Trump Puts Politics Before People
Since the global pandemic swept across our shores, one thing has become abundantly clear. Our healthcare system is more than broken. It’s systemically ill equipped to handle the greatest threat to mankind.
Critics of Donald Trump say they cannot see a plan from his administration, and they are right. We have a patchwork of policies, rules and executive orders coming from the White House and local governors. When we most need an umbrella strategy to defeat this virus and get businesses back up and running, we are confronted with new, often contradictory, ideas every day. There is no thoughtful planning. Trump told us that he and the Republican members of Congress had a new and improved concept to replace what is known as Obamacare. We are now more than 1,000 days into the Trump Administration and there is no plan to improve healthcare. Showing prices for drugs on TV ads does not help me feel good about healthcare. If anything, seeing a $3,000 price tag for a drug makes me depressed.
According to the Miami Herald, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, while sitting with Trump in the Oval Office, said that “our ability to test exceeds the current demand.” That is simply not true. Hospitals in the state say they continue to be constrained by supply shortages of testing components, kits and chemical reagents. DeSantis has no grounding in medicine and clearly has not listened to his frontline people. It’s the Trump Effect. The less you know, the more confident you sound. Why is there so much lying going on here?
Let’s not believe elected officials when they talk about medical issues. Yes, some of our congresspeople or governors are doctors, but they “speak with forked tongues,” which is a native American expression. Think snake.
So, Donald Trump signed an executive order that requires meat processing companies to stay open. The pushback came quickly. The next-day-headline said meat plant workers employees would not show up at work. According to CNN, “The situation has gotten so severe, company executives warned, that the US meat supply could be at risk. John Tyson, chairman of the Tyson brand, warned of limited supply if plant shortages continue.” By signing the order, Trump declared these plants part of critical US infrastructure and declared they must stay open. That brings us to the next problem.
You see, the fat-ass-bastard in the White House, decrying “globalism” and screaming that it’s all about “America First,” has made our country far less prepared to operate in a global environment. We sold medical PPE to China in January to make a buck. Doing so severely crippled America’s ability to control COVID-19 on our own soil.
Yesterday, one of my blog fans submitted an amazing response to my post. She talked about, “A former Labor Department lawyer thought the executive order gave meat packers liability cover to continue operating. I suspect it also gives them license to hire scabs. You cannot make a deathly ill employee stand up and make sausage, and having employees dropping on the line is bad press. The unions can say employees will use their sick time, but employers will waive the ‘executive order’ when it comes to paying those sick workers. They’ll still be waiving as they’re hiring ‘temporary people’ to stand where sick employees stood yesterday. It’ll all go to court of course, but the courts already slow-walk labor issues.”
Have we not learned that imposing tariffs on goods from China looked good on paper but severely hurt our farmers? The fact that Trump brags about giving them a bailout should have been a canary in the coal mine moment. We were dumping soybeans while larger and more politically powerful farmers were getting paid to withhold sales to China. Trump knows how to get into a fight, but he doesn’t comprehend how things are connected. He can squawk all he wants about China as the source of the pandemic, but what would he say if a virus originates here in America and spreads to the rest of the world? We are not CLEANER than any other country, we’re just RICHER and, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, DUMBER.
It’s particularly sad that this global pandemic hit the US at the beginning of an election year. It would have been just as bad any other year, but we would have heard less partisan bullshit from both sides. If more members of the Executive Branch had been hit with this virus, perhaps we might have smarter decisions emanating from Trump’s inner circle. This president’s tweets and comments are so tone-deaf and destructive that his credibility is going down each day.
If you care about polls, more numbers are in. 47% of Americans now say they are “very” or “somewhat” likely to follow Trump’s advice on the coronavirus pandemic. This represents a significant, 15 percentage-point drop from a Reuters poll in late March. More notably, 98% of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, say they would not want to be injected with a household disinfectant like bleach if they came down with the coronavirus. Overall, Trump’s job approval now sits at 43%.
If the election were to be held today, Donnie Boy would not win. Let’s hope his poll numbers continue to decline and he gets the big boot from office in November.
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