Since Donald Trump took office over three years ago his presidency has been marked by one horrible decision and practical failure after another. Trump’s inability to do anything right was repeated again last week in the Wisconsin election. Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin tried to move the election to a later date and initiate the acceptance of mail-in ballots. Both the Republican dominated State Supreme Court and the Republican Governor stopped this from happening. Why did they care?
The election was not just a Democratic Primary. The ballot also contained a race for a seat on the State Supreme Court. This would be very important because it would determine the balance of that court, especially as it pertains to a case currently before the court in which the GOP is trying to wipe over 200,000 voters from the voting rolls. The overwhelming percentage of those votes, of course, would be Democrats. The votes in question would make a huge difference in the November Presidential elections. Wisconsin went Republican by less than that number of votes in 2016.
The GOP understands that considering Trump’s utter failure as a President, their only chance in November is a really low voter turnout, therefore they are doing everything they can to attain that goal. Just to prove they are serious, last week Trump announced that they only have a chance if there is a low voter turnout. In Wisconsin they hoped to do that by insuring a majority on the State Supreme Court that would guarantee those 200,000 November votes would be suppressed. To that end they forced voters to endanger their lives and their health by standing in freezing rain and exposing themselves to a pandemic in order to exercise their right to vote.
Well, the Republicans got their way. They forced the election to go ahead as scheduled and the result was a furious army of voters that angrily voted a Democrat onto the State Supreme Court over Trump’s hand picked candidate.
So once again Trump did his dirty work, got his way and his reward was a well-deserved sharp stick in the eye. It appears that Trump has lied, cheated and failed his way into a place where even when he wins, he loses.
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It has finally happened. In one day Donald Trump completely denied any responsibility for anything that has happened or will happen with the pandemic and announced to all that he and only he has complete authority over everything. He has now completely embraced his Adolph.
After repeatedly telling the world that he bares no responsibility for the spread of a virus that he knew about from the very beginning and for which he refused to prepare or even acknowledge; Trump now announces that he, and he alone, has the power to decide when businesses and states, which he first refused to close, will be forced to open.
Everyone else immediately began to debate what criteria could possibly be used for the President to make this decision. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York stepped up to the plate and declared unequivocally that Trump had no such power and that any attempt to exercise said non-existent power would initiate a constitutional crisis like no other since the civil war.
It is now clear for all who are willing to see, that Trump is completely out of control and quite incapable of making the kinds of logical decisions that would hopefully keep the nation from crashing down around our ears. Like a rabid dog, he viciously attacks anyone who disagrees with him even slightly. He conducts ego boosting “press conferences” in which he rambles mindlessly from attacking the press as exemplified by anyone who asks a question he can’t answer, to denying what he had said the day before, all while babbling to whoever is listening, that he is the greatest President, with the most perfect record in the history of the world. The man is a raving maniac and he’s leading the greatest country in the world into the toilet. And no one is doing anything about it. The Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives tried to impeach him but the Retrumplicans, led by Moscow Mitch McConnell, stopped that with their majority in the Senate, ignoring evidence, morality and rational thought, while voting to not convict.
And now we see a blubbering, humiliated Mike Pence struggling to tell us that yes, the dictator in waiting does have all the power of a king. Really? What country you think you serve in, Mike?
The next election is going to be really fascinating. We are going to see if the 1/3 of the country that represents the Trump base is really, regardless of what they think the maniac-in-chief will do for them, still willing to ignore a raving madman who seems intent on destroying the greatest country in the world to satisfy his own, insanely overblown ego. I understand the passion of the racist, the gun fanatic, the xenophobe and the unconscionable rich to follow Trump down the rat hole but that is a tiny minority not a third of the nation. It’s where the others will go that is of interest. The ones who were sick of being lied to and ignored for the last 40 years and wrongly figured that only a non-politician would finally solve their problems. It sounded good, unless you really knew Trump or had bothered to listen to those that did. If those to whom I am referring are, unlike Trump, willing to be truthful they will admit that they didn’t get what they sought; partly because it’s a job that needs a professional and Trump is just a charismatic amateur who through ego, ignorance and stupidity has ripped apart the government leaving us with an understaffed, under equipped and under motivated assemblage of terrified bureaucrats and Trump sycophants at a time when we need a shaped-up army of professionals to deal with the greatest crisis of our age.
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The big discussion, the one that takes all the air out of every room in which it is whispered is, when do we open the country again? Trump is raging about getting a date. Doctors and scientists are desperately trying to pull him back, suggesting later and later dates. It is all nonsensical. We can’t have a date without all kinds of facts and information that we just don’t have now and we will never have without a complete change in attitude from the Oval Office. How do you know when to relax the restrictions when you don’t have any idea how many have the virus, how many have been exposed to the virus and not gotten it and how many have had it, suffered no symptoms and are now free of it. These are the most basic questions that scientists must know to make any kind of logical predictions about the virus and we still don’t know squat. Why are we in this state of ignorance? Because the man in the White House, the man who most wants to open the country and get that economy going again has done nothing to empower the process of testing which is necessary to answer all of those essential questions and actually open things up.
Trump stands at his, so called, press conferences and tells the nation it isn’t the job of the government to produce testing. Then he tells us that he is the only one with the power to steer this ship. Can he possibly be so stupid that he doesn’t understand the contradiction in that?
Right now we simply do not have the information available to make the decisions necessary to know when it will be safe to reopen the country. Everybody wants that, but most of us understand that doing it before it is safe will only cause a recurrence of the virus and that would be much worse than just holding off until the doctors feel it’s safe. This is a medical decision and it needs data. It isn’t a financial decision. Trump has already screwed that up by ignoring the medical question.
Right now we are taking a “whole society” approach to fighting the virus because we just don’t have the data to fight it the right way. What we should be doing is identifying those that have the disease so we can isolate and treat them. Then we have to find out those they have been in contact with so we can quarantine them until we see if they are infected. Once we have done this and accumulated the data from those two steps we will be then be in a position to slowly open the rest of society. But those two steps, identification of those infected and those contacted by them, are enormous logistic endeavors and to accomplish them we need leadership, which so far has been completely absent from our President and his administration. Until get those tests, there can be no question of reopening anything because it will only give the disease a foothold to reestablish itself and kill more Americans.
That leaves only one question to be answered. Is there some tiny spot in Trump’s diseased brain that can focus on the concept of what we need to do to defeat an inanimate virus that cares nothing for his ego, his desires, or the fact that he wants to rule the world? If there isn’t, and there certainly doesn’t appear that there is, we are doomed as a nation. Considering the medical and societal catastrophe that will result, Trump cannot re-open this nation unless he is able to first expunge the virus. But how will this hollow shell of a man ever find the wherewithal to achieve such a monumental goal.
He won’t! So he has to go, and the real moderate Republicans that are still scattered about the landscape, must be the ones to get rid of him.
If the Democrats find another cause to indict, it will be seen as a political move, which will once again be fought on political grounds and will die in McConnell’s Senate. If some group of morally, logically motivated Republicans lead the fight to stop Trump, the battle will be taken out of the political arena and will have some chance of success, thereby creating an opportunity to save the nation.