It’s All About Trump
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
After Trump’s rally in New Hampshire had been canceled – according to the Trump campaign because of the weather but in reality because there had been very little demand for tickets – the president went looking for an audience, and he found one yesterday in the Rose Garden. Invited for a presser about punishment for China’s actions in Hong Kong reporters were treated to a rambling speech of almost an hour in which China was barely mentioned, but that shifted from COVID-19 to Joe Biden to the economy to Trump’s accomplishments and how he had always been sabotaged. His staffers had urged him to make the speech not about himself but about Biden, knowing that running on Trump’s merits would be a loser, but Trump can only talk about himself and dug every hole that he’s in a little deeper. En passant he broke the law, because it is illegal to campaign on government property, but that was peanuts compared to his commuting of the sentence of Roger Stone, who had been convicted for lying in order to protect the president who now kept him out of jail to return the favor, a genuine mafia two-step if ever there was one.
With the pandemic raging in most states Trump doubled down on his earlier falsehoods, now claiming that doctors are lying about the virus to make him lose the election and that schools are being kept closed for the same reason. Addressing the first issue the White House produced an ‘oppo research’ paper stating that Dr. Fauci had frequently been wrong, and directed that from now on hospitals send their COVID numbers to a data-base in DC, where they are not public and can easily be manipulated, instead of to the CDC. And in spite of the unbelievable testing mess in the US the president keeps repeating his bizarre claim that testing produces infections. With regards to the schools Trump answers every question by saying ‘schools must be open,’ like a person on the extreme left side of the autism spectrum, and inexplicably states that parents and children are dying because schools are closed, and that if administrators don’t want to open a school parents have to find ‘someone who will.’ His proclamations fly in the face of CDC guidelines that identify fully re-opened schools as representing the highest public health risk.
Asked about the Confederate flag the president said that he understands why people like it and that he doesn’t mind having it wave at his rallies, calling it ‘freedom of speech’ and criticizing NASCAR for having banned it from its races. In response to a question about blacks being killed by the police Trump responded that whites are being killed more often, which disregards statistics showing that blacks are twice as likely to be killed by police violence. It was one more example of Trump’s racism getting the worst of him and his self-sabotaging his re-election bid.
The president’s attempt to blackmail universities into opening by threatening to take visas away from foreign students who only take on-line classes failed and was reversed, because both the universities and the US are too dependent on those students. Trump didn’t fare well in the courts this week, because his financial information will be made available to the Manhattan DA and his estranged niece, Mary, is now allowed to give interviews about the dysfunctional Trump family.
Mary’s cousin, Ivanka, who qualifies as the most idiotic member of that family in spite of heavy competition, broke the law with a commercial for Goya beans after its CEO had endorsed her father, and as his senior advisor on employment matters she displayed her profound knowledge of that field by urging the newly unemployed to ‘find something else’ in the middle of the corona pandemic.
Ga HIER naar toe voor alle afleveringen