Not as much a blank cheque rather a blank book!

Thinskin

 

Desperate Trump reverts back to his lying-and-whining strategy as the pandemic spirals out of control

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/de...ining-strategy-as-the-spirals-out-of-control/

 

Twitter again takes action against Trump for lying about mail-in ballots

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/tw...gainst-trump-for-lying-about-mail-in-ballots/

 

Trump burned to the ground by his own White House experts for ‘mind-boggling’ claim he ended COVID-19 pandemic

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/tr...-experts-for-mind-boggling-claim-he-ended-19/

 

You people make me sick!
Just because you hate the man because he speaks his mind without trying to please special interest people and without playing the like me game. I know you will throw all the fake news and his mistakes at me but look at every person on this earth, get the perfect one to be president.
Trump may not be the guy you would buddy with or go out for drinks with but he does a hell of a job running the country.
We never like the person or people that tell us the things we need to hear and do things that we might not agree with but most of the time it’s for our own good.
Get over it and let’s make this country what it can be and that’s called “ ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” JFK. Let’s start working together and stop fighting about stupid shit.
If your perfect or never make mistakes, good for you and you should run for President, but it’s the best person not the perfect person.
Ok hate me just like the ones that hate and refuse to even compromise in this crazy world. I don’t hate and I will listen to anyone on anything. That’s my right just as the right to speed my mind but no where does it say it’s our right to get what we as individuals want, it’s our right to speed and ask but we all have a say.
God bless America and what it all truly stands for, just take time to study that instead of bitching all the time.

 

For several decades Rush Limbaugh has trained the poorly educated whites of flyover country to believe the lies he tells them because they want to believe those lies. Trump, the bogus Christian, and fake enemy of the elites (whose taxes he cut) has taken advantage of that.

 

Trump's lies do not matter to you because he tells you things you like to hear. His only accomplishment has been a tax cut for the rich that has caused the national debt to get higher than it was at the end of the Second World War.

https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287

So far 232,124 Americans have died because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic. More Americans have died from COVID-19 than people from any other country, so say it after me, "We're number one! We're number one! USA! USA! USA!"

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdUOA?Si

Everything about that pompous fraud is fake: his wig, his Christianity, and his claim to be a champion of the common man. These are the people Trump ares about: himself, his family, his rich friends. If you are not in that category @Paul33333, he is laughing at you behind your back.

 

Yep. Them dumb crackers like President Trumps lies better than despicable lies.

They put him in the oval office rather than let hillary keep lying to them.

And those Trump haters like old dog are the biggest liars of all.

 

More than 1,000 doctors and nurses have died of COVID 19 and yet the mad king dictator will stand there and tell this lie because he can't face COVIID.

Trump Baselessly Claims Doctors ‘Get More Money’ From COVID-19 Deaths

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-claims-doctors-get-more-money-from-covid-19-deaths?ref=home

 

AP FACT CHECK: Trump baselessly cites fraud in virus toll

By HOPE YEN and CALVIN WOODWARD
Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — The actual crisis of the coronavirus pandemic and a manufactured crisis over voting fraud featured heavily in President Donald Trump’s misstatements during the 2020 campaign’s final week. Democrat Joe Biden went astray on trade as he assailed the president’s record on China.

Straining to make the pandemic look less dire than it is, Trump baselessly alleged that the death count is inflated by instances of doctors falsifying the cause of death. He produced no evidence of that, and there is strong contrary evidence that the death toll attributed to COVID-19 actually understates how many Americans are dying from it.


A sampling of political rhetoric from the week:

TRUMP: “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID. You know that right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, ‘I’m sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of COVID.’” — rally Friday in Waterford Township, Michigan.

THE FACTS: No, the virus death count has not been overstated because of doctors lying to get more money. No evidence has emerged of such systemic fraud.

Almost 230,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been confirmed as of Saturday. The true number is almost certainly higher by a considerable margin.

As of Oct. 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 299,000 more U.S. deaths than would be expected in a normal year. Some of those deaths are sure to have been from COVID-19 — how many cannot be known.

It's true that hospitals may get higher reimbursement from the government to treat COVID-19 patients. Hospitals were given a 20% add-on for Medicare patients who test positive for the virus to cover the additional costs of treating the disease, such as buying supplies. The higher reimbursements are based on a COVID-19 diagnosis, not on the cause of death as Trump stated.

