Post inauguration Trump:

[Wokko]

[Tannin]

^Sadly, that's about the size of it. Or if they do vote, they do stupid things like support fringe candidates who will never win in the American FPP system. Seriously, a lot of the reason we have started setting new all-time records for bad governments (e.g., Trump, Scotty from Marketing) comes down to these idealistic but quite, quite clueless people.

[pietillidie]

[Wokko]

Not hard to scapegoat the WHO when they said there was no human to human transmission and advised strongly against travel bans. Trump closed the borders and got called a racist while Europe was having hug a Chinaman day and Pelosi was encouraging public gatherings and walking around Chinatown for a photo op.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chief-says-widespread-travel-bans-not-needed-to-beat-china-virus-idUSKBN1ZX1H3

[Jezza]

The WHO deserves all the criticism it receives for being puppets of the CCP.

[David]

[stui magpie]

[Jezza]

[Pies4shaw]

Or, you know, he could stop looking for scapegoats and take responsibility for murdering his own people in droves with his appalling "leadership" decisions.

It is a catastrophe that many scientists and public health emergency experts believe could substantially have been averted, if only Trump had listened.

“This will be regarded as the worst public health disaster in America in a century,” said Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in San Diego. “The root cause of the disaster was the lack of readiness to understand where, how and when the disease was spreading.”

Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development who led the US government’s response to international disasters between 2013 and 2017, said that stark contrasts in outcomes between different countries in terms of illness and death have been determined not by Covid-19 itself, but by how seriously each government took the risk and how early they acted.

“On that score we failed badly,” he said. “You can have the best system in the world, but if you give the virus an eight-week head start it will eat you alive.”

For Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, the unfolding calamity is the fulfilment of her worst fears.

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“When we first heard about coronavirus, I and several of my colleagues worried that Trump would not attend to scientific advice. This is a man who has exhibited a reckless disregard for scientific evidence over climate change; if he could do that, there was always the question of whether he would take seriously any science.”

Oreskes sees Covid-19 as Trump’s ultimate challenge. Would he put the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans first, or would he dig into the tried-and-tested Republican playbook of showing hostility to science and expertise, reining in government intervention and prioritizing the money markets?

“This was a test of whether Trump’s government would act. What we’ve seen is that for the people in power in this country, ideology beats even an imminent threat.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/04/trump-coronavirus-science-analysis

[pietillidie]

^Precisely. You don't see South Korea scapegoating the WHO. You only see pre-scientific mental cases who elected a moron and deprive pregnant teenage girls of technologies of choice engaging in their usual deflection and white anting, making the giant hole they've dug for the rest of us even deeper. You know, the very same geniuses who can't do entry-level maths but know more than climate scientists because someone on Facebook liked their post on gay conversion therapy.

[David]

I have little opinion on the World Health Organization and think they're absolutely fair game for criticism where it's due. But it's hard to mistake Trump's attacks for anything other than parochial sabre-rattling – because of course what he really wants is not for these global organisations to be unbiased, but rather to show meek subservience to the US and its national interest, as so many do.

We've all seen this script before (remember Bush and the UN?), but Trump takes the American bullying that has always been there out of the back-rooms and into the public eye, and makes it even more absurd and gratuitous. That can have its perverse benefits, but I can imagine it must be tremendously embarrassing for Americans who care about their country's position in the world or country's reputation, if there's anything left of the latter at this point.

[Jezza]

[pietillidie]

^That's all you've got to distract from Trump's weeks of catastrophic denial and dithering? A Japanese nationalist scapegoating China after the Olympics disappointment? You still don't get East Asia, do you?

Two monumentally unfit and incompetent disasters, Bush and Trump, elected by the same fist-waving half wits, hastening an ugly decline for the superpower. It's not difficult to see, and no amount of squirrel pointing will distract from it.

Surely it's time to move on from Tony Abbott's juvenile culture wars. All the energy wasted on defending that twat Trump when his maligned status in history has long been sealed. Jump ship now like those who still pretend they never supported George W. I.

[Pies4shaw]

Oxford Dictionary definition of "colossal failure":

425,469 cases, +25,134 new cases (so far today), 14,590 deaths, +1,749 new deaths (so far today), 388,677 active cases and 9,234 cases currently serious or critical.

[swoop42]

Dearest America.

This is what you get when you elect a narcissist for a President and one who critically has chosen to surround himself with a bunch of sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear and not WHAT HE NEEDED TO HEAR.

My deepest sympathy to all those who voted for Hillary and those to young or simple to know any better.

Yours Sincerely,

The rest of the world (minus Russia).