For Those Who Think Trump Didn't Act Quickly Enough During The COVID-19 Pandemic...

[dilbert firestorm]

mar lago is a national landmark?

[SecretE]

Back to the topic, so far the things stated by those who thought the president didn't act fast enough and/or do enough...

- He didn't enact an international travel ban soon enough.
- The federal government had an inadequate plan in place to handle a pandemic, including stockpiling necessary supplies like ventilators.

Is that fair?

[SecretE]

Back to the topic, so far the things stated by those who thought the president didn't act fast enough and/or do enough...

- He didn't enact an international travel ban soon enough.
- The federal government had an inadequate plan in place to handle a pandemic, including stockpiling necessary supplies like ventilators.

Is that fair?

[Jaxson66]

Originally Posted by SecretE

...what do you think he should have done, and when?

Here is a list of actions in a timeline being claimed by POTUS for reference...

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/t...he-coronavirus

The great leader should have reacted when the Senate Intelligence Committee was saving their portfolios. They knew what was being reported and did notify Mulvaney when he was Chief of staff.

[Munchmasterman]

Like you?
He said 12k. You changed it to 18k. You claimed he went down to Florida for 1 job. He didn't say that.

Stop making shit up and stop changing people's stories.
Probably best if you just STFU

Originally Posted by lustylad

I call bullshit. You're saying trumpy called a monger like you to drive all the way down from the Nebraska cornfields and install a lousy $18k worth of windows at his Florida mansion? Yeah.... THAT'S believable!

Don't they have window contractors in Florida?

Anything else you want to make up?

[Why_Yes_I_Do]

Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid

Trump is good!
Trump is great!
Trump makes YR masturbate!

Orange Man Good

[Munchmasterman]

Like you?
He said 12k. You changed it to 18k. You claimed he went down to Florida for 1 job. He didn't say that.

Stop making shit up and stop changing people's stories.
Probably best if you just STFU

Originally Posted by lustylad

I call bullshit. You're saying trumpy called a monger like you to drive all the way down from the Nebraska cornfields and install a lousy $18k worth of windows at his Florida mansion? Yeah.... THAT'S believable!

Don't they have window contractors in Florida?

Anything else you want to make up?

[Chung Tran]

Originally Posted by HedonistForever

I just put up a post with Dr. Fauci the so called leading expert on pandemics saying on Feb29 that Americans need not alter their behavior at this time but that could change and boy did it ever. So Trump depending on this leading expert should have know what the leading expert didn't know prior to March 1st? Come on man, you admit this is China's fault, that implies that China delayed and lied so what exactly was Trump supposed to do when his experts were telling him no need to fear the COVID-19 on March 1st?

both Trump and Fauci should have listened to Navarro, in mid-January. Hell, I have known for 2 decades that everything the Chinese say is a bald-faced lie, and I don't have an exclusive on that position.

[LexusLover]

Originally Posted by BlisswithKriss

Trump was alerted way back in November ....

"Alerted" to what?

You mean Shmucker and PissLousy weren't "alerted"? Or were they "busy"!

[SecretE]

Sorry for all those double posts. ECCIE was having issues this past weekend with that apparently.

So, I still haven't seen concrete actions being suggested that President Trump could have taken sooner, besides enact travel bans.

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by Munchmasterman

Like you?
He said 12k. You changed it to 18k. You claimed he went down to Florida for 1 job. He didn't say that.

Stop making shit up and stop changing people's stories.
Probably best if you just STFU

I grossed it up, dumbass! He said he lost $12k and was paid 35 cents on the dollar.

You're the doofus who needs to stfu.

Stop playing gotcha when you have no reading comprehension.

[Grace Preston]

Originally Posted by LexusLover

"Alerted" to what?

You mean Shmucker and PissLousy weren't "alerted"? Or were they "busy"!

Psst.. you left out McConnell. Both sides are complicit in all this. Hell, look at all the folks who made a fortune selling stocks right before the crash.



Look-- I'm not a fan of Trump... but in terms of how he's actually handled everything-- I can't criticize actions. I could have done without all the hyperbole of a "Liberal Hoax"... but he's just pandering to his easy to rile base. But.. in terms of actions... he's not doing bad. Normally-- Trump would have already rid himself of Fauci-- because he isn't fond of anyone who stands up to him... but... he hasn't done that, which shows that at least he knows he needs to listen to the medical community on this one just as much as the business community.

[BlisswithKriss]

Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do

Orange Man Good

You were saying ?
F690CA80-190E-4AC1-9335-B1443D38BB3C.jpeg

[lustylad]

^^^ Actually, trump's followers are smart enough to know a fake meme when they see one.

[HedonistForever]

Originally Posted by Chung Tran

both Trump and Fauci should have listened to Navarro, in mid-January. Hell, I have known for 2 decades that everything the Chinese say is a bald-faced lie, and I don't have an exclusive on that position.

That's called 20/20 hindsight, easy to say after the fact. Presidents aren't prophets and have to consider more than one man's opinion. I think this is a pretty good and reasonably fair account of what happened. I'll note lines of interest.


https://www.axios.com/exclusive-nava...48f8382a9.html


In late January, President Trump's economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios.
The state of play: By late February, Navarro was even more alarmed, and he warned his colleagues, in another memo, that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.

