How many businesses did he bankrupt again? Who needs a fire department? We’ll just call people up when there’s a fire. Oh they need equipment, training, and resources? Uh, we’ll just order that stuff real quick like too.
“For about 20 minutes on Thursday, President Trump undermined six decades of dogma on the development of safe and effective drugs,” STAT reports. “Trump, addressing a nation under shelter and quarantine from the coronavirus pandemic, said a new drug for Covid-19, yet to be proved safe and effective, was now ‘approved or very close to approved.’ Another, also not approved for coronavirus, would be ‘available almost immediately,’ in part because using it is ‘not going to kill anybody.'” “Then, minutes later, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, took the dais in the White House briefing room and delicately walked back each one of Trump’s statements.”
“What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest.” “Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/donald-trump-menace-public-health/608449/
New ad from conservative group targets Trump on coronavirus messaging: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...-ad-targets-coronavirus-messaging/2882000001/ WASHINGTON – A group of anti-Trump conservatives released a new ad Thursday targeting President Donald Trump on his messaging over the coronavirus outbreak. As cases have skyrocketed around the country, the White House's messaging toward the virus has dramatically shifted from saying they had already "shut it down" in regard to the spread of COVID-19, to daily press briefings addressing the growing number of cases. The ad from the Republicans for the Rule of Law, who backed the president’s impeachment, shows Trump speaking about the issue in January, when there was just one confirmed case. Trump said then he was not at all concerned about a pandemic striking the U.S.