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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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Trump probably cannot spell “authoritarianism,” much less define it. But he has the instincts of a wannabe Duce, and he has been running the authoritarian playbook since he took office:
- He has blatantly violated the Constitution by spending funds not appropriated by Congress, accepting gifts from foreign governments, and using the power of his office to pressure at least one foreign government to do him political favors;
- He has obstructed justice, politicized the Department of Justice, used federal agents to provoke confrontations on our streets, and blocked congressional oversight over his administration;
- He coddles authoritarian dictators while undermining our alliances with liberal democracies;
- He has consistently worked to discredit and undermine the free press, free elections, the judiciary, and any federal official or agency that dares to contradict him.
How is this possible? What happened to our vaunted system of checks and balances and the rule of law? The answer is that Trump has exploited vulnerabilities in our constitutional system that have allowed him to get away with all of this. A sitting president cannot be prosecuted, and the federal courts move too slowly to provide timely corrective action. And just one-third of the U.S. Senate can acquit the president and thwart the impeachment power of Congress.
Yes, it can happen here. It is happening here.
Trump was not called to greatness. He wasn’t even called to above-average competence. He was called to implement a game-plan we’d already written with a disease control bureaucracy that was the envy of the world, the administrative infrastructure and personnel of the world’s most dominant and powerful state, and a practically bottomless well of resources. (None of our peer countries has the massive advantage of minting the world’s reserve currency.) If Trump had merely said, “Tell me what to do!,” had done it, and otherwise had stayed out of the way, I believe it’s almost certain that at least 100,000 dead Americans would now be alive.
But Trump didn’t just fail to do what needed to be done. He didn’t just refuse to do what needed to be done. He actively and aggressively undermined both federal and state efforts to contain the virus. For example, he abruptly ended U.S. cooperation with China on disease surveillance. We could have had a much clearer picture of what was coming, which would have allowed us to gear up and contain community spread before it got out of control, but we didn’t. Trump inexplicably hollowed out our global public health presence before the pandemic, and kept doing it throughout. And he contradicted and undermined his own administration’s pandemic control authorities at every turn, wreaking havoc on the federal government’s immense capacity to respond. If he’d done nothing at all, many thousands of Americans would still be alive.
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It’s impossible to know exactly how many lives would have been saved if Trump had been a president of below-average competence who simply followed the lead of his administration’s own disease control experts. David Leonhardt’s estimate of 145,000, which is the number of Americans who would be alive if our share of global virus deaths was the same as our share of the world population, seems reasonable. But we don’t have a sub-replacement-level president of below-average competence. We have a sociopathic narcissist who knew exactly how dangerous the virus is, but who was dead-set from the very beginning on lying to the public and actively opposing and undermining his own government’s capacity for effective pandemic response. And all because he thought it would make him look bad, hurt the economy, and hurt his re-election chances.
Whatever that is, it’s worse than mere manslaughter. It wasn’t passive. It wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t unavoidable. It took active malice to kill this many Americans. It dishonors their memory, as well as the skill and competence of America’s stellar but stymied disease control officials, to let him off the hook.
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