You know, right from the beginning, Trump was responsible for his supporters' beliefs. He delayed even announcing that there was a pandemic. He refused to wear a mask (because he claimed it would make him look "weak") and he told lie after lie after lie about where the pandemic was going.
He denigrated Dr. Fauci and told people that Covid was no worse than the 'flu.
He claimed that the vaccine had not been available until five days after the 2020 election so that Joe Biden would win.
But he sowed the seeds of doubt in his supporters' minds, that social distancing, mask-wearing and being vaccinated was for weak-minded individuals. They believed that Covid was a left-wing conspiracy and that the vaccine was dangerous and that Bill Gates wanted to put a microchip in everyone, right from the beginning.
It made no difference that he then told people that they should get vaccinated and boosted - it was too late, and people started to boo him at rallies where he said this.
Truly he has blood on his hands.He only did a U-Turn with regard to vaccinations when he realised that his supporters were dying off in droves.
Trump is also responsible for hate crimes against Asian Americans resulting from Trump's persistent use of the phrases "China Virus" and "Kung Flu".
What other counties think of Don the Cons Virus handling
Trump last month pondered injecting disinfectant or using powerful lights to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Following widespread anger and disbelief, Trump claimed he was being sarcastic. He also has touted unproven drugs that were later shown to be ineffective and dangerous.
The world has watched in horror as an American president acts not as the leader of the free world but as a quack apothecary recommending unproven “treatments.” It has seen what “America First” means in practice: don’t look to the United States for help in a genuine global crisis, because it can’t even look after itself. Once there was the United States of the Berlin airlift. Now there is the image of the USS Theodore Roosevelt crippled by the virus, reports of the administration trying to take exclusive control of a vaccine being developed in Germany, and federal intervention to stop the commercial sale of personal protective equipment to Canada. The world has been turned on its head.
True, absolutely true.
Trump is the devil’s cum.
H1N1 verses Covid 19 responses
In response to all that was learned by the Bush and Obama administrations from the H1N1, SARS and Ebola outbreaks, President Obama's White House National Security Council left the Trump administration a detailed dossier on how to respond to an impending pandemic. The document was entitled — conspicuously enough — the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”
The playbook contained step-by-step advice on questions to ask, when to ask them, decisions to make, when to make them, an assignment of critical tasks to various federal agencies, and how the agencies should coordinate the implementation of those tasks in the face of an impending pandemic. It even included sample documents that officials could use for inter-agency meetings. And lest there be any doubt, the dossier explicitly identified novel coronaviruses as one of the pathogens that could require a major coordinated response.
Additionally, outgoing senior Obama officials led an in-person pandemic response exercise for senior incoming Trump officials in January 2017 -- as required by a new law on improving presidential transitions that Obama signed in 2016.
It is now obvious that the Trump Administration followed none of the guidance provided by the outgoing administration. Even though Trump had been warned of the seriousness of COVID as early as January, he publicly downplayed the threat (and even the existence) of the virus well into March, pretending it would just go away while playing golf and holding campaign rallies. When it was obvious the virus wasn’t a “hoax” but instead was rapidly overtaking us, and wishing it away still wasn’t a viable option, he and his HHS administrators still wasted precious time gearing up to act, and completely fumbled the ball getting critical PPE and testing supplies distributed to areas of the country with the greatest need — pitting desperate states against the federal government and, indeed, even against each other.
Now that virus is continuing to spread at alarming rates — indeed, it is literally exploding in populous states such as Florida, Texas and California — Trump still pretends it’s no big deal. Still unwilling to make the hard decisions required during a national crisis, he continues to inexcusably downplay its prevalence and its seriousness, making reckless comments like “99% of the cases are not serious,” and “this will be over very shortly.” That is because acknowledging the current alarming rates of infection would be admitting his abject failure to responsibly deal with the crisis for the last 6 months.
Trump’s continuing denials of the dangerousness of COVID 19 are simply fueling the explosion of cases around the country. His public denials have sent a message to a large uneducated segment of the American public that it is safe to participate in reckless social and other public gatherings. No masks needed, of course — those are for Democrats and weaklings.
But the ultimate outrage is that, at the very moment when: (1) the virus is exploding; (2) millions of Americans have or will be infected; and (3) hospitals around the country are literally on the brink of being overwhelmed, Trump is asking the United States Supreme Court to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. If he is successful, millions of Americans will lose their health care insurance at the precise moment they will need it most. What will millions of Americans who get infected over the next few months do if they need medical care? By all accounts, Trump could not care less.
The sad truth is that Trump’s entire response to the pandemic has been driven not by science, empathy, or concern for the health of our nation, but instead by rank political calculation. And as far as political calculations go, it has been a disastrously misguided one at that— his complete mismanagement has rendered our country’s response to the pandemic the worst in world. I mean that literally — we have the highest rates of infection anywhere on the planet. And all because of Trump’s self-interested pursuit of an economic political agenda which, in the most tragic of ironies, has simply prolonged and, indeed, exacerbated the economic downturn with exploding rates of joblessness that grow exponentially every week, with no end in sight.
By placing his own political ambitions over the health and safety of the American public, Trump has failed the most basic test of leadership in the face of the most serious public health crisis this generation has ever faced. His failures have come at a cost of over 1,000,000 American lives, and counting. Enough is enough.
Regardless we need to do better next time. We need to revise our pandemic plan and approach. We need to better coordinated gov't agencies. We need to work with industries to ensure next that we have testing early and often.
Trump "started it" for sure. The irony is, if that dumb shithead had just done a good job pretending to care and do the right things with the pandemic instead of worrying about his re-election, he would have easily won re-election.
"He claimed that the vaccine had not been available until five days after the 2020 election so that Joe Biden would win."
Honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was ready before the election, but was delayed until a few days after out of spite due to all the chaos he caused.
Anyway, while Trump gets a lot of blame, this thinking that it's all his fault is overly US centric. Other countries have anti-maskers, anti-lockdown protests, anti-vaxxers. Yeah, we have it worse than other western countries, but we ALWAYS have it worse than other western countries when it comes to anything involving healthcare and our populace's attitude toward it.
When Trump tells his supporters to get vaccinated, they boo him and GQP media personalities go after him. When he goes after DeSantis for playing coy about whether he's boosted, they go after hiim.
I don't think he contributed all that much to anti-maskers and anti-lockdown folk, and he didn't contribute at all to anti-vaxxers. Trust me, I think he should be rotting naked on a stone floor in solitary confinement in gitmo for his attempted insurrection, but the right itself is largely responsible for the piss poor way the populace handled everything. He made things a bit worse, but if 2020 had been, say, Mitt Romney's second term, I think we'd have still had the same issues among the populace even though we'd have had a republican president who urged everyone to do the right things. We'd never have been Canada or Japan. We'd always have done the worst of the western democracies.
Yes, the orange grifter gets all the blame for this shit. He has blood on his hands. You n addition, he gave the racists and bigots permission to come out of the sewer and spread their hate and try and take away the rights of all of us. It is impossible to say how much I truly hate the monster.
Along with all the financially motivated ghouls on far right media such as Fox, Newsmax, and OAN.
All of them vilifying scientists, and making false statements about the effectiveness of vaccines.
And even though he is systematically killing his supporters, they still want to vote for him and put him back in the White House in 2024.
God forbid.
Yeah. Because his out of shape, fat, orange, jowly appearance doesn’t make him look weak at all.