U.S. president Donald Trump has never been described as having a small ego, but was especially full of himself in January, 2020. However, is Donald Trump Cooked? The president gave a triumphant state of the union address just after the Democrats failed to impeach him in the U.S. Senate.
America’s future is blazing bright, declared Trump, perhaps also talking of his own personal future with his re-election this November 3 looking almost certain. In his speech, Trump trumpeted his efforts to cut red tape and reduce the size of government, claiming this had resulted in increased economic performance and record low unemployment.
Then the pandemic happened.
Not only has Trump repeatedly fumbled in dealing with this major crisis, drawing criticism from near and far, but the economy has tanked. The U.S. rapidly went from record low unemployment to unemployment levels unseen since the 1930s. And economic performance is almost everything for re-election campaigns…
Embarrassingly, the only thing that has prevented the U.S. economy from contracting further is massive government intervention, something conservatives like Trump are hyper-allergic to. Now, the only reason many Americans can pay their bills is because of big government and its red tape issuing billions of dollars worth of cheques.
Trump, who had no previous experience in public office before becoming president of the world’s largest power, has a weak grasp of public health. He first crowed about the low COVID-19 infection rate in the USA before that country gained the dubious title of having the highest numbers of infected people and deaths in the world.
Refusing to listen to his experts, Trump has dismissed and dismisses public health measures such as social distancing or wearing masks. Trump has promised that the virus will disappear of its own accord and recommended cures not sanctioned by the medical community. He has stymied efforts of the Center for Disease Control to issue guidelines for how different levels of government should respond to the threat.
Most importantly, in true Trump fashion, the president refuses to take blame for any mistakes he has made and continues to make. Instead, he lashes out at anyone else on whom he can pin some blame: the World Health Organization (WHO), former President Obama, the Democrats who tried to impeach him, or the Chinese…
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a businessman, not a politician. But he felt compelled to respond to Trump’s threats by tweeting: Halting funding for the (WHO) during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.
Obama spoke recently about how officials in the Trump administration are handling the pandemic and that a lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge. This provoked an angry series of tweets from Trump, suggesting that Obama is guilty of some sort of unspecified criminal misdoing.
There is an old saying that anybody can captain a ship in fair weather, but only a true captain can do the job in a storm. And the COVID-19 storm vividly shows what Trump’s shortcomings are.
But Trump is very adept at marketing, and still capable of making this look like somebody else’s fault. Also, things can change so quickly in politics campaign that it is far too early to call the November election. So, Trump might be incompetent, but he is not cooked.
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