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steve2470

(37,457 posts)
Fri Mar 27, 2020, 05:19 AM Mar 2020

The Trump O'Clock Follies

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trump-oclock-follies

The President’s mendacious nightly press briefings on the coronavirus will go down in history for their monumental flimflammery.

During the Vietnam War, the United States had the Five O’Clock Follies, nightly briefings at which American military leaders claimed, citing a variety of bogus statistics, half-truths, and misleading reports from the front, to be winning a war that they were, in fact, losing. Richard Pyle, the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau chief, called the press conferences “the longest-playing tragicomedy in Southeast Asia’s theater of the absurd,” which, minus the “Southeast Asia” part, is not a bad description of the scene currently playing out each evening in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, in the White House. We now have the Trump Follies, the nightly briefings at which President Trump has lied and bragged, lamented and equivocated, about the global pandemic that poses an existential threat to his Presidency. Just as the Vietnam briefings became a standard by which the erosion of government credibility could be measured then, historians of the future will consult the record of Trump’s mendacious, misleading press conferences as an example of a tragic failure of leadership at such a critical moment. There will be much material for them; the transcripts from just the first three days of this week runs to more than forty thousand words.

Since Trump began making the press conferences a daily ritual a couple of weeks ago—an eternity in the pandemic era—his more memorable lines are already featuring in political attacks against him. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump insisted, two weeks ago. When asked to assess his own performance, he said, “I’d rate it a ten.” This Wednesday, with members of his coronavirus task force joining him onstage, he added, “We’ve done one hell of a job. Nobody has done the job that we’ve done. And it’s lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem or you wouldn’t even have a country left.”

The disconnect between Trumpian reality and actual reality has never been on starker display than in the past few days, as the true face of the horror we are facing in the United States has shown itself, in New York City, with overwhelmed morgues and emergency rooms, a governor pleading for ventilators and face masks from the federal government, and heartbreaking first-person accounts reminiscent of the open letters sent from Italy a few weeks back, which warned Americans: this is what is coming for you—don’t make our mistakes. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said that the United States was emerging as the “epicenter” of the global pandemic, which makes the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room the emerging epicenter of the failure to respond to it.

A couple of weeks ago, it seemed as if maybe that would not be the case. Although the Trump Administration had faltered and delayed and denied through the initial stages of the virus, when it raged outside our borders, it looked like it might finally get its act together and take this public-health menace seriously, now that it was hitting in force inside the U.S. Trump declared a “national emergency,” stepped up testing, and, on March 16th, agreed to his crisis committee’s plan for a fifteen-day countrywide slowdown, in order to “flatten the curve” of the disease’s trajectory. Barely a week into the fifteen days, however, Trump began signalling an abrupt change of course—at just the moment when the disease was accelerating its deadly progress through a wealthy nation that turned out to be surprisingly ill-prepared for it.
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The Trump O'Clock Follies (Original Post) steve2470 Mar 2020 OP
trumps legacy will be one of complete failure duforsure Mar 2020 #1
He did not do this damage alone. Scarsdale Mar 2020 #2

duforsure

(11,882 posts)
1. trumps legacy will be one of complete failure
Fri Mar 27, 2020, 06:10 AM
Mar 2020

For everything he's done to destroy this country, especially from his actions and inaction now in a national crisis he's help cause. He knows now he can't win the election , so watch how desperate he will get very soon, and try to stop it from happening.

Scarsdale

(9,426 posts)
2. He did not do this damage alone.
Fri Mar 27, 2020, 06:30 AM
Mar 2020

The gop are equally to blame. They have covered for him from day one. He is the most unqualified, uneducated, uncouth, unstable "president" EVER. The gop knew he would be, yet as long as tax cuts for the wealthy, destroying government agencies and other items on their wish lists were done, they have defended the indefensible. The gop are quite happy that this country is descending into a third world position under tRump's "leadership". We are the laughingstock of the entire world. When Boris Johnson in the UK is being praised for his performance, as much as he was disliked, then the US is totally on the skids. We have a mental patient in charge, damaging everything he touches. It is like having a patient at an Alzheimer's clinic running the place.

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