• Navarro's grim estimates are set out in two memos — one dated Jan. 29 and addressed to the National Security Council, the other dated Feb. 23 and addressed to the president. The NSC circulated both memos around the White House and multiple agencies.
• In the first memo, which the New York Times was first to report on, Navarro makes his case for "an immediate travel ban on China." Which Democrats if you will remember were calling racist and xenophobic
• The second lays the groundwork for supplemental requests from Congress, with the warning: "This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill." Yes, "request" from Congress, the only body that could do this and what kind of response from Nancy Pelosi do you think Trump would have gotten if he asked for hundreds of billions in spending on a "maybe we will need this"?

Why it matters: The president quickly restricted travel from China, moved to delay re-entry of American travelers who could be infected, and dispatched his team to work with Congress on stimulus funds. So he took the advice on China and put his team to work with Congress and it was ultimately in the hands of Congress to make this decision. This shows that the President did everything in his power to act.

• But Trump was far slower to publicly acknowledge the sort of scenarios Navarro had put in writing. Because I'm sure he was getting advice not to act so quickly on one mans prediction, the trade representative not an expert in pandemics. That expert was giving opposite advice that healthy Americans didn't really need to change their behavior until we had further evidence. So Trump erred on the side of of the scientific experts. Imagine that.

One senior administration official who received Navarro's memos said at the time they were skeptical of his motives and thus his warnings: “The January travel memo struck me as an alarmist attempt to bring attention to Peter’s anti-China agenda while presenting an artificially limited range of policy options."

• "The supplemental memo lacked any basis for its projections, which led some staff to worry that it could needlessly rattle markets and may not direct funding where it was truly needed."

Navarro declined to comment for this story.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon defended Navarro's motives, calling the memos "prophetic" and saying Navarro was forced to put his concerns in writing because "there was total blockage to get these facts in front of the President of the United States."

• The "naivete, arrogance and ignorance" of White House advisers who disagreed with Navarro "put the country and the world in jeopardy," Bannon said, adding that Navarro was sidelined from the task force after the memo.
• "In this Kafkaesque nightmare, nobody would pay attention to him or the facts."

The Jan. 29 memo set out two stark choices: "Aggressive Containment versus No Containment."

• Navarro compared cost estimates for the choices and wrote that the Council of Economic Advisers' estimates for stopping travel from China to the U.S. would be $2.9 billion per month. If the virus turned out to be a pandemic, that travel ban could extend 12 months and cost the U.S. $34.6 billion.
• Doing nothing (the "No Containment" option) could range from "zero economic costs" to $5.7 trillion depending on the lethality of the virus.
• On the high end, he estimated a scenario in which the coronavirus could kill 543,000 Americans.

The Feb. 23 memo did not advertise its author as did the first, but it was written by Navarro and distributed to numerous officials through the NSC. It was titled as a memorandum to the president via the offices of the national security adviser, chief of staff and COVID-19 task force, and the subject line described it as a request for supplemental appropriation.

• It began: "There is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls."
• He called for an "immediate supplemental appropriation of at least $3 billion" to support efforts at prevention, treatment, inoculation and diagnostics.
• He described expected needs for "Personal Protective Equipment" for health care workers and secondary workers in facilities such as elder care and skilled nursing. He estimated that over a four-to-six-month period, "We can expect to need at least a billion face masks, 200,000 Tyvek suits, and 11,000 ventilator circuits, and 25,000 PAPRs (powered air-purifying respirators)."

Navarro clashed this past weekend with Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over how widely to promote the use of malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus.

• But the January and February memos reveal a more substantial advocacy on his part, with detailed health and economic calculations meant to grab and hold the president's attention.
• Politico first reported in late February about the existence of memos from Navarro to White House officials, while their details had not been published.

Our thought bubble: Axios' health care editor Sam Baker says Navarro's concern about the severity while acknowledging the speculative nature of modeling viruses was largely correct.

• "These memos place a very big emphasis on banning travel specifically from China —which, of course, Trump did," Baker says. But by Jan. 29, there were confirmed cases in 15 countries, including the U.S.
• "This is not to say they're a bad idea, only that this is why public-health experts don't lean as heavily on travel restrictions. People come into the U.S. from a lot of places, and with two globalized countries, simply stopping people coming in from Wuhan was not bad but it shouldn't be shocking that it was insufficient."

Flashback: "It's going to have a very good ending for us," Trump said of the coronavirus in a speech on Jan. 30.Trump's biggest detriment. He shouldn't say things that are not under his control that could come back to bite him. This is a problem that many Presidents have including Obama saying his health care plan would save each American $2500. Why the fuck would anybody make such a specific amount? Why not just leave it at "savings are projected". This is such a basic lesson that politicians should learn but they never do, just ask the guy that said "read my lips, no new taxes". They never learn

• In a Feb. 24 tweet, he said it was "very much under control" and that the stock market is "starting to look very good to me."And the list of foot and mouth disease goes on and on but then I don't much care what he says, I only care about what he does and all things considered, I think he handled this as well as any President could with the House, the branch that controls spending, being in the hands of one of the biggest adversarial parties in political history. This has to be taken into consideration when trying to assess what Trump could and couldn't do in a timely manner but that would take a fair and open mind.
• The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic on March 11. The organization that should have been doing what Navarro was doing but being in the pocket of the Communist party prevented that. When listening to the WHO we didn't realize we where listening to the Communist Party of China.
• On March 17, the president said, "I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic." Always the need to brag which bites him in the ass more times than I can count.