The Healthcare Financial Management Association, which works with hospitals on billing matters, says providers must support COVID-19 billing with test results or a physician's statement. The organization says hospitals expect to be audited for this billing and know that Medicare cheaters may have to pay back three times what they overcharged or even lose access to Medicaid patients.

Susan R. Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, said Trump's allegation of COVID-19 overcounting, which he has made several times, “is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge.”


___

VIRUS

TRUMP: “In California, you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask.” — Arizona rally on Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Those statements are false.

California residents are not required to wear “special” masks Nor are they required to wear them all the time and “eat through the mask.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide mask order allows Californians to wear basic coverings such as homemade ones and people are not required to wear them when at home, outdoors more than 6 feet from others or when eating and drinking.

His office this month did tweet out a graphic advising people to “keep your mask on in between bites” when going out to eat at restaurants. That was mocked because Californians were also advised to minimize the amount of times they touch their masks. Newsom told reporters that one of his staffers had sent out the tweet, which the governor said was intended to indicate that if people start to read a book at the table, they may want to put their mask back on.

___

TRUMP: “We have a spike in cases ... And you know why we have so many cases? Because we test more.” — Michigan rally Tuesday.

THE FACTS: No, increased testing does not fully account for the rise in recorded cases, and Trump is contradicted by his own top health officials. People are also infecting each other more than before as distancing rules recede, some shun masks and community spread picks up.

Adm. Brett Giroir, the Health and Human Services Department official overseeing the nation’s coronavirus testing efforts, stressed anew that the increases can’t be explained by just additional testing.

“We do believe and the data show that cases are going up,” Giroir told NBC’s “Today” show on Wednesday. “Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up. And we know that, too, because hospitalizations are going up.”

More testing actually does not mean more infections at all; people are getting sick regardless of whether their illness is recorded. More testing can help prevent the disease’s spread by letting people know COVID-19 is rising in their area.

Practically every state is now seeing a rise in cases. The virus has now killed over 228,000 in the U.S., according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Giroir warned that local governments may be forced to take “draconian measures” if Americans don’t take safety precautions seriously. “Cases will go up if we don’t make a change,” he said.

___

TRADE

BIDEN, comparing Trump’s record on trade with that of the Obama administration: “We have a trade deficit that’s larger with China than when we were there.” – interview on “60 Minutes,” Oct. 25.

THE FACTS: Biden’s claim is outdated and no longer true. The U.S. deficit in the trade of goods and services with China fell last year to $308 billion — the lowest since 2013 — as Trump slapped taxes on most Chinese imports to the United States. And the gap is down again so far this year.

In the first two years of the Trump presidency, however, the United States ran higher trade deficits with China — $380 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017 — than any recorded during the Obama administration. The deficit was $310 billion in 2016, the last year of the Obama presidency.

___

2020 ELECTION

TRUMP: “It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November third, instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate and I don’t believe that that’s by our laws.” — remarks to reporters Tuesday.

THE FACTS: “Our laws” don’t require the immediate reporting of all election results in the country on election night. Delayed counting is unavoidable.

Apart from the usual lags in rounding up and reporting totals from every precinct in the country, the U.S. is seeing unprecedented numbers of early votes, and some battleground states won’t even start counting them until Election Day votes have been tallied.

Indeed, the Supreme Court is allowing Pennsylvania to count mailed ballots that are not even received by elections officials for three days after the election, as long as there’s no evidence that such ballots were filled out after Nov. 3. The decision isn’t final: Justices left open the possibility of reviewing the matter after the election.

The court is also allowing absentee ballots in North Carolina to be received and counted up to nine days after Election Day.

Earlier in the campaign, Trump asserted that the winner should be declared on election night, another outcome no one can guarantee and one that may elude the country Tuesday. There is no requirement that the winner be determined Election Day.

He once raised the question of delaying the election, then dropped the thought, but has persisted in groundless allegations that the election is certain to be plagued by fraud.

___

TRUMP: “Strongly Trending (Google) since immediately after the second debate is CAN I CHANGE MY VOTE? This refers changing it to me. The answer in most states is YES. Go do it. Most important Election of your life!” — tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Not so fast. Some states allow voters to switch their early vote, but laws vary and many have restrictions.

