While Americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in Florida, for the 51st-birthday party of Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the former co-hosts of The Five, and now the girlfriend of Donald J. Trump Jr. All the usual suspects were there, including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham; Tiffany Trump; Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; and Trump’s younger son Eric and his wife, Lara. They sang happy birthday to Guilfoyle and lit a big sparkler. At the end, she pumped her fist and shouted “Four more years!” This is what passes for a cozy family celebration in Trumpland. But out in the real world, darkness was falling fast.
There were already 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, around the world, and 3,600 people had died. In the U.S., more than 100 new cases had been reported that day, a rate that was doubling every three days. Other nations knew how serious this was: By that time, China had shut down major cities, all but quarantining 760 million people. Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea had put in aggressive travel restrictions and testing procedures. In the U.S., fear was rising. South By Southwest, the giant music/tech conference in Austin had just been canceled. Grocery stores were stripped in panic buying. On Wall Street, stocks were in free fall.
There's also an AUDM version embedded at their site - you can listen or download it.
Two of the big points:
- 45* is responsible for dismantling the pandemic response team that was in place in the NSC. He let Bolton scrub that whole fucking thing.
- The "China Travel Ban" was a Swiss cheese measure. He blocked travel, but only for Chinese nationals (which is why it was in fact a racist asshole thing to do). Everybody else was free to come and go as they pleased. And he didn't block any manufactured goods coming in from China. It could have given us a little lead time to get something in place before the thing took off, but he sat on his ass doing that stoopid fucking wishful thinking thing he always does.
This is on him, and I've not seen any good evidence that we're not being played - that this is not the standard Shock Doctrine bullshit that the plutocrats have been using to fuck people over for 50 years.
History is not a series of random independent events - and there's not such thing as mere;y coincidental, un-connected happenstance in politics.
If you've got about 9 hours, give a listen to Naomi Klein:
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