Trump's desperate hours: He was contemptuous of the virus — now it has him trapped
Trump was convinced COVID-19 was nothing — and now it's in the White House. He's a desperate, dangerous man
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
MAY 9, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
Imagine you're dreaming, and it's a really, really bad dream. It's night, and something is chasing you down a dark street. You're running and running and running, trying to get away. All the windows are dark. No lights are on in any of the houses and apartments along the street. You bang on doors, but no one answers. You try the door handles, but the doors are all locked. When you cry out for help, no words come out of your mouth. No one can hear you. You keep running and running and running…
This is why Donald Trump is awake at 2:30 a.m., rage-tweeting. When he sleeps, he dreams, and his dreams are nightmares. He's a frightened, desperate man. Every day, he turns on his television, and the death count from the COVID-19 virus keeps going up. The economy — the precious economy, the one he's so proud of for no particular reason — is tanking. His poll numbers are down. His approval ratings are down. He's losing to Joe Biden in national polls and in every important swing state. Nothing he does is helping.
He has tried everything to beat the virus. First he denied it was a problem. You remember the quotes from February and March: It's only a few cases. Like magic, it will just go away. Then his people convinced him it wasn't going away, and he had to do something. So he trotted out a string of corporate execs and golf buddies onto a stage in the Rose Garden and declared a national emergency. Surely that would fix things!
But the virus kept spreading, and people were dying. The NBA canceled its season. So did Major League Baseball and NASCAR. Businesses started closing … General Motors, Ford, big businesses — and then small businesses like restaurants and retail stores and salons and barber shops. Unemployment numbers skyrocketed. Six million. Then another five million. Another six million. And those were just the people out of work who actually applied for unemployment benefits.
The virus kept spreading, and people kept dying. Trump called together a "task force" to confront the problem, and he put his vice president in charge. So Mike Pence started holding briefings in the White House press room with input from experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, the one with the shoulder scarves. When all the networks started covering them and the ratings were through the roof, Trump took over the briefings himself.
But things kept getting worse. The virus was everywhere. Hospitals were running out of protective gear like gowns and masks, emergency rooms were overrun, there was a shortage of ventilators. They had to do something, so they printed up a bunch of cards with "guidelines" for something called social distancing that was supposed to last 15 days.
more:
http://www.salon.com/2020/05/09/trumps-desperate-hours-he-was-contemptuous-of-the-virus--now-it-has-him-trapped/?fbclid=IwAR3HhIIOJQhpUxViubEgFHgY25ah9FaJSb9YaK_RPOz4LHIAhPbhACwTk3k
DO SOMETHING!
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