In current days, Donald Trump’s go-to reason for why the federal government hasn’t done more to increase efforts to test Americans for the novel coronavirus– even though such tests are required for the economy to effectively reopen — is that this should be the responsibility of state federal governments.
” Governors should be able to step up and get the job done,” Trump tweeted Saturday afternoon, while likewise weirdly stating that the U.S. was the “King of Ventilators.” Is he going to start offering them in late-night commercials?
When guvs grumble that they can’t ramp up coronavirus testing, because there’s no place near sufficient capacity, Trump rejects it, declaring that governors “don’t wish to utilize all of the capability that we have actually produced.” When asked why testing rates have stayed mostly flat for the past month, Trump naturally turns it around and pins blame on the governors, incorrectly declaring they have not asked for help.
It needs to be apparent what’s going on: The Trump administration is doing everything possible to hamstring states’ capacity to perform the massive testing that would be needed to end the lockdowns securely and resume the economy. When Trump is called out for this, he lies about it. He actually does not desire more screening. However why?
Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, told Jake Tapper of CNN, “Every guv in America has actually been pushing and combating and clawing to get more tests,” and said it was ” absolutely incorrect” to declare there’s sufficient screening capacity.
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Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, also pointed the finger at Trump, stating that her state has “the capability to double or triple the variety of tests that we’re doing,” but due to the fact that Trump refuses to enact the Defense Production Act to require the production of those products, they are falling short.
Hogan got so disappointed with the federal government’s inactiveness that he and his wife, Yumi Hogan (who was born in South Korea) separately negotiated a deal with South Korea to secure half a million test packages for Maryland. Throughout Monday’s propaganda blast (aka coronavirus rundown), rather than congratulating Hogan for taking effort, Trump was livid, making the clearly incorrect allegation that a close-by guv from his own celebration didn’t do enough to get assist from the White House.
Reporting in the Washington Post on Tuesday even more shows how much Trump is doing whatever he can to slow down coronavirus testing.
A little bit of reality slipped out throughout Monday’s instruction, when Trump muttered, “We truly do not need it,” obviously referring to the DPA.
The conclusion here is basic, and has been right on the surface area all along: Trump doesn’t particularly want Americans to be checked for the coronavirus. Some pundits and political leaders seem unwilling to draw this conclusion, a minimum of in public, in no small part because it does not seem to make sense.
No one is under any impressions that Trump cares about the American public, of course.
So why is Trump doing whatever he can to prevent the very thing that would give him the best opportunity of saving the economy and enhancing his re-election chances? Why is a notorious narcissist whose only plausible inspiration is his own self-interest refraining from doing the something that would benefit him in this crisis?
Due to the fact that Trump isn’t capable of seeing prevalent testing– and more accurate details about the spread of the infection– as remaining in his self-interest. He sees it this way: The more tests that are done, the more confirmed cases are counted, and his impulse is to hide that bigger number if he potentially can. So he’s trying to keep the official case count as low as possible through the only approach he understands: Lying and cheating. In this case, by preventing screening such that no accurate count is possible.
It’s not like he’s hidden Trump hasn’t concealed this desire from the public.
His reasoning was simple, if idiotic: As long as those infected individuals remained on the water, Trump didn’t have to count them in the “main” numbers, which at that point were exceptionally low.
Early in the crisis, Trump didn’t exactly take pains to conceal that he felt that the very best method to keep the validated case numbers low was to make sure that people with COVID-19 never got a main medical diagnosis. As NPR press reporter Dan Diamond noted on March 12, Trump did not promote aggressive screening, despite the fact that would have slowed the infection, “because more screening may have led to more cases being discovered.”
Lying about statistics is at the heart of who Trump is. The male has never ever fulfilled a number that he didn’t believe he must immediately improve to flatter himself through straight-up lying and adjustment.
Trump compulsively cheats at golf.
His very first serve as president was to force his press secretary to lie about the size of his inauguration crowd, and after that to force official professional photographers to modify the pictures to make his crowds look bigger.
Trump spent ungodly quantities of effort bullying and manipulating the personnel at Forbes to think he was richer than he was, in order to get on the Forbes 400 list, where he plainly didn’t belong.
Trump has lied constantly on both his tax returns and his loan applications to banks.
Trump’s favorite game as a property designer was to estimate one set of numbers to specialists and then, when they finished the job, to renege on the offer and decline to pay them what was owed.
Trump has actually fanatically lied about the number of women he’s slept with, calling tabloid reporters while pretending to be a publicist to plant stories about dating numerous women that were probably not true.
Trump lies about his television ratings from his time as a truth TELEVISION host.
Trump relentlessly lies about his survey numbers, and simply this week wrongly claimed that 96%of Republicans approved of him.
Trump has lied about his charity providing, claiming to have contributed millions of dollars when, in reality, he mostly took checks composed by other individuals and passed them off as his own.
As president, Trump never fulfilled a number he won’t lie about. The Washington Post fact-checker counts 291 lies Trump has actually informed about the economic numbers, 257 lies about the size of the border wall, 197 lies about the size of his tax cuts, and 177 lies about the size of trade deficits with China.
Trump lied about both his hand and penis size throughout a Republican primary argument, stating, “Take a look at those hands, are they little hands?” while holding them up and declaring that there was ” no problem” with “something else” either. Audiences might see, with their own eyes, that Trump has little hands. As for “something else,” I will defer to porn star Stormy Daniels, who had the undesirable experience of sex with Trump, as the authority on that.
I might go on, but you understand. Trump has a compulsive desire to manipulate statistics to flatter himself, even in cases– such as with his hand or inauguration crowd size– where the lie is visible for all to see and he has absolutely nothing to get by pressing it.
Trump lies about numbers compulsively because he has gotten away with it his entire life, primarily by leaving other people to clean up the messes he’s made. That’s how he handled to endure multiple personal bankruptcies, which were no doubt caused in large part by his obsession to manipulating the numbers up until it finally overtook him.
Sadly, Trump’s instinctive impulse to manipulate numbers has actually become fatal in the coronavirus age. Trump wishes to keep individuals from getting evaluated so the official case load in the U.S. remains synthetically low. As long as individuals aren’t getting checked, they’ll keep spreading the infection around and more people will get sick. Plus, the lack of testing hurts the economy, keeping people from returning to work and resulting in more personal bankruptcy and more economic challenge.
There’s no need to tiptoe around the scenario here. Trump is doing whatever he can to stop Americans from getting coronavirus tests, and lying about it, due to the fact that he desires to synthetically deflate a number he thinks makes him look bad. His every impulse is to lie and cheat, specifically when it comes to hiding fact and controling numbers, and he just will never ever think there’s any scenario he can’t lie and cheat his way out of. Understand that, and you comprehend why we can’t have adequate coronavirus testing under this president.
