More Red Flags Than A Chinese Communist Party Parade
More Red Flags Than A Chinese Communist Party Parade
Rant #13(Opinion)
Originally March 17, 2020
Not to say I told you so, to those who either bought that this president had the skills to effectively manage a crisis, or the many who bet that the country would not face something seriously threatening for 4 or 8 years...without gloating or anything, please don't say nobody raised concerns about his ability to lead.
Of the many, many, many warning sides in a sequence of more red flags than a Chinese Communist Party parade:
When trump used a sharpie to draw obviously altered lines over a map to show (falsely) that a hurricane would hit Alabama--in line with an earlier, incorrect statement--his more cognizant supporters wrote it off as clearly not true, but insignificant (whereas his die-hard base adjusted their understanding of that hurricane's path, trusting trump over NOAA, the nation's premier meteorological agency).
Instead of admitting wrong, trump went on to justify his mistake by claiming in a tweet that "almost all models predicted it going to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. I accept the Fake News apologies!" When asked about the altered map, the president shrugged and said he didn't know who made it.
Meteorological maps with 'spaghetti plots' display a range of models predicting an upcoming storm's path, which public observers can easily misinterpret. Rather than trusting the experts' interpretation, our stable genius came to his own conclusions. It is likely that trump looked at the graphic, saw some lines near Alabama, and issued his infamous remarks. Even so, a map from August 30 showed the edges of the storm barely touching a corner of Alabama. This was days earlier. Then, its path changed after that. According to the debunking website PolitiFact, trump's claims got a "pants on fire" rating--that given to the most egregious of lies. "There was never a substantial probability of it reaching Alabama," said Judith Curry (a scientist who founded the Climate Forecast Applications Network). In other words, most models did not show Hurricane Dorian hitting Alabama, to put it lightly.
Despite yet another absurd assault on truth and science by the trump administration, those who support him either believed him, or wrote it off, because it didn't really impact their lives and besides, the economy was doing great.
That was September of 2019. But even then--or September of 2018, 2017, 2016 or before--critics saw this as more than a 'gotcha' finger-pointing at trump for saying and then standing by a lie. It went beyond trump's weird behavior of not only telling and defending a lie, but doing so with unusual energy. Rather than try to change the subject or something, the president used it to attack scientists and the media. As per usual, he blamed the 'fake news media' for this attempt to make him look bad. His supporters said the left wouldn't stop highlighting a simple mistake because they hate him so much. Trump became angry at scientists and the bureaucracy; he did nothing wrong, they did. If he did mispeak at all, it was because clearly the Never Trumpers, deep state Democrats, or some other malevolent faction fed him the misinformation deliberately to try and take him down.
This little example exposes all of the sick internal organs inside trump's administration, a window into a horribly dysfunctional and abusive place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. First of all, his overuse of terms like 'fake news' has made many Americans genuinely distrust what legitimate news networks have been saying about this very real virus. Up until this weekend, Fox News and the right wing mediaverse went along with the president's version of events; when it comes to a life-threatening pandemic, there shouldn't be any 'versions' of the story. But he kept politicizing the coronavirus and downplaying its severity.
Also by lashing out like he does, it discourages anybody under trump--throughout the immense span of the executive branch's departments and agencies--from reporting information which goes against the narrative told by the president. In fact, the impeachment drama and other reporting has shown that those who say things interpreted as 'defiance' and 'subversion' by trump end up in trouble, even losing their jobs; it doesn't matter if they speak truth and it doesn't matter if the truth is of dire consequence. This president refuses to entertain any information that contradicts the world his psychosis has constructed, and that he espews to the world. Reality is a bad ingredient of the word salad said by donald trump (unless it lines up with what he already believes). After 3 years, trump has purged any dissenting voices from his administration. After surviving the Mueller Report, impeachment and dozens of other incidents which would have ruined any other president, he feels empowered to do whatever he wants, as if it has no real-world implications.
And because everything is a game to this man, he denied the coronavirus as it spread just like every other facet of reality before this. This disease meant nothing to him other than using it as a vehicle to criticize China and immigrants and to push a payroll tax cut and even take jabs at the Dems and 'fake news media.' It got real: the virus reached the shores of the United States, began infecting and killing Americans and all he could say was how much it effected the stock market. As questions of contagion arose, the president wanted to develop a domestic test for it rather than use the COVID-19 test already in use by the WHO. Even a couple of weeks ago, coronavirus was nothing more than a Democratic hoax (according to him).
Trump's delusional narcissism and anti-scientific attitudes no longer make just good fodder for memes or reasons to roll your eyes. People in the United States have lost their jobs and savings, gotten sick and even died because of the inadequacy and mental issues of this president. It will only get worse before it gets better (though nobody can quite say the extent). Obviously the president doesn't control all germs, and coronavirus would definitely have spread to this country regardless of who was in the White House. Others deserve blame, too--the Chinese government has some explaining to do, and Italy's response to this has also led to preventable (or containable) devastation there.
Yet trump had the ability to make decisions which could have mitigated the effects of this pandemic. Instead, he chose to lie and act with complete recklessness. Had he not disbanded the pandemic team in the NSC, maybe we'd still have a plan and better preparedness for this. If he listened to the experts, maybe the stock market wouldn't have fallen to roughly the same figures from when trump took office. Perhaps virtually all schools and colleges in Southeastern Pennsylvania and allover the nation would not have closed, but instead students will have holes in their education. This effects all aspects of life for, at the bare minimum, a couple more weeks. It appears that the president failed to put 'America first' when he made the decisions leading up to this: otherwise, 100 Americans would still be breathing. Rather than having made America great again, we embrace a generation-defining event with no faith that the most powerful leader in our country and planet will make the best decisions to handle it.
Works Cited:
-PolitiFact, Trump's Hurricane Dorian Map Truthfullness Rating.
-CBS News, 100 coronavirus deaths.
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