INCOMPETENT! Not a good word to hear when talking about the President of the United States (who used to also be known as the “Leader of the Free World”). But, because we see it happening every day before our eyes, we cannot escape its truth (for example: how about some disinfectant injected inside your body, or doses of hydroxychloroquine as a preventative medicine that has been shown as having harmful side-effects?)
We also see a con man acting out a role for us that involves:
· Stealing money from taxpayers and foreigners alike to line his own pockets
· Lying about anything and everything as needed to hide his incompetence and his many failings
· Bullying, intimidating and using spineless sycophants who cow-tow to him
· Capturing the other branches of government so that his will prevails
· Using the functions (and the functionaries) of government to his own ends and his self-aggrandizement
· Making friends with every dictatorial leader he can find to fulfill his ambition to ‘rule the world’ no matter what it takes to do so
· Blaming everyone he can for his own failings and incompetence: Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, Democrats-in-general, immigrants, Muslims, Governors, department heads, intelligence services, the CDC and W.H.O., Inspectors General, military generals, scientists, women – the list goes on because he accepts no responsibility for anything that "doesn’t go the way he wants it to" (which, by the way, is the exact reason Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo gave for the recent firing of the State Department's Inspector General).
· De-constructing a government that he cannot manage and that he sees as a “deep state” full of career professionals who oppose his every desire and fantasy is revealed again in Trump's recent expressed desire to fire all the IG's who were appointed by President Obama (four have already been fired!).
· Constructing fantasies and conspiracies that enable him to hold a base votership intact while destroying everything that base believes in and does not question, like:
o Good jobs with benefits like affordable health care (fast disappearing in 14.7% unemployment)
o Wages that enable one to live comfortably (flat-lined)
o A few extra benefits like owning a home, an extra car, college for the kids, nice vacations, a reasonable pension (requires extra effort like 2-3 jobs, now unavailable)
· An inability to deal with a crisis of any kind, especially a pandemic disease (but who can forget separating children from their parents at our southern border, or throwing paper towels to victims of a hurricane, or abandoning the Kurds to Turkish forces in Northern Syria – and the beat goes on!)
Donald J. Trump is simply out-of-his-league. He doesn’t have the temperament, the training, the experience, the empathy, the emotional or mental capacity or the smarts to tackle this job. Unlike Barack Obama who demonstrated all of those leadership traits, and many more!
What is more – Trump repeatedly demonstrated that same lack of knowledge, temperament, human decency and competence in the business world. Casinos failed and closed; bankruptcies declared, real estate deals gone awry, a university he founded sued for incompetence and false representation; use of courts to bilk clients and delay lawsuits; use of the tax system to gain income for himself through write-offs and false assessments of assets, money-laundering for foreign interests, and, of course, hiring of illegal immigrants.
David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and best-selling author who has closely followed this con man’s activities for over 25 years, has a lot to say about Trump’s incompetence, but he warns us not to tread too lightly here because “The Donald” takes full advantage of perceived weakness. Let us briefly explore some of Johnston’s comments from his book, “It’s Even Worse Than You Think” (written just 18 months into Trumps presidency).
“This is a presidency marked by chaotic lurching actions that often make no sense, leaving even some top Trump appointees baffled. The political termites Trump has loosed into our government are a wrecking crew doing damage not so obvious because they eat away at the foundations of good government… This is a government of the worst people. The Trump administration can be described with three words: Dissemble, Dismantle and Destroy.”
Then, he lists some of his predictions (several of which I have paralleled in postings on this Blog), such as:
ü Trying to start wars – North Korea, Iran
ü Vowing to ‘drain the swamp’ and run against Wall Street, he instead stocked high government offices with “swamp monsters” from Wall Street, letting financiers run free “to take advantage of borrowers, escape penalties for abusing customers…lying to customers about loan terms.”
ü Ignored his inaugural promise to Champion the ‘Forgotten Man.’ Instead, he has destroyed or “wrecked decades of laws and rules that protect consumers from unsafe foods, unsafe job sites, unsafe chemicals, and proposed massive cuts in science” and hides or ‘muzzles’ research findings
ü Let polluters write government policy and then freed them from rules and regulations “to dump toxic wastes into the water and air instead of cleaning up after themselves.” The effects on our children—asthma, cancer, heart disease -- won’t be evident until after Trump has been out of office
ü As a lazy, unserious man, he has “spent more than a fourth of his days as president playing golf at his own courses while failing to fill many important government posts…often skips his daily national security briefings.” He is so “appallingly ignorant of world affairs…that much of what is in the…Daily Brief is too complicated for him.”
ü Spending your money with little regard for his campaign promise to pay off the $19 trillion debt in eight years. Tax cuts for the wealthy, huge increases in military spending (and now the costs attributed to the COVID19 pandemic) have raised the debt to a level that will again have its greatest effects after Trump leaves office.
ü In brief, some other damages include:
o Appointed many federal judges whose records show their favoritism to corporate interests over people, maximum freedom for gun owners and minimal freedom for women to have control over their own bodies
o Seeking to make life harsher for the poor: raising rents on public housing, In 2018 a report called for reducing noncash welfare for children, the disabled and the sick; proposed work requirements to get Medicaid, public housing and food stamps….in spite of the fact that a third of Medicaid spending is for nursing home residents, and children count for half of all food stamps (SNAP).
o Denigration of long-standing alliances along with allied leaders.
Trump caters to Putin, and praises Putin’s’ achievements; has strongly supported Putin’s account of non-interference in our elections
Trump caters to Putin, and praises Putin’s’ achievements; has strongly supported Putin’s account of non-interference in our elections
o “If you harbor any doubt that Trump is a dictator in waiting, that he believes in his own mind that he is the greatest person of all time and that those who came before are, as he calls them, ‘idiots,’ remember what he said about Kim (Jung Un) and the America Trump wants to force upon us all: ‘He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same’.”
