Donald Trump completely screwed up the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He was impotent to act early on, and continues to be impotent now, opting to simply attack everyone else for his administration’s shortcomings.
On Wednesday, Trump had a group of nurses in the Oval Office to celebrate National Nurses Day. One of those in attendance was the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, Sophia Thomas. When asked about the sufficiency of the supplies available to front-line workers like Thomas, she very politely told the truth.
SOPHIA THOMAS: PPE has been sporadic, but it's been manageable. And we do what we have to do. We are nurses and we learn to adapt and do whatever the best thing that we can do for our patients to get the job done and the care provided, and that's what we will continue to do as COVID-19 continues.
That’s a fact. Nurses and other medical personnel are doing what they have to do in spite of a failed Republican Party and its leadership. But Donald Trump is nothing if not a pathological liar. He made sure to tell everyone that Sophia Thomas, a woman on the front lines of this epidemic, a person in charge of overseeing thousands more front-line workers, didn’t know what she was talking about. He did. The guy that can barely put together a complete sentence.
TRUMP: Sporadic for you but not sporadic for a lot of other people. Because I've heard the opposite. I have heard that they are loaded up with gowns now. Initially we had empty cupboards, we had empty shelves , we had nothing because it wasn't put there by the last administration."
Trump’s not right. He’s what medical professionals might call full of shit. What he is literally saying here is that he knows more about how masks and personal protective equipment is being distributed to medical personnel around the country than the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, but if he doesn’t indeed know more than her about this subject, and she is not just lying for the, I don’t know, the fucking deep state? Then, it’s because former President Barack Obama emptied the White House pantry supplies, and Trump finally got around to going to the grocery store. It’s idiotic and offensive.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Thomas explained herself to reporters, saying “I think it's sporadic. I mean, I talk to my colleagues around the country. Certainly there are pockets around the country where PPE is not ideal, but this is an unprecedented time."