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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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The United States has just over 4 percent of the world’s population, but had about one-third of all global coronavirus cases and one-quarter of the fatalities, as of Friday.
This is a catastrophic failure that can be laid largely at the feet of President Trump. Editorial boards and politicians — both Democratic and Republican — should be calling on him to resign immediately.
It’s not just the catalog of screw-ups that led us to this point — the playing down of the threat, the lack of testing, the spread of misinformation and lies, and the government-wide inattention to the issue. It’s that Trump represents an ongoing danger to the health and well-being of the American people.
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When the president has lost the confidence of the American people and when his words and actions are doing far more harm than good, there can be little justification for him to stay in office.
Granted, we’ve never really encountered a situation like this before. In modern times, there were calls for Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton to resign. But those were for crimes in office, not incompetence. Mishandling a crisis has rarely been grounds for a president to resign. But we’ve never had a president like Trump, who is making the crisis worse simply by remaining in office.
I’m under no illusions that Trump is going to resign. But as I wrote in September when I argued that politicians should call for Trump to step down over the Ukraine whistleblower allegations, “A call for resignation is a statement of principle that Trump’s actions so clearly violate the public trust that his position in office has become untenable."
Demanding accountability would serve as a reminder that even in the wreckage of the Trump era some basic political norms still matter and we, as a nation, cannot become inured to having such a dangerous and unqualified leader in the nation’s highest office. It would also force Trump’s defenders to explain why his continued service is in the interest of the American people.
Anyone who has regularly watched Trump’s press conferences knows that the president is detached from reality, indifferent to the suffering around us, and more concerned about his political standing than the health and well-being of the American people.
Calling for the resignation of a president who muses about the use of household cleaning products to fight a deadly virus is not a partisan exercise or a futile plea for political sanity — it’s common sense.
“And he’s going to get re-elected.”
Not a day goes by without several friends — Republicans as well as Democrats — saying that to me. It’s the blunt coda to a bloated recitation of Donald Trump’s failures during this pandemic. It’s a whimper of surrender following a scream of disbelief.
Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he’s going to get re-elected.
With that refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair.
But somewhere along the way, we started to confuse a coping mechanism with reasoned analysis. We began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.
It isn’t. While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, it’s at least as possible that he’s self-destructing before our eyes.
Maybe a toasty beam of sunlight is all that we need to wipe out the coronavirus? What if we just injected disinfectant into our veins? He floated both of those fantasies on Thursday, when he might as well have stepped up to the lectern in a tin foil hat. They’re the ramblings of a dejected, disoriented and increasingly desperate man.
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Don’t tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.
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