INPUTS FROM TWO EXCELLENT WRITERS ON PRESIDENT TRUMP

 

Both of the following writers feel the same about our current US President.

 

As many of you may know, one of my favorite opinion writers is Dana Milbank of The Washington Post.  But as it also turns out, one of my favorite actors, who is also an accomplished writer is Alan Alda, who just happens to be the co-founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University..

I was very sad today when I first read that my favorite opinion cartoonist, Tom Toles had decided to retire after 50 years of drawing political cartoons.  But on this same day, those two of my other favorites writers, they just happened to offer up their talents in articles in The Washington Post.

As it also happens, these two favorites both separately decided to write about what I have been writing about for over the past year.  And that is to write about the worst US President that this nation has ever been so unfortunate to have at its helm, that of Donald J. Trump.

I would therefore like to offer to my readers the two entries of what Mr. Milbank and Mr. Alda has to offer on our current resident in the White House and that they both agree that he should be sent out of that residence this coming Tuesday.

So, here is what these two have to offer regarding Mr. Donald Trump:

First, from Dana Milbank of The Washington Post:

 

…Dana Milbank

This is the time for presidential candidates to make their closing arguments, but Joe Biden didn’t really have to.

President Trump did it for him.

“The Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the Election….Losers!” he tweeted.

“Covid, covid, covid, covid,” he said in Nebraska.

“Covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid,” he said in North Carolina.

“Covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid!” he railed in Michigan.

This was about as presidential as Jan Brady of the Brady Bunch Movie crying “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.”

Trump was doubling down — actually, tripling, quadrupling, sextupling and decupling down — on the very thing costing him the election: his incompetent and inhumane handling of the greatest mass trauma in living memory for the vast majority of Americans.

His callous disregard for at least 228,000 Americans dead from the virus (they apparently had ignored him when he said), “Don’t let it dominate your life” and to the millions out of work.

His ridicule of the media, Democrats and the public for paying attention to the pandemic at a time when a record number of Americans (nearly 90,000 this Thursday) are getting infected, and 1,000 are dying, daily. “It is what it is.”

His incessant lies about “rounding the corner” on the virus, which is “ending,” even as cases rise in 42 states and overwhelmed hospitals consider rationing.

His "let-them-eat-cake" attitude that Americans shouldn’t fear the virus, when he had a squadron of top doctors spending a fortune in taxpayer money ($100,000) to give him advanced and experimental treatments nobody else can get.

His contempt for science and masks, his rushed reopening, and his crackpot remedies that led to worst-in-the-world fatalities in the United States.

Trump is unfit for the office he holds, and it was good of him to encapsulate so succinctly why he must be replaced with a leader of competence and compassion: Covid, covid, covid!

We needn’t look back over the past four years — joblessness, debt, racial strife and international disdain — to see why Trump is unfit.

We need only look back at just the past two weeks:

• He returned to calling immigrants “rapists” and “murderers” and referred to “Barack Hussein Obama.”

