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Harry Marks
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Re: Trump Watch

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What can we say about the cacophony of contradictions coming about the President's medical condition? I wish him a speedy recovery, though even my cursory acquaintance with covid attacks tells me we can't be confident he will recover at all, much less fully recover. The obvious nemesis following hubris is too overwrought. It's more like, if you play with fire you are likely to get burned.

Trump has only a passing acquaintance with truthfulness, and I don't suppose he has ever experienced its possibilities of offering safety. So he was never going to try sharing the truth for a change. If you have ever seen that sort of manipulation in families (it doesn't have to be narcissism - some people are just controlling to the point of inability to trust others to handle the truth) then you understand that the tangled web of lies doesn't get messier and messier or break all at once, it just drags on and gets more and more disgusting.

I'm not surprised this is finally dragging his poll numbers down. Coming on top of the disgraceful debate performance, and tracking along with continued negative economic news combined with serious warnings about failing to control covid, it would have been astonishing for it to have no significant impact at all. I know some people expected a sympathy bounce like Boris Johnson got, but I fear anyone inclined to interpret this superspreader mess through sympathy was already in the Trump column. Older folks and moms, by contrast, just feel threatened. This fool has done way too much damage to just furrow your brow with concern for him.
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DWill

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Re: Trump Watch

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When Trump reported from the hospital, "I get it," some people were inveigled into saying that maybe, just maybe, he would emerge from the experience a "sadder and a wiser man," like the Ancient Mariner. But that would be a poetic or cinematic ending, not the type we get in real life. For him to start talking in real, rather than fantasy terms, would require a personality switch, not just a revision of his view on one issue.

One possible side effect of the strong steroid he's taking is euphoria or mania. With Trump, it's not a big leap from his normal psychology to an abnormal state. I look at an action like canceling any negotiations on a stimulus bill until after his declared reelection and wonder about where such impulsivity, not even benefiting him politically, could come from. One possibility is that he truly thinks that focusing all energy on getting Coney Barrett onto the Court will enable him to challenge fraudulent ballots should he "lose." But then we're moving into the realm of delusion.
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Re: Trump Watch

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Alas, Trump's belligerent and bellicose nature prove to be his Achilles' heel when it comes to dealing with this pandemic. All the months of playing it down and minimizing its risks—foregoing masks and social distancing—have come to kick him in the rear. With so many of his advisors now in quarantine, and the critical time period for recovery still some days away, he insists he's ready for next week's debate with Joe Biden. The man is delusional. He's a tough cookie for sure, but perhaps this is not a quality that meshes very well with being POTUS.

It's's also very difficult to imagine the timing for getting COVID could be worse, politically speaking. I hear he's not getting much of a sympathy bounce from his sickness, but this of course is his fault too. Arrogance is not conducive to sympathy. Trump seems perfectly willing to expose others to the virus, all just to maintain appearances. WIN at all costs.

Trump certainly cannot be blamed for 200,000 Covid deaths in the U.S. He's a victim of circumstance to some extent. But then his chutzpah and inability to listen to experts or reason, even from his own party, now showcases a spectacular fall from grace and continue to show his shocking unsuitability for this office.

Wow, what a week. And it's only Wednesday.
-Geo
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DWill

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Re: Trump Watch

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You said it. Reminds us of the Greek maxim: your character is your destiny. It's logically inexplicable to me that after he took the active step of the China travel ban, he did so little. That action makes sense, though, in terms of Trump looking only to place blame on others. (The blame was justified, but he stopped way short of leading the country through the crisis.).
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Taylor

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Re: Trump Watch

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PSfB’s travel ‘ban’ only was directed at those who were foreign nationals who had visited China within the previous 14 days and did not include the most important potentials of covid 19 vectors, which was Americans and permanent residents traveling from Hubei province. These were people who were primarily tourists and businness class travelers who were ‘exited to tell their stories of travels to their loved ones and that’s the geniuses of the spread of covid 19.
PSfB failed to not only recognize the danger but more grotesquely, he lied about the true danger that was to come.

