We'll see soon enough. United States Presidential election, Tuesday, November 3, 2020


IDEAS
The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.

MARCH 13, 2020

Peter Wehner

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC


When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?

What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.

David Frum: The worst outcome

“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.


The Downfall of the Republican Party
PETER WEHNER
To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.

That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

Ben Rhodes: How Trump designed his White House to fail

Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity has been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."

We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)

But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)

Yascha Mounk: The extraordinary decisions facing Italian doctors

Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.

Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.

The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.

“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)

On and on it goes.

To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”

Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.

The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting professor at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/

propaganda!!

Please I want op to summarize this for me,
I can't kill myself by reading this

Useless Democrats .... Corona fall on the writer.

I read through, and despite the vitriol posted by the author, one could tell he made attempts to be fair to Trump.

Trump has failed.

And failed massively.

Americans are dying and many more being infected.

Trump dithered when he could have acted in the best interest of his nation.

Sad to say, but his reaction is akin to Jonathan's reaction to the Chibok abductions ; rather than being troubled by the incident, they were both bothered by their 2nd term outlook.

The fallout of this contagion is the vast erosion of Trump's popularity.

When the populace act against the guidance of the commander-in-chief, you know he has lost his rudder.

He's simply inept, visionless and divisive.

Quite unpresidential for an American president.

Quite unpatriotic for an American.

Subduer:
Trump will WIN in November, because the American Economy is strong, & Defence is strong.

A recession is imminent and the number of funerals and medical bills many would be faced with would be his death knell.

I can bet a Million Naira on this.. Trump and the Republican will still remain in power.. The Democrats have wasted enough time of the American citizen...President Trump be look lousy, but he's a man of his word.. Economy, Safety/defence all improved. What else do you need from a president?

bluebay:
I can bet a Million Naira on this.. Trump and the Republican will still remain in power.. The Democrats have wasted enough time of the American citizen...President Trump be look lousy, but he's a man of his word.. Economy, Safety/defence all improved. What else do you need from a president?

America is in a recession and the next 6 months would be about trading blames on who caused it.

[s]

ZooOga:
We'll see soon enough. United States Presidential election, Tuesday, November 3, 2020


IDEAS
The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.

MARCH 13, 2020

Peter Wehner

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC


When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?

What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.

David Frum: The worst outcome

“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.


The Downfall of the Republican Party
PETER WEHNER
To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.

That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

Ben Rhodes: How Trump designed his White House to fail

Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity has been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."

We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)

But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)

Yascha Mounk: The extraordinary decisions facing Italian doctors

Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.

Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.

The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.

“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)

On and on it goes.

To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”

Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.

The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting professor at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/

[/s]
We heard Much more than these in 2016..

Those who bragged in 2016 are yet to Recover from the shock..
A Tsunami that will send some people to their graves is ahead..

Trump 2020
Ivanka 2024
Mike Pompeo 2032..

As someone who has spent the last 3years studying America politics closely I can easily dissect the whole story in the article. First let’s start with the article channel, The Atlantic, a left wing publication in the US which has rarely public anything positive about trump and it’s a channel used by the resistance party and the NeverTrumpers. Second all the people cited in the article are all Democrats, the same people who have been attacking trump even before he got in to office, the same people who wanted to impeach him before he was sworn in, the same people who called him a Russian agent, the same people who rallied behind their friends in congress to make sure he was impeached for a phone call to the Ukraine president, the same people who said he was going to crash the American economy if he was president, the same people who said he was going to start a civil war in America, the same people who said he was going to start a world war. For obvious reasons it shouldn’t be a surprise they are taking this position that trump is not doing enough or he is not doing anything at all, it should be known that this are the partisan consumed folks who are politicizing the virus for one reason alone, and that’s to limit trump chances in November. They didn’t learn anything in the last three years, for everything they’ve thrown at the president, he has come out stronger, his fundraisers up, Democrats and independents switching over the to Republican Party just because they don’t like the Democrat party and the resistance they’ve played over the last three years, you should remember that by there standard trump should never be president, he shouldn’t have ran for office in the first place, they know he’s not like them and he won’t play by there rules of the kingmakers in both parties, he totally destroyed the old bush Republican Party to establish the new Republican Party. He’s a threat to there interest and they know they’ve got one shot at this and that is to use the virus against him in all manners possible. You should pay no attention to them and instead check what trump as done in response to the virus and what the Democrats response was. I’ll run a short timeline of events for you.

