Trumpenstein

Note: At the bottom of this is most of my “GNR Annex” for today, which i write 3-5 times a week on “Good News Roundup,” which is a terrific daily series with a different author every day of the week. There are a few interesting additions in the “Annex.”

The newly published NYT article about Trump’s incompetent virus response is so powerful, that Mother Jones wrote an article about the article. One can almost feel the pens quivering in their hands as they write about it. They also note that the Times story has SIX reporters with bylines, because of how much research went into it. “Trump’s failure on the virus” is going to become a storyline for the rest of history; he is a mass murderer, and this is a story that will end up putting him in prison—not because of the virus per se, but because no one will feel the slightest compassion for him as an ex-president, when Letitia James et al go after him on his long list of crimes. The article is long, detailed and spectacularly damning, and should rip Trump apart, politically. As far as the article is concerned:

www.nytimes.com/...

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response. By Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action… His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action. The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen… As February gave way to March, the president continued to be surrounded by divided factions even as it became clearer that avoiding more aggressive steps was not tenable. Mr. Trump had agreed to give an Oval Office address on the evening of March 11 announcing restrictions on travel from Europe, where the virus was ravaging Italy. But responding to the views of his business friends and others, he continued to resist calls for social distancing, school closures and other steps that would imperil the economy.

In terms of what we are going to experience, I hearken back to Thomas Friedman’s article about the world in terms of BC and AC: Before Coronavirus and After Coronavirus. We are never getting back to the pre-virus world, with so many differences in national wealth, personal wealth, education, state and local government viability, and all sorts of important behaviors. Are you going to ride a crowded mass transit facility any time soon? A crowded airplane? Go to a packed concert or other stadium event? How many people will face financial devastation? How well will we fight climate change with emptied coffers? And on, and on and on.

And in each and every case, literally millions of people will think about the changes in their lives and their nation, and then think about Trump’s role in bringing us there. I always disliked the man, but the rage and contempt I feel now is something really new for me—except for people like Hitler and Stalin. Except this is a lot more personal, because I am living through it. I can only hope that the detailed eloquent story in the Times article gets the kind of attention it deserves. In fact, the time to start working on a documentary film about the story about “Trump’s failure on the Virus” is now. It should be ready in time for the late stages of the presidential campaign, and contribute mightily to a blue tsunami.

God, I hate this guy.