PSfB can, and deserves the finger point of blame for the deaths of 200,010 thousand and counting. It has been the Trump show for better than four years and it has been a disaster through and through. I’m going out on a limb here,but I just cannot agree with some of the parsimonious leeway given to PSfB and the policies laid forth; loading the judiciary with ‘originalist’ (a horribly arcane interpretation) , Placing the obscenely rich in positions of power that when colluded with others of likewise obscene wealth are in a position to overpower not only individual state governments but more so the federal government.

Please think about what I have just proposed, The Federal Government is what stands between the community and an oppressive conglomerate.

Geo: I love you but it’s not just “a week” . You and me we’er close to the same age. This week has been our lifetime. We are living the culmination of catastrophically poor ideas. Bad ideas that start with Ronald Reagan’s ‘City on a Hill” and ended up with Steve Bannon’s ‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State’.

PSfB is no surprise ! We’ve been handed what we may have been asking for and we are shocked (possibly) and maybe even disgusted by what we actually got. I’ve admitted my part in this catastrophe and I can tell you first hand that neither Biden nor Harris have or would admit theirs.

If there is a legitimate criticism of the debates that we have been given, It is just that. It’s the part of ‘politics’ that I hate and I am besides myself trying to fix that.

My all being desire to get rid of PSfB should not be confused with bias, on the contrary, I am skeptical of all politicians no matter their party affiliation but we have an opportunity, a unique confluence of generational desire to complete some social projects that started the ‘New Deal’ and are culminating in some unnamed idea that binds the dyeing Baby Boomers and this newest generation of kids who are called ‘Gen Z’. It is my thinking that there is something available to are time that has not been present since the ‘Great Generation’ was passing the ‘American Century’ to what would be called the WWII generation. Think about it?.

There has to be a proper, or more appropriatela or correct, trans generational / trans special cooperative relationship otherwise these ‘kids’ will do without and for them history will note that we just let them down.

I’m tired, I’m going to chill out and get my mind ready for a new day. :wink:
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Re: Trump Watch

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Taylor wrote:PSfB’s travel ‘ban’ only was directed at those who were foreign nationals who had visited China within the previous 14 days and did not include the most important potentials of covid 19 vectors, which was Americans and permanent residents traveling from Hubei province. These were people who were primarily tourists and businness class travelers who were ‘exited to tell their stories of travels to their loved ones and that’s the geniuses of the spread of covid 19.
Travel bans would be just one measure a country might use to combat a disease entering. Trump's had significant holes, but my point is that he put it into effect even before Fauci said we had a serious problem. So it might have been expected that Trump was just getting started. What happened? It would seem at first glance like an opportunity to show strong leadership, one that could help him win an election. Was it his fear that responding with restrictions would damage the economy that he saw as his great achievement, that held him back? Or was it that Trump projected his own fear of appearing weak and vulnerable onto the entire country? He was an early convert to Norman Vincent Peale's power of positive thinking. I'm inclined to think that the work of fighting the virus just wasn't up his alley. The work required close cooperation with many other people from both parties and implied the sharing of credit--something Trump hates to do. Detail work requiring patience and incremental progress doesn't allow the grand gestures Trump craves. The whole task probably bored him.
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Re: Trump Watch

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I think that part of PSfB’s early travel restrictions was more an attempt at ‘throwing shade’ towards the Chinese government than any actual understanding of the potential dangers that faced the U.S.

I have a hard time thinking that there is truth to the idea that PSfB had a better understanding of the threat that C 19 posed than Fauci but I doubt it. I think that both the White House and the CDC as represented by PSfB and Fauci respectively underestimated the threat. PSfB’s underestimation was to my hindsight opinion, political. Fauci’s underestimation was to, again, my hindsight opinion, due to a factual vacuum. They simply underestimated the threat. The CDC is not an enforcement agency, they can only create guidelines which they did recommend as their understanding of the threat grew. Meanwhile PSfB represented C 19 as a minor concern that would just go away.

