As the death toll neared 100,000
As the death toll in the coronavirus pandemic neared 100,000 Americans this Memorial Day weekend, President Trump derided and insulted perceived enemies and promoted a baseless conspiracy theory, in between rounds of golf.
In a flurry of tweets and retweets Saturday and Sunday, Trump mocked former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight, ridiculed the looks of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and called former Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton a “skank.”
He revived long-debunked speculation that a television host with whom Trump has feuded may have killed a woman and asserted without evidence that mail-in voting routinely produces ballot stuffing.
In short he carried on like an angry disordered incel who lives on Twitter and potato chips, rather than a normal dim-witted president like a Bush or a Reagan.
Trump’s barrage of social media attacks stood in sharp contrast to a sober reality on a weekend for mourning military dead — the number of Americans whose lives have been claimed by the novel coronavirus has eclipsed the combined total of U.S. deaths from wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.
And some share of those lost lives were lost because he is a bad incompetent self-dealing head of state, who spends his time insulting people on Twitter rather than managing a pandemic.
In 2014, Trump had criticized President Barack Obama for playing golf when there were two confirmed cases of Ebola in the United States.
“He’s played a lot of golf, there’s no doubt about it,” Trump said then, in a telephone interview with the “Fox & Friends” program, on which hosts had noted disapprovingly that Obama had done so 200 times as president at that point, six years into his presidency.
Yes but Trump is white, ok?
Trump’s Twitter barrage on Saturday evening included crass descriptions of women viewed as his adversaries.
Retweeting one supporter in rapid succession, Trump blasted doctored images of Pelosi and two images of Abrams to his more than 80 million Twitter followers. Abrams, who is under consideration as a vice presidential pick by Biden, had “visited every buffet restaurant in the State,” Trump’s retweet said.
“To protect PolyGrip during this pandemic, we have developed 2 options. With the DJT option, she will be able to tongue and adjust her dentures more easily,” Trump retweeted, showing doctored images of Pelosi’s face, one with a “Trump 2020” mask over her mouth and the other with silver duct tape. “With duct tape, she won’t be able to drink booze on the job as much. Which do you think she will prefer? #maga #tcot #kag,” Twitter user John K. Stahl had tweeted.
Pelosi’s office has repeatedly said she does not drink alcohol.
Stahl’s Twitter profile describes him as a retired tech executive and conservative. Trump appears to have scrolled through the account and retweeted numerous posts that praised Trump, criticized Democrats and the news media or voiced support for Trump’s view, which is not based on fact, that mail-in voting invites fraud.
As any president would, because that’s what presidents do, especially during a rapidly-spreading pandemic.
Trump also claimed Sunday that hydroxychloroquine has “tremendous rave reviews,” despite studies showing that it can be dangerous.
In a Sinclair Broadcasting interview, Trump politicized a study from Columbia University indicating that had stringent social distancing been in place a week earlier, the United States could have prevented 36,000 coronavirus deaths through early May — about 40 percent of fatalities reported to date.
“Columbia University is a liberal, disgraceful institution, to write that,” Trump said in the interview broadcast Sunday. “I saw that report from Columbia University and it is a disgrace that they would play right to their little group of people to tell them what to do.”
Yes, so liberal and disgraceful to tell people how to avoid being infected and infecting others. Good people just get on with things, and bury the dead as needed.
Who’s pulling his strings? All this talk about mail-in ballots inviting fraud? He never thought of that by himself. Obviously, this is a dog-whistle to politicians of the Republican Party that they can carry out the actually illegal action of discounting (or even destroying) votes for their Democratic Party opponents and the administration will turn a blind eye or blame the victims and say that their votes were fraudulent. Because they didn’t go closing all those polling stations in traditionally Democrat-voting districts only to have those blasted poor people vote anyway, and floating the idea of closing the US Post Office wasn’t as popular as they had hoped.
There is no ‘man behind the curtain.’ It’s fools and knaves all the way down. Vote suppression has been central policy for the Republican Party for decades. They’ve been pretty public about it at least since Florida, 2000.