The Trump Administration announced it has reached a phase one trade deal with China in November and they would meet in January and sign the deal. While this is going on the virus was already in China but as we all know it the Chinese government didn’t even know there was an outbreak already and when they knew they hid it from the world, filtered it off there internet space, arrested a whistleblower, but only when they couldn’t hide it no more they decided to alert the world and put a whole city on lockdown. The deal was signed around January 13 or so, about a week later news got out of China and on January 28 trump declared a public health emergency, on January 31, Trump set up a task force to respond to the outbreak, on feb 2, the guy banned anyone who has travel in and out of China in 14days from coming to the US and stopped flights from China. Guess what the US Congress was doing at that time, they were busy with impeachment. US offered the CDC team to China but China refused to let them in to there country to access the situation and better understand the virus, The WHO was not allowed in too, then later China posted the virus genetics, only then did the US know what they were dealing with. You would wonder what did they expect the president to do. They called him racist and a xenophobe for taking this actions and they accused him of not being diverse enough with his task force team.

They referred to dr Fauci in the article, All the measures trump took was on the advice from dr fauci and the Health Secretary. All actions till date is still based on advice from this experts.


They said there was lack of testing, of course there would be lack of testing when you exactly do not know what you are testing for and the symptoms. And yes the WHO provided a testing kit to the US to use but in the US they have a massive amount of red tape and that testing for subject to approval by the FDA in the US, first the test kit was made in Germany and hasn’t been used anywhere before so it has to go through a process of approval, that’s a red tape put in place by the Obama administration but those guys in the article will not admit that, while that was going on the CDC quickly developed its own testing kit but was running low on the amount of kits available, when the president was made aware of all this he cut all the red tapes giving all agency of government the power it needs to go out of the government pockets to do everything that is needed to develop testing kits, working days hospitals, clinic, health homes, private labs and public labs developed there own testing kits and began shipping it all around the country and then the president brought the private sector in and they pledge to help with the testing, they are going to develop there own testing platform like the drive through testing to aid testing, the US currently have 1million test available and by next week will have 4million.

Dr fauci said a pandemic office was disbanded in the White House, yes it was but not by Trump, in 2018, the NSC was going to cut down its number of officials working in the White House, the pandemic office has been there since 2009 and they’ve had nothing to do literally, so the NSC closed that office in 2018, who knows when a pandemic will happen by the way.

And don’t get it twisted America is still the number one country to handle a pandemic and President has been proactive since onset while his critics and opponents were busy with opponents.

In 2009, during the swine flu out break, a week after the outbreak the health secretary declared a public health emergency, that was all the government did, nothing more, after 6 months when it got out of hand, 1000 people had died, then did Obama declare a national emergency, at the need 60.8million was infected, 200k+ hospitalized, and 12k+ died. No one blames Obama but every one worked together to solve the problem.

Remember this is not because this people care about the health of other people, the only thing they want is to see Trump gone by November. In case you missed it the watch word of the Democratic Party used by Rahms Emanuel is “never let a crisis go to waste”. This certainly isn’t going to waste and at every point they are using it to attack trump.

Can you believe in a press conference earlier today, The President wore a hat with USA boldly written in front of it and 45 by the side. In a corona virus briefing the only takeaway for the journalist is that, the president was wearing a reelection campaign hat that can be bought on his campaign site. Maybe that journalist shouldn’t have posted that, what happened after was fantastic, people went on the campaign site and started buying the hat.

