you to think it was our now-inconsequential political adversary's fault."  Statesmanship has devolved to politics, and politics has devolved to meaningless fanaticism.

The thing that surprises me is that it seems obvious there is going to be an economic cost way over and above the lockdown, because if the current administration don't get their finger out, the rest of the world is going to socially distance itself from the US for fear of contamination.

And if that happens, I'm worried that the Trump administration will keep spinning conspiracy theories wider to involve the rest of the world, and then threaten military action to force the lifting of restrictions and sanctions.  Countries with well-developed militaries, whose leaders blamed their own economic failures on others, haven't historically fared well.

[Zakalwe]

Well worth a read: https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed

A Croatian once said (of civil war and mass graves due to genocide) "don't think that it can never happen in your country. I used to think like that".

Its also worth spending an hour listening to this interview:

Yes, i know that the interviewer, Griffin is a nutjob, but some of the stuff talked about is remarkably prescient (and chilling).
"As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show
him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American, it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show
him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American, it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

The more i look at Trump in the US, Johnson in the UK, Brexit and the rise of populism, the more I am convinced that Putin is a stone-cold genius at this stuff.

[Peter B]

Well worth a read: https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed

A couple of good shout outs to the Australian situation regarding the pandemic. As I said over at UM, so often the Scandinavian countries are held up as an example to Australia, but maybe when it comes to the pandemic they (and others) might look to Australia.

A Croatian once said (of civil war and mass graves due to genocide) "don't think that it can never happen in your country. I used to think like that".

I can see where the sentiment comes from. All (all? ha!) you need to do is find the fault lines in a society and exploit them to the full. In Yugoslavia in the 1990s it was ethnicity and religion. In Spain in the 1930s it was politics. Dare I say it, in the USA in the 1850s and 1860s it was slavery.

The more i look at Trump in the US, Johnson in the UK, Brexit and the rise of populism, the more I am convinced that Putin is a stone-cold genius at this stuff.

He may be, but as I said earlier in this thread, Putin is naive if he doesn't think Russia is on China's to-do list, just a little further down than the USA. And just remember what happened to Russia the last time a Russian leader thought he had the measure of the neighbourhood's big bully.

[Allan F]

Sweden didn't take precautions, before it was too late, so they have suffered a lot of unnecessary deaths. Denmark closed all public assemblies - bars, nightclubs, music festivals, schools and prohibited public assemblies for any reason over 10 people right at the start, and we're doing quite well.

[gillianren]

I believe Sweden's goal is herd immunity.  Graham's sister lives there; apparently, her husband was already working from home, and she's on maternity leave, so they've been able to stay home anyway, though she says she's gotten quite a lot of "gee, I wonder if Margaret is alive or dead" messages.