The Donald Trump Score Card

Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic
The president cannot rely on his usual strategies of lying and bullying to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes
March 3, 2020

Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic

excerpt:

"The Trump crisis playbook to date has involved bullying both political allies, to keep them in line, and potential opponents, to prevent them from talking. It has involved lying. It has involved the deflection of attention onto other matters. It has involved attacking the attackers, spinning conspiracy theories about and spawning investigations of the investigators. It has involved bombastic dismissals of serious issues as the latest “hoax” or “witch hunt” or instance of “presidential harassment.” And it has involved endlessly reminding people that the economy is humming along and their 401(k) plans are doing well.

But a virus, unlike a Republican member of Congress, cannot be bullied. It doesn’t care about the president’s poll numbers. Nor does it pay any mind to whether the president describes his own handling of its presence as perfect.

The second- and third-order consequences here are also out of the president's control. People don’t hold on to stocks out of political loyalty whose value they see declining. Businesses don’t make purchasing decisions to validate presidential ego either. The current challenge involves the highly distributed actions of countless organisms—human and microbial—none of whom will be looking over their shoulders at the president’s anger or desires."

 

Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic

excerpt:

"But presidents rarely get spared political blame for economic shocks beyond their control. And a president who ties his political fate so energetically to the state of the economy and the market—who declares that voters should ignore apparent illegality, corruption, and serial failures of decency because their retirement accounts are faring well and their job prospects are good—may prove particularly vulnerable to conditions that undermine the premise of his argument."

 

What exactly is your point?

 

Trump is obsessed with declaring emergencies and requesting emergency hearings about his emergencies by the U.S. Supreme Court.


Justice Sotomayor calls out the US Supreme Court in a sharp dissent
By Ephrat Livni
Senior reporter, law & politics, DC.
Washington DC
February 22, 2020

Justice Sotomayor calls out the US Supreme Court in a sharp dissent

excerpt:

"The five conservatives on the bench approved the government’s request and the four progressives voted no. Sotomayor accused her colleagues in the majority of undermining fairness and process by continually granting the Trump administration’s allegedly urgent demands.

“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow,” Sotomayor writes.

But the disingenuous alarm isn’t what bothers her most. “Perhaps most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others,” she notes.

That litigant is the federal government under president Donald Trump. Though she didn’t name the president in her dissent, the justice is clearly unimpressed with the Trump administration’s exceptional neediness, and even less taken with her colleagues’ willingness to be its supreme enforcers."

 

Justice Sotomayor calls out the US Supreme Court in a sharp dissent

excerpt:

"University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck wrote in the Harvard Law Review last year about the high court’s unusually active “shadow docket.” The federal government now turns to the justices for emergency relief, circumventing the usual appellate process, more than ever before. It doesn’t wait for lower courts to decide matters but goes straight to the top, claiming extraordinary needs—often with little supporting evidence—and has created this alternate docket, a shadow caseload the high court continually considers prematurely"

 

Trump’s tone toward pharma shifts, as he looks to drug makers to help with coronavirus response
By Lev Facher
March 2, 2020

Seeking help with coronavirus, Trump shifts his tone toward pharma

excerpt:

"WASHINGTON — President Trump had billed the meeting with pharmaceutical executives as a scolding waiting to happen. The gathering was intended to pressure the industry to bring drug prices “way down,” he said on Friday, suggesting it had only later morphed into a “convenient” opportunity to discuss the development of a coronavirus vaccine.

But seated across from 10 pharmaceutical executives in the Cabinet Room on Monday, Trump’s long-simmering contempt for the drug industry melted away. Trump told executives from Gilead, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer that they worked for a “great company.” He affectionately referred to Leonard Schleifer, the CEO of Regeneron, as “Lenny.” At one point, Trump referred to the assembled drug executives as “geniuses.”

The meeting signified a remarkable shift in Trump’s view of the pharmaceutical industry. After years of maintaining that drug companies charge “ripoff” prices, Trump appeared floored by the executives’ progress reports. He alternatingly praised CEOs and egged them on to lay out shorter and shorter timelines for bringing a vaccine to market. Trump, throughout the meeting, appeared so blown away by the drug companies’ claims that his deputies struggled to rein in his expectations."

