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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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I've been plagued by a nauseating sense of recognition lately. Story after story of the pandemic response in the United States reminds me of the country that I spent most of my professional life writing about: the Soviet Union and also the Russian state that was born after its collapse but which couldn’t shake many of its traits.
One persistent Soviet trait is the ways in which Russian institutions handle information—what we might call “the culture of reporting upstairs.” The best-known example is the Soviet government’s coverup of the extent, nature, and danger of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
This wasn’t only, or even primarily, a matter of suppressing uncomfortable truths. What drove officials to lie was not so much a desire to conceal the facts from ordinary people as it was a need to supply the leadership with upbeat reports. For many officials, before and after Chernobyl, the production of cheerful stories that were entirely divorced from reality was a full-time job.
They lied about the number of shoes that the country’s factories had made and about the length and location of roads that its workers had built. (Once, when I was eleven or so, my parents saw a television story about a newly built road and decided to take a trip to it in our recently acquired Zhiguli car. It turned out that there was no road—only a few feet of pavement where the report had been filmed.)
Little that was made or said by official Soviet institutions fit, worked as intended, or made any sense, because so much of it existed only for the purpose of reporting upstairs. (An old Soviet joke: “What doesn’t buzz and doesn’t fit in your ass? A Soviet machine for buzzing inside your ass.”)
I find myself recognizing this culture in the U.S. now, when, for example, I read a report in the Times on how the Trump Administration convinced itself, back in April, that the covid-19 pandemic was on the wane. Or when the Administration shifted the duty of collecting coronavirus data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Department of Health and Human Services—the C.D.C. had been pliant but not, it seemed, pliant enough for Trump.
Could moving data collection to a Cabinet agency explain why the curve of new cases seemed to flatten?
I felt a similar sense of recognition when I read the Times’ report on the fifty-two-million-dollar temporary hospital in New York City that ended up treating a total of seventy-nine covid-19 patients, while people died of the virus in other hospitals, sometimes for lack of access to care.
The facility, set up at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, in Queens, turned some patients away because they weren’t sick enough and others because they had a fever. Because confusion reigned over whether patients could be transferred there from other hospitals, very few were.
The chaos recalled the U.S.N.S. Comfort, which also was supposed to ease the burden on hospitals in New York City. At what was nearly the local peak of the pandemic, only twenty of its thousand beds were occupied. Arcane and absurd rules and procedures kept it from admitting more patients.
I thought back to all the times when I would tell a story about Russia to an American friend, and how they couldn’t understand how nonsensical rules could govern and destroy people’s lives. I could never really explain it, and I always had the sense that my friends didn’t quite believe me.
For example: a person who had served time in prison in the U.S.S.R. could not obtain a residence registration—a government permit to live at a particular address—if they didn’t have a job, and they couldn’t get a job without a residence registration; not working, in turn, was an offense punishable by incarceration.
The intentional institutional ineptitude and callous nihilism of contemporary Russian society is the product of a seventy-year Soviet totalitarian experiment—or so I have long believed. No such experiment took place in the United States.
So how is it that the pandemic has made the U.S. resemble the post-Soviet Russian state?
Part of the explanation lies with Donald Trump himself, in the ways in which he performs power. He acts like a totalitarian leader in the absence of totalitarianism—a Mafia boss without a Mafia—and to an astonishing degree he gets away with this act. He has created a culture of reporting upstairs that is reminiscent of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; ...
(CNN) President Donald Trump was still struggling to fully grasp the severity of the coronavirus pandemic during a task force meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN.
"He still doesn't get it," the source said. "He does not get it."
Trump's meeting with the task force in the Oval Office was his first in-depth meeting with the panel of his top health experts since April. Trump tweeted photos of the task force members, some wearing face masks, surrounding the Resolute Desk Tuesday afternoon.
During the meeting, officials on the task force continued to have trouble convincing Trump to take the pandemic more seriously, the source said.
As some members of the task force tried to stress the dire nature of the situation to the President, the source said Trump repeatedly attempted to change the subject.
"He starts talking about something else," the source said.
My name is Obfuscate.
I hear about several examples of GOP manipulation of photos. Desperate people do desperate things
Dr Fauci getting death threats
What a dumb bunch of Americans. What else can you say? Ignorant, uneducated, feeble-minded conspiracy theorists.
it’s flabbergasting
What a dumb bunch of Americans. What else can you say? Ignorant, uneducated, feeble-minded conspiracy theorists.
it’s flabbergasting
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