ü What distinguishes the Trump presidency from all those who came before is that “those administrations had in common the pursuit of policies that they believed would make for a better America and would benefit the American people.”
“THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY IS ABOUT TRUMP. PERIOD.”
Therein lies the overwhelming reason for his inability to deal with our current health crisis in anything other than an incompetent manner. He is incapable of doing so because:
§ He can’t see the problems to be solved because he thinks the main problem is losing an election that he must win for himself.
§ He can’t use the very instruments and structures available to him in government because he not only isn’t interested, he doesn’t understand how good government, peopled with competent, professionals, handles crises and knotty complicated problems every day.
He doesn’t trust those people because they do not think like he does, nor do they act as he does, on whims and rumors, on fantasies and lies.
§ He doesn’t have a clue how to mobilize thinkers, innovators, data technicians and other experts because he doesn’t trust them. He thinks every intelligent person is a potential threat to him, or perhaps a rival or an enemy, so he is frozen in place because he can’t take the risk that leaders must take in trusting, partnering, cooperating, and acknowledging that others have something to offer that you alone do not.
§ In short, Donald Trump is incapable of being a team member. He only knows solo action and self-aggrandizing success. Anything else is anathema to him because it means putting someone else in his spotlight where only he – who knows it all – can be.
§ He can’t fathom the depth and breadth of this pandemic because he doesn’t have a clue as to what it is, how it manifests itself, what the scientific data show us about it, or how one must fight it without medicine or vaccination, for the time being.
§ He can’t work on a non-partisan or bi-partisan basis because he can’t allow his base to think he is not in-charge or that he is catering to a bunch of socialists or intellectuals or liberals.
§ And, as we now realize, he can’t manage the federal bureaucracy; can’t put together a national response plan, can’t mobilize private industries to make needed PPEs; couldn’t, and still can’t, manage to get testing and tracking into gear, much needed long before this point.
And, because he can’t do what needs to be done, he has diverted a health pandemic into a concern for the stock market, the economy and small businesses, as well as supporting the fabricated issue that government is forcing people to stay indoors, stay out of crowds and wear masks when outdoors.
And, because he can’t do what needs to be done, he has diverted a health pandemic into a concern for the stock market, the economy and small businesses, as well as supporting the fabricated issue that government is forcing people to stay indoors, stay out of crowds and wear masks when outdoors.
However, one of the things he can do well is to use lies and made-up scenarios to divert a certain gullible base of the population from any issue that does not serve his insatiable desire to win another term as president. We find several such recent attempts:
1. Dr. Fauci’s expert guidance on the horrendous nature of this coronavirus Trump has declared as unacceptable;
2. A close second is the now acknowledged move to stifle new CDC guidelines on reopening the economy; what got released is totally sophomoric and inadequate
3. Of all his attempts to minimize the seriousness of this virus, Trump is reported to be carrying out a plan to under-count the number of deaths that are a result of the coronavirus. Deaths related to the virus will soon show themselves as by-products of his mishandling of this viral attack:
a. suicides will increase under economic and health failures;
b. more children will suffer death because of the effects (Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children) of the virus;
c. poverty and hunger forced upon families will take their toll as will lack of adequate affordable health care to handle other illnesses and needed surgeries;
d. there will be more drug overdoses; and, of course, more deaths among the already vulnerable populations in nursing homes and other institutions,
e. plus, more deaths among the homeless whose number is already expanding.
And those numbers will never make it into the total count of deaths caused, in one way or another, by the coronavirus.
Plus, one more late and farcical entry into the fray:
4. Trump again seeks to blame someone else for his self-manufactured problems. He wants you to think that somehow President Obama (and Vice President Biden) were behind some conspiracy that involves General Flynn; that they wanted to unmask Flynn as someone mentioned in a security report to affect the 2016 election. Trump also implies that Obama was behind the FBI Russian-connection investigation of candidate Trump. Trump presents no explanation or documentation, as usual, unlike extensive documentation of his corruption and failures, both here and elsewhere.
To these examples of propaganda and lying, we can add the made-up Right-Wing talking points that the government is interfering in our lives, keeping us locked up on purpose and that we have vanquished this enemy. We end up with the false impression that this president has defeated the enemy and all that is needed is for Democrats who control the House to let us get back to normal functioning. Mitch McConnell, that huge excuse for a Senate Leader, has joined the deception by declaring that any further legislation regarding the receding pandemic is unneeded and unnecessary,and can be delayed or now, especially the latest three trillion-dollar stimulus Bill passed by the House of Representatives!
SO, THERE YOU HAVE IT – the Trump and Alt Right Republican Plan for dealing with the worst health threat in our lifetime: deny it; belittle it; misreport its effects, blame someone else for its existence and outcomes; bring up unrelated matters to divert attention; then pretend that all is well!
Ooops, excuse me – that’s not his plan for controlling the pandemic – that’s his Plan for winning the election in November! Trump obviously has another motivation than simply saving lives. He has his future in mind, and nothing – not a pandemic, or death numbers, or breakouts of the virus in meat-processing plants or in prisons or nursing homes or midwestern states – will deter him from his goal: total control of the levers of government to permit him in another four-year term to overturn the deep state and to establish a cultish group of followers who will sit up and pay full attention and loyalty to their despotic leader.
This extremely dangerous, villainous and despotic incompetent must not only be turned out-of-office in November, but he should face citizen criticism and censure for every lie, conspiracy, diversion, inaction and policy failure over the next 5.5 months that could contribute to the loss of another million lives!
LET THE WORD GO OUT:
SAVE LIVES – REJECT TRUMP
SUPPORT JOE BIDEN!