I think that PSfB does get bored easily, especially when he is the focus of bad press. I get it, placing such pressure on a single mind, particularly a mind as warped as PSfB’s can create an interesting dilemma for a public that functions best when life is mostly a matter of routine. Covid 19 is not a routine virus, in fact it is something new and therefore cannot be compared with past outbreaks. Unfortunately for Fauci, at the time PSfB instituted his meager travel restrictions Fauci considered C19 to be containable in the sense that they were able to contain SARS, Ebola, MERS just to name the viruses that are comparative, relative to a January 2020 understanding of coronavirus.

One of the most important things to consider, when considering economics is diversification. The shutdown of the social portion, the service sector portion of the U.S. economy should be taken as more of a ‘canary in a coal mine’ analogy of the down side of the USA’s dependence on the service sector as being the primary source of GDP. So it stands to reason that PSfB was early on sweating bullets, and now with his personal diagnosis of Covid 19 infection he is also sucking wind.
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Harry Marks
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Re: Trump Watch

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His Messiahship has been giving out favors for donations. Not a big surprise, I suppose, but it gives us good reason to be disgusted by his continued business operation while in office. The New York Times had an expose out at the end of last week, showing incredible amounts of favors for money.

The big surprise is that people don't always get their favors. He loses track, things don't materialize, you know how it is. Perhaps the biggest gift was about $11 million from a casino magnate (not Sheldon Adelson) who is a partner with Trump and just paid him a bunch of money. He may be in tax trouble over it, and he is almost certainly in violation of the law on campaign contributions since it was clearly given in response to his running out of money in 2016. But his buddy was hoping for Federal funding of a high-speed train from L.A. to Vegas, which never materialized.

Nobody really wants to think about all the people who have staged events at Mar-a-Lago or one of his other venues, in hopes of making contacts or getting favors done, but the Times compiled a long list. My favorite story, though, is from a Fortune Magazine writer, interviewed on Fresh Air if I remember right, who was trying to check out Trump's income from the Towers and found that an entire floor, worth hundreds of thousands per year, was being rented by a front for one of the Persian Gulf States, and was absolutely empty. Peering in through glass walls, he saw dead flowers from many months before, but no other sign of people.

But hey, corrupt is fine with the Right, because conservatives on the courts.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Trump Watch

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My Bible Study group last night read Psalm 73, a remarkably modern plea about the difficulty of maintaining faith in God in view of the prosperity of the wicked.

The hypocrisy of Trumpian Christians is put in stark relief by this psalm, which castigates the wicked for their malicious and arrogant oppression and iniquity: "Behold, these are the wicked— always carefree as they increase their wealth."

A focus on abortion as a Christian policy priority is like what Jesus called 'straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel'.

Psalm 73 concludes that hypocrisy is a betrayal of the future, whereas the purpose of authentic faith is to construct a stronghold that can be sustained for ever. So the Trumpians are on a path of doom:
The Psalmist wrote:I discerned their end. Surely You set them on slick ground; You cast them down into ruin. How suddenly they are laid waste, completely swept away by terrors! Like one waking from a dream, so You, O Lord, awaken and despise their form.
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DWill

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Re: Trump Watch

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LDN-L-TRUMP-LETTER-02-SR-1 (1).jpg
LDN-L-TRUMP-LETTER-02-SR-1 (1).jpg (121.48 KiB) Viewed 2847 times
I volunteer at our local food pantry. Today, the Farmers for Families Food Boxes arrived. You may have heard of these a few weeks ago when it was announced that each box would contain a letter signed by President Trump. The letter ballyhoos Trump's deep concern for the welfare of citizens. I found ironic the guidance on avoiding the coronavirus--this from someone who tells us not to worry and who sets the worst example possible.

We needed to open the boxes, since we couldn't distribute them right away, and they contained some food that needed to be refrigerated. We don't have large enough coolers to store 100 boxes. When I opened the first box and saw the letter on top, I didn't see immediately that the letter was also printed on the right and left flaps of the box itself (in English and Spanish). This was apparently to thwart volunteers who might want to break open the boxes and trash the leader's letter.

The CEO of our parent food bank didn't appreciate what he or she saw, presumably, as Trump using taxpayer resources to give himself a political boost three weeks before the election. We were directed to throw away the letters and cut the flaps off each box. I did this willingly, but a couple of the other volunteers complained that the CEO was "being political."
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