"A collective national incompetence in government"
"A collective national incompetence in government"
New books exposing the Covid failures of the GOP
The Washington Post Editorial Board published a review of a new book “Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report” and called out Trump for his pandemic leadership failure that led to the death of over a million Americans and has left millions to cope with long Covid. This was a “a collective national incompetence in government.”
The Editorial Board’s piece calls out Trump’s prioritization of the stock market over the safety of his citizens. One cannot tell if his insistence that everything was “really under control” is genuine belief or another Trump bluff hiding a lie.
On Feb. 24, 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted from India, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA … Stock market starting to look very good to me!” But according to the report, that same day, the White House task force concluded “containment was failing.” It was time to shift to mitigation. The next day, a high-ranking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, announced that community spread in the United States was inevitable. The stock market dived.
“President Trump was furious,” the report recalls. He kept downplaying the danger. “It’s going to disappear,” he said on Feb. 27. “Everything is really under control,” he said Feb. 29.
The early day failures of the Trump Administration are depicted in a Hulu documentary “Totally Under Control” featuring many high-level government officials speaking out. Unfortunately, it’s been hidden under a mountain of buzzier Covid disinformation available across the internet.
Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the senior CDC official discussed in the Editorial Board piece, was a target of Trump’s rage for appropriately raising the alarms on Covid. This bullying behavior against the scientific community continued through the rest of his presidency and his attempt to destroy democracy over his re-election loss. Animosity towards science has long been a part of Koch-fueled America, but it reached new heights with the chaos of the pandemic and continues to fester.
Investigation into what was happening inside the Trump White House during the early days of Covid was done by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (HSSCC). However, the new GOP-led response effort, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) has invited some of the very individuals named in HSSCC reports as experts. It’s clear that this GOP-led House will not fulfill their duty to investigate members of their own party if left to their own devices. And so the “collective national incompetence in government” continues.
Certain politically aligned media is too far gone and will continue to push deadly propaganda to prop up their failing, deeply unethical movement. Just look at the Wall Street Journal’s generous spin on 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis’s Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s latest vaccine study altering scandal. The WSJ also brought us the “low confidence” Wuhan lab leak reporting days ahead of the launch of the HSSCP. Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ ownership is coming through quite clearly with this latest “opinion” piece. He is guilty of platforming deadly political Covid lies, is out $787 million from Dominion, and staring down the Smartmatic lawsuit next. Trump is in just an astonishing amount of trouble and he’s beating DeSantis in the polls. It’s such a mess and would be funny if it weren’t genuinely terrifying.
Unfortunately for the fascists, independent journalists and experts are holding feet to the fire. In addition to the book discussed in the Washington Post Editorial Board piece, Dr. Jonathan Howard of Science-Based Medicine has a new book on the dangerous and failed herd immunity strategy - the Koch-tied The Great Barrington Declaration, for the uninitiated - pushed in the Trump White House by politically aligned doctors like Ladapo. “We Want Them Infected”, available now from Redhawk Publications, is horrifyingly named after Trump Covid advisor Dr. Paul Alexander’s emails.
Alexander was part of the Brownstone Institute, the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration” owned by neo-confederate Jeffrey Tucker, until independent journalist Walker Bragman’s reporting. He has continued to call out the Brownstone ties to dark money, including the group the GOP is sending to Congress.
This pandemic is not over and there is not enough attention on the devastation it has caused. We know some of whose dark money funded this national mishandling. We know quite a bit about the politics behind it. We have the power to call them out, but it comes with personal risk. Leaders in government and the medical community failed the American people. Healthcare workers are now individual targets of collective MAGA rage. The Trump poison. The very internal issue that’s killing the GOP.