Minnesota, for instance, allows voters to “claw back” their vote and change it, but the deadline for that has passed. Wisconsin allows people to change their vote up to three times, though it doesn’t happen often. Florida allows voters who received mail ballots to choose to vote in person instead, but they cannot vote more than once.

If a voter has already sent his or her mail-in ballot and then goes to vote in person, “the (mail) ballot is deemed cast and the voter to have voted,” according to Florida law.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation said changing a vote in states where that is possible is “extremely rare” and very complicated.

“It’s hard enough to get people to vote once — it’s highly unlikely anybody will go through this process twice,” he said.

Trump’s suggestion that he did so well in the debate that people who already voted for Biden wished they could switch to him is not borne out by the search engine’s statistics.

Google searches for “change my vote” did not crack the top 20 searches that night or after. Jill Biden was the subject of Google’s 20th most popular search that day. On Friday, the new “Borat” movie, presidential polls and college football were among the subjects drawing top 20 attention.

___

TRUMP: “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.” — tweet Monday.

THE FACTS: No, the catastrophe Trump has warned darkly about for months in mail-in voting has not materialized.

There have been sporadic reports of voters receiving mail ballots that were incorrectly formatted and other localized hitches in the record early turnout, but large-scale disenfranchisement has not been seen.

Trump has conspiratorially inflated local incidents, contending, for example, that mail-in ballots filled out for him are being dumped in rivers or creeks. This is a fabrication.

Three trays of mail were found by the side of a road and in a ditch — not a river or creek — in Greenville, Wisconsin, in mid-September. The sheriff initially said “several absentee ballots” were in the mix. The state’s elections officer later said no Wisconsin ballots were in the lost mail after all. No one said ballots marked for Trump were thrown out in the incident.

Trump’s motive for challenging votes by mail is plain: Democrats are dominating that segment of voting. Registered Democrats have also outnumbered registered Republicans in early voting in person at polling places, though the gap is narrower than with mailed ballots.

In short, Trump may need supporters to show up in huge numbers Tuesday if not before, and his baseless allegations of early-voting irregularities are designed to motivate them to do so as well as to portray the result as illegitimate if Biden wins.

___

VOTING FRAUD

TRUMP, suggesting that Nevada’s Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak will add fraudulent votes: “We’re worried about the governor. ... Some of these people, in Nevada, they want to have the election. They want to have the count weeks after November 3rd. So let’s all wait for the governor to count them up good, and how many is he going to add during that two weeks, right?” — Arizona rally Wednesday.

TRUMP, on Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf: “The governor counts the ballots. ... This is the guy that’s counting our ballots? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.” — remarks Monday in Pennsylvania.

THE FACTS: To be clear, governors don’t count the votes, and they can’t just manufacture votes in the election.

Local county officials in Pennsylvania send out the ballots and count the votes. The state’s top elections official is Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Wolf appointee.

In Nevada, Sisolak has been a target of Trump’s ire after Sisolak in September criticized Trump’s indoor rally in a Las Vegas suburb for violating the state’s large-scale ban on indoor gatherings. But Sisolak doesn’t tally the votes himself, and Trump makes a baseless assertion that he can add fraudulent votes to the count.

Nevada’s secretary of state oversees that state’s new all-mail election. That office is held by Barbara Cegavske and she is a Republican.

___

TRUMP: “In Nevada, they want to have a thing where you don’t have to have any verification of the signature.” -- New Hampshire rally Oct. 25.

THE FACTS: Not true, despite his frequent assertions to the contrary. The state’s existing law requires signature checks on mail ballots. A new law also spells out a process by which election officials are to check a signature against the one in government records.

In Nevada’s June primary, nearly 7,000 ballots were thrown out due to mismatched or missing signatures.

___

TRUMP: “I say the biggest risk we have are the fake ballots.” — New Hampshire rally.

THE FACTS: His claim, frequently made in the last days before the election, is overblown.

It’s true that many states are expecting a surge in mail-in voting because of the coronavirus pandemic, which may lead to longer times in vote counting. The Supreme Court, for instance, will allow Pennsylvania to count mailed-in ballots received up to three days after the election; it also will allow North Carolina to count votes received nine days after the election so long as ballots are postmarked by Nov. 3.

