This week has been quite week, mostly because of the concerns for the novel coronavirus-19. The internet has been full of new infections, new deaths, new guidance, new everything. It is really a time of social and mental unrest. President Trump has done a terrible job of handling the situation from the federal point of view. Below is an article from the Atlantic which pretty much sums up our feelings about Trump and the Covid-19 issue. For the moment, I may have my frustration and anger under control...........so after the article, on to the daily affairs of our week
The Trump Presidency Is Over
Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
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.
“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.
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.”
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.)
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.”
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.
Monday - Abby lost her first upper tooth. She was so excited - especially because she got a dollar from the tooth fairy.
Jude is under the influence of Tyranitar, so much so that he wants to embroider a Tyranitar on fabric. At least I think that is what he wants..........unfortunately he doesn't have the vocabulary to express to me what he wants. So I started him on learning the basics of embroidery.
While he was struggling to make perfect stitches, Abby was on the floor being a cat and chasing stuffed animals.
The next Tyranitar effort was to print an image of the beast and then enlarge it to the right size that would be appropriate for a 5 x 7 frame (which wasn't easy except for the efforts of my TI guy...named Ray)
Then I taped the image to a window and copied it onto a piece of fabric.
Then to make it even easier for Jude to visualize the project, I did some creative colorized accents..........but I don't think Jude was impressed - I'm not even sure that he wants an embroidered picture of this Pokemon thing. "Jude - I am trying!"
Tuesday -I moved to outdoor activities because the weather was nice. I began to clean out the "cooler" side of the barn - in other words - I began to move Malcolm's stuff to the shed and to pallets placed on the ground, outside, near the shed. It is a terrible situation...not as bad as the Coronavirus, but close.
I organized, threw out some things, combined boxes of similar plumbing thingys, and so on. Discovered Dad's old electric welder and also the ottoman that W &W placed in the barn about five years ago. This project will last for a couple of weeks.
Tuesday evening was the Relief Society Birthday Dinner. It turned out to be rather nice. Bev and Jessica played their duet of Ashoken Farewell from the tv documentary, Civil War.
Wednesday - weather was still great. The kids love, the most, to have rides on the ATV. They particularly like to go with Dad because he goes quite fast (too fast, in my opinion), but they will ride with me as an alternate driver.
But Dad really is the best
The new boysenberry plants that Dad ordered finally arrived - guaranteed to be thornless and have flavor better than any previous boysenberry in the history of jam making. They are already planted and protected from our pesky deer.
Wednesday hit our pocketbook pretty hard when Vannessah called and told us her septic tank was backing up into her toilet and shower stall. Sure enough, her septic tank was FULL. Our fault really - we should have had it pumped sooner.
So---to be on the safe side, we had Speedy Septic come and pump our tank too. It really could have lasted a bit longer, but that's okay.
Thursday we woke up to a thin layer of snow everywhere. Cold and nasty outside. Bev came over with lunch and her little kids, and they spent the afternoon with us, commiserating about how awful it was outside.
Ruby tried to brush her hair after a session in the hot tub and learned, hopefully, not to roll the brush as she brushes down.
Logan got into a fight with Tyler, lost, rode his bike over, burst through the front door sobbing that he was cold, wet, and traumatized. So I put him to bed with the bunnies, and he magically healed.
Friday - the actual outside weather forgot to note that the Osmaronia cerasiformis bushes have already bloomed. Suddenly the snow hit the fan and, honestly, the biggest snow flakes I have ever seen started floating down from the grey clouds.
Sunday, since church services have been temporarily postponed until the Coronavirus scare is gone, we had a "family centered" Sunday meeting. Camille even made a program with Ryan conducting, Logan giving a talk, and Whitney leading the discussion. It was a great meeting - based on this week's Come Follow Me Lesson. We'll be having these for a while
After our meeting we had a nice lunch and then celebrated Camille's birthday - which is on the 18th
Whitney made the cake which was a great success. The fun part was when the singing started. She had a lotus flower stuck into the cake. When the candles were lit, the flower opened, but instead of spinning (I think the bloom was supposed to spin), it tipped sideways on the the cake. Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of that. Camille calmly picked it up, stuck it back in, the singing continued, and then she blew!
Will we be self quarantining next week?? Probably!!!!
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