 

Wind vane Trump does an about-face on the pharmaceutical industry he once scorned for high prices.

He is in the predicament of having to act like a humanitarian while still waging his wars on China and Iran where the virus has been at its worst, particularly Iran which has been financially damaged by Trump which is hampering response to the virus.

Trump put himself in a similar predicament by starting a trade war with Europe, threatening Europe with auto tariffs, damaging Iran with sanctions, pressuring Europe to do likewise, insulting NATO, and later begging Europe and NATO to help him grapple with Iran and other problems in the Mideast that he spawned.

 

Attempts at appeasing Trump didn't work for Europe. Trump scrapped the Iran agreement that he had earlier used as ransom and pressured the rest of the signatories to scrap it.

Appeasement didn't work for Argentina and Brazil either. After heavy negotiations to avoid Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs, Trump later and without warning accused them without evidence of currency manipulation and imposed the tariffs on them anyway. Trump apparently became frustrated that the two countries were forming business relationships with China to provide agricultural products no longer being purchased from the U.S. due to his trade war.

It didn't work for Senate Republicans who thought they could appease Trump with an acquittal for an impeachment that they thought would teach him a lesson. He became even cockier and embarked on a post-impeachment retaliation and purge campaign.



Europe's Last-Ditch Effort to Save the Iran Deal
And what happens if it fails
Robert Malley and Colin Kahl
April 24, 2018

Europe's Last-Ditch Effort to Save the Iran Deal

excerpt:

"Trump essentially is taking hostage something the Europeans value, threatening to kill the agreement unless they pay him ransom. So France, Germany, and the U.K. have been valiantly seeking a way out of the crisis Trump manufactured, attempting to accommodate the president’s demands while staying true to their own obligations under the JCPOA. They are doing so not because they agree that the deal is in urgent need of repair. They don’t. Rather, they are rightly worried that Trump will make an ideologically inspired and fact-free decision to tear it down, with profoundly negative consequences for their national security interests. Which explains why America’s European allies are in the awkward position of bending over backwards to appease a man intent on killing the deal by considering more pressure on a party (Iran) that is abiding by it."

 

In October 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal from four agreements. Two were related to fights he started with China and Iran.


Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights with Iran.

Optional Protocol to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR).

Universal Postal Union

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia




Trump Administration Announces Withdrawal from Four International Agreements

Trump Administration Announces Withdrawal from Four International Agreements

excerpt:

"In October of 2018, the Trump administration announced that the United States would withdraw from four international agreements. On October 3, 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would withdraw from the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights with Iran. Later that day, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced that the United States was also withdrawing from the Optional Protocol to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR). Both withdrawals were triggered by pending International Court of Justice (ICJ) cases grounded in these treaties that were recently brought against the United States. Two weeks later, in an escalation of the ongoing trade dispute with China, the United States gave notice of withdrawal from the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the international body charged with overseeing the international mailing system. Finally, on October 22, 2018, President Trump announced that the United States would be terminating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. Unlike other withdrawals undertaken by the Trump administration, this latest round involved three Article II treaties to which the Senate had provided its advice and consent. In addition, the international commitments withdrawn from in this round were long-standing ones, with U.S. participation in the UPU going back as far as 1875."

 

In any other country what Trump and the Republicans have done has a name.

 

Yes, they lack 'fathers' !!!

 

Maybe the windmills caused the virus. Just so Trump would look bad.

 

The windmills didn't cause it, but if this is an airborne virus, they would sure help to spread it !!!

 

The windmills do not create a breeze. so I don't expect them to spread anything, They just use the wind to turn the blades.
I was trying to make a joke about Trumps comment that the " windmills cause cancer "

 

It would be ironic if trump, a known germophobe, caught the virus.


Hi everybody, It's good to be back. I missed you all, well some of you. I was in a car accident, and hurt my back. Was in a lot of pain, and didn't feel like posting.

 

Sorry to hear that, flag. Welcome back hope you're feeling better.

 

Thank you.

 

Hey Flagie Baby! Welcome Back!

 

At a rally in N. Carolina, Trump turned the coronavirus problem into a black-white, twisted dichotomy of protectionism vs. globalism.


Trump:

“We’re doing everything in our power to keep the sick and infected people from coming into our country,”

“There are fringe globalists who would rather keep our borders open.”