But there is no evidence to indicate that massive fraud is afoot. Any delay in declaring a winner of the presidential race after Tuesday would not in itself be illegal.

Broadly speaking, voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

In the five states that regularly send ballots to all voters who have registered, there have been no major cases of fraud or difficulty counting the votes.

Even if the election is messy and contested in court, the country will have a president in January — and not have vote counting going on “forever” as he asserts — because the Constitution and federal law ensure it.

___

Associated Press writers Arijeta Lajka in New York, Tom Murphy in Indianapolis, Paul Wiseman and Darlene Superville in Washington; Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, California; Michelle L. Price in Las Vegas and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

___

Find AP Fact Checks athttp://apnews.com/APFactCheck

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter:https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

 

The reality is that while cases are up, deaths are unchanged which means drs. Are learning how to treat this.

Which raises the question, why would they hide the facts??

Cause without control, they have nothing.
Which the Lincoln project would like you not to notice.

 

What has Donald Trump really done for the rust belt states?

Ben Chu
Sat, October 31, 2020, 9:55 AM CDT



The volume of US steel imports did fall due to Trump's tariffs, but there has been scant evidence of any gains from that for steel workers (Reuters)

In perhaps the most memorable image in his inauguration address in January 2017 Donald Trump lamented the “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”.

The “rust belt” generally refers to American states around the Great Lakes region of the northwest including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

They were once prosperous centres of coal mining, steel production, heavy industry and manufacturing in the early 20th century.

But their fortunes turned in the domestic recessions of the 1970s and the rise of domestic and foreign competition. This decline accelerated in the 1980s as much manufacturing automated and shed jobs, and the US shifted resources from industry into services, leaving many disused factories to “rust”.


What industry remained was then hollowed out further by the “China shock” of the 2000s, when China entered global manufacturing trading networks at huge scale and began overproducing steel and depressing demand on world markets.

The rust belt means places like Scranton (Pennsylvania), Gary (Indiana), Detroit (Michigan) – names that have become resonant with industrial decline, population loss and its attendant human misery over the past half century.

Trump made the plight of the rust belt a central feature of his 2016 campaign, making extravagant promises to resurrect American steel production, reinvigorate domestic manufacturing and bring back jobs.

This was, to a considerable degree, an electoral calculation.

The rust belt contains some important “swing states” – states that traditionally teeter between the two main parties – such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

Trump’s team believed he could wrestle blue collar rust belt voters away from their traditional allegiance to the Democrats.

And the strategy succeeded. Trump managed to flip Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan from Democrat to Republican and the electoral college votes from those states helped to deliver him the White House.

But has Trump delivered for those voters over the past four years?

What has Donald Trump done for the rust belt?

One of Trump’s primary economic policies over the past two years has been protectionism.

He imposed 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports from China and also Europe in 2018, claiming this would help domestic steel producers by reducing competition from imports.

The volume of steel imports did fall, but there has been scant evidence of any gains from that for the domestic steel industry and it workers.

Employment in the steel industry in the rust belt states was largely flat even before the coronavirus pandemic struck the US economy.

Though steel prices rose in March 2018, which helped domestic producers’ profit margins, they have been falling for most of the period since.

The share price of US Steel, one of the biggest national employers and producers, is now below where it was when Trump was elected. The rest of the stock market is higher.

Moreover, it seems the initial spike in domestic steel prices resulting from those tariffs on imports hurt the industrial consumers of steel in the rust belt more than they helped steel producers.

One analysis suggests that steel and aluminium tariffs resulted in at least 75,000 job losses in metal-consuming US industries by the end of 2019.

The costs of car manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors rose, prompting them to shed jobs. Last year General Motors closed its Chevrolet plant in Lordstown, Ohio, shedding its final 1,500 jobs.

The number of jobs in car manufacturing in Michigan, the heart of the US industry, declined by around 4,000 to 36,000 between the beginning of 2017 and September 2020.

Broader manufacturing jobs in these states also stagnated between 2017 and 2019.

Calls for people to “Buy American” seemed to be making little substantive impact. And then came the pandemic.

Overall unemployment in some rust belt states, such as Michigan and Ohio, shot up more rapidly than elsewhere in the US earlier this year.

Another Trump policy has been to exert pressure on US companies to increase investment domestically.