Another one during the declaration of National emergency yesterday said the people with the president on stage were all old men with ties. He said this while a Ambassador Birx, a professor, female, and a heath expert, public expert was speaking.

Trump is living inside the head and mind of his critics every night and day, and he his always on the mind of his opponents, it’s not hard to see that they are thinking about it, they all suffer from TDS and it’s all playing out in his favor.

This too like everything will pass and the US will come out on top, the measure trump has taken will be vindicated and they know he will be re-elected.

Righteousness89:
[s][/s]
We heard Much more than these in 2016..

Those who bragged in 2016 are yet to Recover from the shock..
A Tsunami that will send some people to their graves is ahead..

Trump 2020
Ivanka 2024
Mike Pompeo 2032..

Absolutely

Subduer:
Trump will WIN in November, because the American Economy is strong, & Defence is strong.

.

Stong economy?. You just wait. China and the us are both going down.
What will finish Trump finally is health care in a coronavirus context. You need to test to detect but many people dont have cover so democratic party policies will win over. Trump is also unstable and cannot maintain cool under pressure so a lot if weaknesses will soon start showing

I just saw this on my Twitter news-feed. Many middle-class voting age Americans are not feeling so great about present conditions. Worldwide travel and tourism industries are about to lose thousands of jobs.
Stay tuned folks and stash some extra money and food.


Cruise passengers under coronavirus quarantine say they lack food, basic medical attention
Letitia Stein
USA TODAY


Cruise ship passengers under federal coronavirus quarantine say they are lacking food, medical attention and are being housed in unsanitary conditions, contradicting Trump's claims that getting them off the Grand Princess was a "tremendous success."

Michelle Saunders and her 83-year-old grandmother, both from Illinois, have been waiting for medical attention and other basics since they were among the 2,000 evacuated from the ship.

At Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia no one came by to check their temperature for nearly two days, Saunders told USA TODAY on Saturday – a standard protocol they were promised to help monitor for infection.

Food was not delivered to their room for more than 12 hours after their arrival, she said. Their room had no towel and one small bar of soap, and she has been told there is no more, despite the constant public health reminders to wash hands.

No efforts are being made to keep the former cruise ship passengers at a safe social distance from each other to avoid spreading the contagious disease either, she said, beyond telling them to wear masks when they leave their rooms.



Sanders said her grandmother has become increasingly scared and has not eaten much.

“It shouldn't be my job to keep her safe,” Saunders said, breaking into tears. “It should be their job, and they are not doing it.”

On Friday in the Rose Garden, President Donald Trump praised Vice President Mike Pence for the “tremendous success out in Oakland” in coordinating the disembarkment from the Grand Princess, which had identified two passengers and 19 crew infected with the new coronavirus when the ship finally docked on Monday in Oakland, California.

More:14 passengers left on Grand Princess as others begin quarantine at military bases



Contradictory accounts came not just from Dobbins but from Travis Air Force Base in California and from Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Many of those quarantined at the three military bases already had spent days stuck in their cruise cabins to avoid the spread of the coronavirus while arrangements were made for their transfer to the bases.

They found a stark contrast between protocols onboard the ship and at the bases. On the ship, they had been restricted to their rooms. But after being carefully guided off the ship, maintaining a wide distance to avoid the possibility of spreading infection, they were tightly crammed into airplane seats, then buses, to take them to the military bases.

Concerns about missed meals, lacking information about coronavirus testing and inadequate medical care were raised during a Saturday afternoon call between quarantined cruise passengers at Dobbins and representatives from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the cruise line.

“I am just concerned for everybody, because we do have a lot of older people in these buildings and they are not being cared for,” said a woman, noting that she was aware of people who had not received adequate amounts of food or missing meals entirely.

A representative for the governor of Montana complained about having difficulty getting information to assist residents of her state who are quarantined. Others raised concerns about travel logistics and lost luggage.

Officials pledged to investigate the problems.

“We thank you for your patience as we try to resolve medication, luggage, linens and room equipment problems,” HHS spokeswoman Cheri Rice told those on the call, acknowledging “many significant logistical challenges.”

