Home / Forum / World affairs

Trump responsible for US coronavirus disaster: US media

Report

ceciliazhang

Jul 14, 2020, 14:48


President Donald Trump is responsible for America’s unfolding coronavirus disaster, according to an opinion piece published by The Washington Post on July 6.

Columnist Michael Gerson said in the article that the US is entering dangerous, uncharted territory, urging Trump to fulfill his role in response to the pandemic.

With a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the US now has about 25 percent of coronavirus infections. Over the past five months, more Americans have lost their lives to this disease (137,000 and counting) than died in World War I (116,516).

Gerson warned that exponential growth of 3 million infections can quickly surge to 10 million and higher, and even a relatively low fatality rate could easily leave more than half a million Americans dead.

The article pointed out two problems brought by the pandemic in the country. First, following COVID-19’s assault on the body, a significant number of younger people will end up with long-term health complications.

“President Trump’s claim that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases are ‘totally harmless’ is a cruel lie,” he said, adding that researchers have warned of lingering damage to the brain.

Second, allowing the exponential spread of the disease will eventually make protecting the vulnerable an impossible task. “All our islands of safety for the ill and elderly are endangered when the sea level of infection rapidly rises.”

The author argued that Trump is responsible for the national disaster, calling him a “determined and creative ally of the virus”, as he not only endorsed a strategy for gradual, prudent reopening in mid-April but also undercut governors for his own benefit instead of encouraging them to continue shutdowns.

Noting the fact that the successful control of infectious disease is ultimately a matter of individual behavior, the author stressed the importance of “a consistent message from all the commanding heights of a culture”, namely the medical profession, the government, the church and the media.

During the coronavirus crisis, although the medical profession has provided facts, “the government (see Trump), the church (see Trump’s evangelical enablers) and the media (see Fox News and talk radio) have encouraged broad skepticism about essential health measures”, creating a right-wing constituency for preventable death.

Putting forward two options for Americans, Gerson said that either Americans will be rudely jerked toward sanity by the sight of rapidly filling graves, or leaders of determination and talent will “rise above the self-destructive strife and make deliverance from illness and death a unifying national cause”.

“The president has left this role vacant. It needs filling,” he concluded.

Echoing Gerson, another opinion piece posted by The New York Times on July 6 said that Trump and those around him led to the failure of America’s war against COVID-19.

In the article titled “How America lost the war on COVID-19”, columnist Paul Krugman suggested that the turning point of the outbreak in the country was on April 17, when Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”, in support of protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns.

Moreover, the Trump administration refused to heed the lesson of the initial outbreak centered on New York, ordering premature reopening which made things quickly become very grim over the past three weeks.

The author noted that anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grass-roots affairs. “Many were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.”

The main driving force behind reopening, Krugman said, was the administration’s desire to have big job gains leading into November, so that it could boast about economic success.

“The irony is that Trump’s willingness to trade deaths for jobs and political gain has backfired,” he said, stressing the fact that a variety of short-term indicators suggest that growth slowed or even went into reverse soon afterward.

“[W]e lost because Trump and those around him decided that it was in their political interests to let the virus run wild,” Krugman said. 

2 639
gork

[b]Banksters Try To Shfit The Blame[/b]

- war criminal, The Donald, merely inherited this mess

Instead of having their alchemists try and fail to turn dross into gold, they started both World Wars to impose "jew-confetti" on the planet whereby they can pay their bills with yet more bills, in the form of dollar bills. So they can borrow for free, fund anything they want by borrowing at effectively zero interest rates and run up the worst debt in all of history whilst the only cost is for the illegal invasion of any nation that refuses to be ripped off. That's why goon&thug, Dana Rorebacher, went to Iraq and suggested they refund the Great Satan for the cost of the illegal invasion based on the, now proven, lies of WMD. Even convicted war criminal, Tony Blair, eventually admitted that the real justification was to maintain "our way of life" and leaked transcirps have George Tenet admitting that  “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.

Now with this fraud coming to an end, they have to pay their bills and Paul Volcker called it the most intractable mess he'd ever seen (adding that he'd seen a lot) and are trying to blame China.

[color=Blue]Bogac Ozdemir, a Singapore-based global head of credit at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., wrote on LinkedIn in early March that “we are all in this mess because of China and I don’t believe anything from there,” adding that “Americans do not have a government anymore.”
. . .
It also follows other social media firestorms over remarks by bankers seen as critical of China. UBS Group AG put its top economist Paul Donovan on temporary leave in 2019 after he referred to Chinese pigs in remarks on inflation.[/color]
- ANZ Trader Stirs Controversy After Criticizing China on LinkedIn

Liononthehunt

From what he said and did during the election campaign, many people rightly came to the conclusion that Trump would plunge the US into irreversible chaos. Now the prophecy has materialized, though in an utterly unexpected way...