There was a spate of announcements early in Trump’s presidency of factories expanding or of firms reshoring production. But the flow of announcements has dried up.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic advisor insisted last year that “billions of dollars are being invested in new or rejuvenated mills and foundries all across America”.

And Trump himself claimed in June 2019 that “now we have many [car] plants being built all throughout the United States.”

Yet there was no statistical evidence of an investment boom in the rust belt states, automotive or otherwise, before the pandemic and there certainly isn’t now.

Poverty rates in the rust belt states did fall between 2017 and 2019 according to the US Census Bureau, although these declines were broadly in line with the national average.

And the bulk of the gains from Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut went to the wealthy, not to blue collar workers in the rust belt.

The impact of Donald Trump’s policies on America’s rust belt has been broadly what economists had predicted when he started talking up the economic merits of protectionism in 2016.

That is to say, it did more harm than good overall. And to even those sectors which did initially benefit, the boost did not last.

 

The real Trump Derangement Syndrome is 'Orange Man Good'

Anthony L. Fisher
Sun, November 1, 2020, 7:27 AM CST



President Donald Trump on October 21 in Gastonia, North Carolina. Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

• 
  Trump supporters reflexively insist President Donald Trump's critics have "Trump Derangement Syndrome" and that their only argument is "Orange Man Bad."
  
  
• By nearly every objective metric, Trump's presidency has been a failure, and he has contributed to this country's partisan division perhaps more than any single person over the past decade, from his birther slanders to his idiotic anti-mask posturing.
  
  
• The real TDS is Trumpists and anti-anti-Trumpers evaluating his presidency and saying, in the face of all evidence, "Orange Man Good."
  
  
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
  
  
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
  

Trump supporters reflexively insist President Donald Trump's critics have "Trump Derangement Syndrome," a condition in which the mere mention of the 45th president's name induces fits of hysteria.

"Orange Man Bad," they'll say, as a dismissive conversation-ending put-down.

Both Trumpists and crypto-Trumpists see his critics as so unhinged that they're simply incapable of rational thought about the 45th president. To them, TDS sufferers might as well be breathing into a paper bag at the sound of his name, with "Orange Man Bad" the zombie-grunt of those chronically afflicted with TDS.

It's understandable that any criticism directed at Trump is dismissed as "TDS" from dyed-in-the-wool, MAGA-till-they-die Trumpists.


More infuriating are the anti-anti-Trumpers, right-leaning contrarians too embarrassed to admit they support such a fiscally irresponsible, defiantly unintelligent, conscience-bereft hypocrite. Trump's their guy, whatever superficial objections to his vulgarity they may voice, because they appreciate that he did tax reform, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, and, most important, triggers the real bad guys — "the left."

By nearly every objective metric Trump's presidency has been a failure, and he has contributed to this country's partisan division perhaps more than any single person over the past decade, from his birther slanders to his idiotic anti-mask posturing.

That's why the real Trump Derangement Syndrome is these reluctant Trumpists' knee-jerk defense of Trump just because he "triggers the libs."

And the truly mindless response isn't a resistance liberal crying, "Orange Man Bad." It's disingenuous conservatives droning "Orange Man Good."

Trumpists wear magic glasses that make them see his presidency as successful
To the outwardly reluctant Trumpist fact-based indictments of Trump's disastrous presidency are merely the rantings of deranged socialists. These anti-anti-Trumpers fancy themselves the enlightened seers of Trump's establishment-obliterating 4-D chess strategy. But there are more important distinctions among the pro-Trump camps.

Some Trump voters see in Joe Biden a "Weekend at Bernie's" candidate. He's a walking corpse, a puppet of the socialist left that will be the real power behind his presidency. (There are exactly five self-described democratic socialists in the 535-member Congress.)

To their minimally earned credit, at least their argument isn't "Trump's been a good president."

It's more that they see Trump as the bulwark against the culturally liberal George Soros-funded forces that will raise taxes to pay for abortions, send antifa stormtroopers to burn down the suburbs, and permanently open America's borders to caravans of "dirty" immigrants.

That's a political calculus not moored in reality, but it at least concedes the motivation isn't so much an affirmation of Trump's presidency as it is an expression of their brain-crippling fear of what the "bad Americans" will do when they're in power.