• He mockingly mispronounced Kamala Harris’s name and used the racist trope of labeling the African American Democratic vice-presidential nominee “angry.”
• His senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, proposed that Black Americans don’t “want to be successful.”
• Trump’s campaign, after a rally in frigid Omaha, stranded supporters for hours, landing some in the hospital.
• Judge-appointed lawyers said they couldn’t find the parents of 545 migrant children the Trump administration separated from their parents.
• Trump embraced a “lock her up” chant directed at the Michigan governor, target of a kidnapping plot.
• Covid-19 relief talks collapsed after the Senate Republican leader told the White House not to make a deal.
• A federal judge struck down Trump’s plan to slash food stamps for 700,000 unemployed Americans.
• Stocks plunged, suffering their worst week and month since March as pandemic fears outweighed strong third-quarter growth.
• Trump opened 9.3 million pristine acres of rainforest in Alaska to logging and development.
• A Trump political appointee resigned in protest because a new presidential order destroys the integrity of the civil service.
• Trump promoted dubious allegations against Biden that news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, said could not be corroborated by the evidence.
• Trump told women in Michigan that “we’re getting your husbands back to work.”
• And he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Israel’s prime minister to join him in ridiculing “Sleepy Joe.”
• Meanwhile, news broke that:
• Trump’s administration ousted the top scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after he reminded Trump appointees not to manipulate scientific findings.
• The U.S. Postal Service’s on-time delivery dropped below 60% in swing states after a Trump ally sabotaged operations.
• Trump’s businesses have received at least $8.1 million from taxpayers and supporters since he took office.
• Creditors forgave some $270 million of his unpaid debts related to a Chicago building project a decade ago.
• But leading the latest parade of horribles has been pandemic ineptitude: the White House issuing a report taking credit for “ending the covid-19 pandemic,” Trump’s claiming we’re “rounding the turn” even as his chief of staff says “we are not going to control the pandemic,” and Vice President Pence campaigning despite an outbreak among his staff.
• The White House justified Pence’s recklessness by saying he “has the best doctors in the world around him.” The hell with those he might infect.
• The millions who have lost friends and loved ones, lost jobs, lost a year of their lives in the unmet hope that the government would do its job? Go tell Biden. It’s just nuisance noise to Trump.

And we can’t forget:

• Covid, covid, covid.

 

The following is from actor, writer: Alan Alda:

 

…Alan Alda

Almost 63 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but in 1983, more than 106 million people watched the last episode of “M.A.S.H.”  So, it seems that by this president’s standard, I’m a bigger deal than he is.

But I don’t write here as a formerly famous person; I write just as a citizen who might have something in common with you. After spending a decade doing everything I could to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, I made a decision 37 years ago to keep much quieter in public about my political opinions. If I was going to make a contribution, it should be by doing what I was good at: writing and acting.

Since then, I’ve found that one of the things I’m also good at is helping scientists communicate more clearly. I’ve helped train more than 15,000 scientists around the world, so science is important to me — as it is to all of us. We swim in a sea of science, and perhaps, like fish who take water for granted, we take science for granted. But without it, we would stop breathing.

Which is where we are now. Science is at stake, as is our very breath.

I’ve wondered what would tip me over into breaking my silence. Would it be Trump’s racism, his misogyny, his attack on the free press, his unspeakable cruelty to children — grabbing them from their parents and then forgetting to return them? Would it be the overt, brazen attempt to deprive people of their ability to vote, the right through which all other rights are guarded?

I’m outraged by all of these things, but what has finally done it for me is something even more fundamental: You can’t vote if you’re dead.

Trump’s deceitful assurances that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about have laid untold dead at the feet of this president. And now, his administration is flirting with a policy to achieve “herd immunity” by following a theory put forth in a statement known as the Great Barrington Declaration that calls for deliberately allowing the less vulnerable among us to become infected while somehow protecting the more vulnerable. The authors call this “focused protection.”

This is decidedly a minority view, and it has been excoriated by the world’s leading infectious- disease experts. But the Trump administration seems willing to let a few hundred thousand people die and hope for the best.

Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without consequences. At this moment, we are all on Fifth Avenue.

You, too, might have been silent until now for fear of intruding on someone else’s opinions. But is it an intrusion to try to save lives? Is it impolite for the lemming who notices the cliff to say, “Uh, wait a minute, guys?”

There’s still time to speak with respect to friends and neighbors. Yelling at each other across this crazy gap is not accomplishing anything, but listening and speaking from the heart wouldn’t hurt.

We have to take care of one another, no matter what our politics are. I don’t take pleasure in the idea that the people most in danger are Trump’s staff and family and millions of followers. In the worst cases of Covid-19, the experience — even when not fatal — has been described as a constant feeling of drowning. I don’t wish that on anyone.

So, I’m speaking now, and I hope you will, too. Someone you know who hasn’t thought it necessary to vote might decide to cast a ballot.

I hope they’ll vote for science. I hope they’ll vote for life.

Thanks to both Dana Milbank and Alan Alda.  I couldn’t have said it better.

Copyright G. Ater 2020