It’s like Trump has a rigged crystal ball, that shows him with the worst possible moves.
Started a trade war that hit global GDP 1.5%, and disrupted relationships including with so-called allies.
Then a virus comes along and trashes global GDP even more, right when those relationships are needed, and the “decoupled” country doesn’t have masks or even toilet paper. Did anyone think this thru?
Trump boosted corporate valuations and propped up the stock market with tax cuts funded by debt, plus kept the existing experimental monetary policy in place. This led to even more buybacks, and debt. But now that $10T in debt defaults. So are the corporations going to “buy high & sell low” into the market to drive down prices further in desperation for cash? No, state capitalism will just bail them out, so now even more public debt. What was the point of all this again? Lose/lose, more debt, lower stocks; the Ponzi failed.
Somehow a country with 1/5th the population of CN and a huge head start got double the confirmed cases; highest in the world. Trump chose GDP and corporate profits over lives, But then that failed, and he lost lives AND profits/gdp. Unimaginable disorganization and incompetence. How is this even possible?
The trade war failed, that’s over. And rather, CN is set for +3 GDP vs US -4%. Epic failure in what was always a losers war—this now quickens CN overtaking the US as the world’s largest economy. Plug it into your model, its significant. Just as post-2008, disruption disfavors the empire.
bubonic plague. china.
spanish flu. china
covid-19. china
i know they say that aids came from africa. but i am almost hiv positive it came from china. thanks!
All evidence is that the CDC was moving at the best pace it could. The test kit shortage was a fluke owing to a faulty batch of chemicals.
Did Trump publicly fail to take this seriously enough early on? Yes.
Was it infuriating? Yes.
But the response since his pivot has honestly been impressive on several fronts and it’s clear you’ve veered into hyperbolic responses so I doubt there’s any point attempting to discuss this rationally.
I was talking about not having qualified people in place to recognize and respond to the outbreak back in January. The responsibility for not having those people in place falls squarely on the Trump administration.
I agree that the response is finally approaching a reasonable level.
Your threshold for hyperbole and mine apparently differ.
I don’t know whether you’ve seen any of the daily briefings from California’s governor Gavin Newsom. If not, I encourage you to do so, and to compare his briefings to Trump’s. To his advantage, Newsom is a much more polished public speaker than Trump, so we should ignore that aspect of the difference. What’s striking is the tone: Newsom seems genuinely interested in giving an accurate assessment of the current situation and, while he tries to a reasonable extent to calm people’s fears, he’s realistic in explaining what is happening and might happen in the future. He replies to questions from the press politely, and when he doesn’t know something he says that he doesn’t know it. Trump has more than once attacked members of the press for their questions, has belittled the governors of Washington, Michigan, and New York, and has, apparently, told Mike Pence not to take calls from some governors. That is exactly how a leader is not supposed to act.
(Note that I’m not remotely a Democrat and never voted for Newsom. Nevertheless, I admit that he truly is doing a great job of leadership during this crisis.)
It’s a fact that his administration did not replace the personnel whose job it was to coordinate the US response to pandemic outbreaks. And it’s a fact that he has blamed Obama for a lack of medical equipment when his administration has been in place for over three years, and should have taken the responsibility for resupplying that equipment if there truly were a shortage.