The truly deranged pro-Trump argument is one which was eloquently analyzed by Kevin Williamson in the conservative National Review:

"The unqualified — and indefensible — case for Trump goes: 'Donald Trump's presidency has been good for America — positively, on its own merits, rather than merely relative to what we might have expected from Mrs. Clinton.' That argument is partly dishonest, partly delusional."

Put another way, there is no real case for a second Trump term, no matter how liberal or conservative you may be, except for — say it with me — "Orange Man Good."

Defending the indefensible to own the libs
For voters whose sole concern is abortion-hostile federal judges and a couple generations of a right-leaning Supreme Court, this doesn't apply to you. Trump — the corrupt philanderer who mocks evangelicals behind their backs — has given you what you voted for.

But if things such as free trade, the national debt, robust foreign policy, scientific advancement, or the basic machinery of a competently run government are of any import — and you're still insistent that Trump has been a good president — you might be experiencing Trump Derangement Syndrome of the "Orange Man Good" variety.

This isn't 2016, when it was all one big troll. Trump's got a record now. And in its totality it's an indefensible record.

Trump is flagrantly corrupt
Ever since Trump burst into the national conscious in the 1980s he's stiffed hundreds of other working people — from construction companies to dishwashers — on countless occasions over the years. He's also dripping with a history of corrupt chicanery.

So while Trump desperately wants to talk about Hunter Biden, Burisma, and some guy named Bobulinski, the last thing he wants to talk about is how he and his talentless children have shamelessly used his presidency to enhance their own financial interests.

It's an election year, so it's probably worth recalling that time he was impeached for trying to strong-arm a foreign leader into investigating a political opponent. Even honest Republicans admitted that was corrupt as hell, but fearing their "Orange Man Good" constituents, had to qualify that it wasn't "remove from office" corrupt.

Books will be written detailing just how many conflicts of interest Trump has exploited as president, but none is more in-your-face than the Trump International Hotel — a veritable swamp of influence-peddling, heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer, barely more than a mile from the White House.

Trump's coronavirus response was, and continues to be, criminally negligent
Trump initially denied the coronavirus existed.

Then he said it would go away like magic. Then he said we have it under control. Then he explicitly said we should slow down testing because the numbers were making him look bad.

Then he attacked the scientists and suggested that injecting bleach might be a good idea. Then he said masks were bad and lockdowns tyrannical. Then he said we're "rounding the corner," which he's insisted over and over and over for the past eight months. Then he got COVID.

Now his chief of staff Mark Meadows admits they've just given up.

In between all that, Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of securing the nation's restocking of personal protective equipment.

Kushner in turn tasked a small group of resourceless 20-somethings with personal laptops and Gmail accounts to do all the work. It didn't go well.

A recent study out of Columbia University estimated that at least half of the US death toll could have been avoided if the US had used the same COVID-mitigating policies and protocols as Canada. That didn't happen, and now 220,000 Americans and counting have died of the virus, and we couldn't escape to Canada if we tried.

As Trump said at the onset of the pandemic, in March, "I take no responsibility." To drive the point home, he's been purging inspectors general — the independent watchdogs of government — for months.

And as he says now, with the country still a COVID basket case, "The Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the Election. Losers!"

Objectively, Trump is a liar, and he's incompetent, and he's caused untold destruction to his country. You'd have to be deranged to look at the available evidence and come to a more charitable conclusion.

Trump is the greatest promoter of left-wing identity-politics-driven 'wokeness'
If "wokeness" didn't exist we'd have to invent it because Donald Trump is president.

A certain portion of Trump voters claim to be put off by his Twitter feed and his shambolic press conferences, but in Trump they see the only bulwark against what they believe to be existential threats to Western civilization — identity politics, critical race theory, and other elements of progressive wokeness.

At times I've been vocally critical of certain punitive deployments of woke politics, particularly the variety that cancels first and asks questions later, thinks dissenting ideas are inherently problematic, or rationalizes theft and violence as righteous instruments of justice.

But as Andrew Sullivan, a far more strident critic of what he calls "left illiberalism," aptly put it this week: "Trump has facilitated, exacerbated and legitimized wokeness more than any other figure on the right or left. He has made anti-wokeness toxic by association."

That's because, unlike some of the wrongly cancelled, Trump is indeed a racist, a misogynist, and a xenophobe.

In a world where this guy is the president, of course woke opposition would gain greater credibility and influence.

