The emergence of Donald J. Trump as the Republican candidate for president in the 2016 election included a concerted overt and covert campaign to undermine his opponents with real and imaginary scandals and various slurs intended to tarnish their image in the minds of voters. He knocked off his Republican challengers one at a time with slurs like Low Energy Jeb Bush, Little Marco Rubio and Lying Ted Cruz. While also vilifying Hillary Clinton with similar slurs.
In the lead up to the last election, Trump did the same thing with Joe Biden — going back to Ukraine and Trump’s effort to induce president Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky to slime Biden in exchange for congressionally approved funds and weapons purchases needed to fight a Russian incursion on his eastern border.
That perfect phone call is now in retrospect — eerily similar to one Trump made to Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, after losing the election, in an attempt to strong arm him into manufacturing 12,000 more votes for Trump, either by tossing out mail in votes over bogus signature challenges, or by finding some mysteriously overlooked uncounted ( freshly manufactured) votes.
Trump has not stopped campaigning. Less than a month after the start of the Biden presidency, Trump is actively working to unseat him in 2024. Just because Donald Trump can’t gaslight America on Twitter, that does not mean he has stopped exercising his best talent.
I’m not entirely sure what is going on in NY now, with respect to Andrew Cuomo and the underreporting of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes, but it smells very much like the start of Donald J. Trump’s campaign for a second term. Trump was livid that Cuomo got such favorable attention for his Covid19 briefings. I regularly watched both Cuomo’s TV briefings and the Trump/Pence briefings and Cuomo’s were winningly engaging and exuded a confident sense of governance, while Trump would have us inject bleach and or Lysol and pop a few hydroxychloroquines. Trump clearly lost that exchange, so now he may be working to unlevel the playing field.
Time will tell if there is a conspiracy here or just a theory of one, but while the MSNM takes pot shots at Cuomo, they are downplaying or just ignoring the fact that the huge US death total — some 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19 — is largely the fault to Donald J. Trump’s failure to support social distancing and mask wearing and basic public health responses to the pandemic.
At least 200,000 of those deaths could have been avoided if only we had behaved sensibly and all worn masks and practiced social distancing and washed our hands more often. Trump could have made a difference by leading in that effort, but he declined because his base didn’t like those ideas.
Cuomo is going to be vilified for failing to accurately report Covid-19 deaths in NY nursing homes, while Trump’s inaction and outright mocking and demeaning approach to masks and social distancing actually caused at least 200,000 unnecessary deaths slate.com/… There is something wildly out of balance in how those two issues are being reported.
The real political damning news is found in this widely ignored report issued back in October by Columbia University Earth Institute’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, entitled “130,000 – 210,000 Avoidable COVID-19 Deaths — and Counting — in the U.S.,” which compares the U.S. death toll and policy response to six similarly high-income countries: South Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia, France, and Canada. Trump’s policies were an epic failure, yet here we go again, tearing down one of his likely opponents in 2024. I smell a rat.
Not 50, but 200,000 Shades of Benghazi
Thursday, Feb 18, 2021 · 3:53:44 PM +00:00 · ARodinFan
My title has proven misleading. I may have misled myself and misread Trump’s intentions. I appreciate the comments that this diary has generated but they have mostly been a discussion verging on a food fight about who should or should not carry the Democrats torch after Joe Biden. I don’t really want to go there. I’m more interested in helping Joe get stuff done and in figuring out how Trump intends to mess with the Biden agenda.
Maybe I have mistaken Trump’s intentions. Maybe he isn’t thinking about running for a second term as pResident after all — he’s been there done that in his mind. Maybe he is considering running for Governor of NY — a position from which he might be able to do his thing and exert undue influence over the prosecution of state criminal charges being brought against him. If he can stall and avoid facing those actions until 2022 and then somehow manage to get himself elected Governor (God help us) then maybe he thinks can skate. May seem Cray cray, but consider I’m talking about Trump — and he has done some crazy stuff to try to stay in office, mainly I would argue because he would continue to be shielded from federal charges — whose statute of limitations he could have run out in a second term . A Rodin Fan