The department did not respond to USA TODAY's request for additional comment, Princess Cruises did not respond either, but during the call cruise line official Jeff Salvatore tried to reassure the former passengers.

“You are not alone in this; we’re all with you,” Salvatore said. “We are doing everything we can to make this basically as calm and pleasing as possible.”

Routine medical care reportedly has been lacking at Dobbins, too. Barb May, 63, from Bloomington, Illinois, said her requests for help refilling a prescription for her husband went nowhere. Ultimately, she found a local pharmacy to deliver it.

“We shouldn’t have to go beg for water. We shouldn’t have to go stand at the fence to get food,” said May, describing a barricade fence separating quarantined passengers from the rest of the base. “We’re probably being treated worse than prisoners right now.”



A barricade fence separates passengers from the Grand Princess cruise ship under federal quarantine at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia.
Late Saturday, Saunders’ grandmother’s temperature finally was checked as a precautionary screening for coronavirus infection. She did not have a fever. But Saunders was still waiting to have hers taken.

In interviews, other passengers recounted additional problems at the three bases.

A passenger taken to Travis Air Force Base in California said she and her two young daughters were given no soap. She listed other concerns: dirty sheets, no heat, a lack of testing for coronavirus and non-working toilets in some rooms, causing people to have to enter the rooms of others when they are supposed to avoid contact with each other.

A Kentucky woman told the Courier Journal, a USA TODAY Network paper, that she felt like a prisoner at a Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where she had not yet been tested for coronavirus.

More:Kentucky woman aboard Grand Princess says she still hasn't been tested for coronavirus

Some, though, characterized the quarantine at federal facilities as the least of the ordeals they have experienced since the news broke that an elderly man with coronavirus had died after cruising with Grand Princess on its previous voyage. Some passengers and crew stayed aboard for the second trip.

Now quarantined at Travis, an easy drive from her home in San Jose, California, Donna Kaletta is grateful to be talking walks outside her room, even if she has to wear a mask.

But, Kaletta said, “this is not the vacation I thought I was going to have.”

Additional reporting by Curtis Tate and Chris Woodyard, USA TODAY.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/03/14/quarantined-cruise-passengers-lacking-basic-medical-care-even-soap/5051059002/

Its funny that the same Democrats that have not recovered from 2016 elections are setting themselves up for another heartbreak.

Though we don't know who democrats final presidential candidate is going to be between Big Mike(Michelle Obama) and other shadowy figures, we know the Senile "cardboard" Joe can't string up a sentence together without teleprompters which will not be allowed during presidential debates.

Democrats can hope coronavirus will destroy Trump, but it won't, America will come back bigger and better. Trump is a patriotic president put in the white house by God's own hand for a specific job and just as the devil has never had power over the work of God, this battle between good and evil will end with truth at the top.

Trump already has historic turnouts for Republicans and has beaten every Obama's record in primaries.


It seems you don't know that Democrats party is dead. First of all, there won't be many people left among the democrats leaders by the time the storm of justice sweeps through and the rest will be useless to themselves and their party.

See these numbers and tell me your chances come November.

voltron14:


America is in a recession and the next 6 months would be about trading blames on who caused it.

Exactly and that's what's The democrat is good at..

Now I believe the news that Said Russian meddlers are now operating from Nigeria against trump.

According to this Reuters/DM UK news report President Trump done put his country first, and Bleep everyone else on planet earth.

too much to copy & paste for the lazy, challenged readers.

Donald Trump 'offers to pay German company creating experimental coronavirus vaccine to move to the US and make it exclusively for Americans'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8114015/Donald-Trump-tries-pay-German-company-creating-experimental-coronavirus-vaccine-US.html

German officials are trying to stop the US from enticing German company CureVac to move its research to the US, insisting no country should have a monopoly on any future vaccine. President Donald Trump had offered funds to lure the company CureVac to the US to reportedly get the vaccine exclusively for Americans