Trump is a sadistic thug and a sniveling coward
Trump White House alumni, including decorated generals, have described their former boss as a walking disaster.

But among the few senior staffers to survive the entire administration is the white-nationalist Stephen Miller. Trump put him in charge of directing immigration policy and border enforcement, which included zero-tolerance prosecution of the misdemeanor crime of illegal border crossing, and the deliberate separation of children from their parents.

Now we know that the Trump administration lost track of 545 of those kids' parents. (If you're a "Save the Children" pro-life conservative for Trump, maybe read the previous sentence again.)

His ham-fisted "Muslim ban" disrupted thousands of lives, including American citizens', for no other reason than because the administration hoped — as Steve Bannon put it — "the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot."

Trump is also your dangerously gullible uncle on Facebook. It doesn't matter how implausible the conspiracy theory, he's the target audience. His Twitter account is a national embarrassment, larded with hysterical tantrums, hoax conspiracy theories, and retweets of QAnoners, anti-Semites, and miscellaneous internet scumbags.

Another book can be written on all the asinine conspiracy theories Trump has tacitly endorsed — and how much damage was wrought by violent idiots who believe in the church of Trump.

But among the most despicable lies Trump has propagated is the slanderous accusation that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered an aide two decades ago — who in fact tragically died at 28 in a freak accident as a result of an undiagnosed medical malady.

The deceased woman's family has kept mum about the leader of the free world pushing the theory that a famous man murdered their loved one, because they know how vicious and legitimately dangerous Trump's online minions can be.

Trump's brand is cruelty, but what his myopic supporters miss is that, like all bullies, he is a sniveling coward who rejects any honest inquiry that might reveal his lies, corruption, and incompetence.

That's why he panicked when faced with Lesley Stahl's basic questions in the "60 Minutes" interview he fled last week. He's been running from fair but critical questions for decades.

Trump's idea of what makes America 'great' is un-American
Trumpists believe the president loves America, so much so that he wants to make it great again. Or keep it great. Or kick out all the people who don't like America, because the only good criticism of America is "Make America Great Again."

Sure, Trump started and lost a pointless trade war with China, then used taxpayer money to bail out the American industries battered by his trade war of choice.

And yes, he might disrespect the military by insulting veterans as "suckers," disparaging the generals under his command as "pussies," and using the armed forces as political props for a pre-election stunt.

But, many Trumpists argue, at least Trump respects free speech, unlike the censorious authoritarians on the left.

Trump has been an opponent of the First Amendment for his entire public life, openly musing that it should be easier to sue journalists for libel, while his campaign attacks media outlets with potentially ruinous lawsuits for running unflattering op-eds and political ads.

Even his nominal attempts at protecting speech are Trojan horses for censorship, such as his executive orders protecting conservative speech on college campuses while labeling other speech as beyond the pale.

Trump's recent EO regarding social-media companies was applauded by the right as a necessary pushback against Big Tech censorship, but as Adam Serwer put it in The Atlantic: "Trump's goal, though, is not honest debate. It is censorship. If the tech companies do not promote his propaganda, or maintain his exemption from their own rules, they will be punished."

'Orange Man Good'
Trump got elected by demonizing Muslims and Mexicans, supposedly to assuage the "economic anxiety" of a subset of working class Americans. How times have changed.

The president has enough self-awareness to know he has no political principles or guiding philosophy besides his own personal enrichment. Trump knows he can only appeal to fear and anger. That's why the supposed "American carnage" of 2016 is now packaged to the MAGA masses as the terror of antifa, wokeness, and lockdowns.

Trump doesn't want us to talk about his record. Or his businesses. Or COVID. He is constantly throwing up manic smoke bombs to keep us focused on anything else.

That's his only move because his presidency has been catastrophic and the damage he has done to this country is incalculable.

I can already see my Twitter mentions filling up with green frogs and TDS memes. But I have sympathy for the deranged.

Trumpism is a nihilistic cult believing in one falsifiable maxim: Orange Man Good.

 

Despicables and trump haters simply cannot understand that attacking someone because they support trump will never encourage open dialogue on politics.

 

Finally.
The real truth.
And still so fucking arrogant they're incapable of seeing the real problem.
Biden?
Really?
Harris.
Really.
Hunter!
Oh shit!