Our Worst Crisis Since 2008... and We Have an Idiot at the Helm

[babylonsister]

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/coronavirus-trump-economy-travel/

Our Worst Crisis Since 2008… and We Have an Idiot at the Helm
Trump offers nothing but bigotry, ignorance, and pathological narcissism.
By Sasha Abramsky
Yesterday 5:45 am

snip//

There’s only one Signal this week: the global lockdown now underway to combat what is shaping up to be the world’s worst public health calamity in a century. It is now clear that COVID-19 will not be contained, will have incalculable human costs, and will devastate the global economy, reshaping our lives, workplaces, community relations, and international affairs, possibly for years.

And the man at the American helm, the captain who is supposed to help navigate us through these troubled waters, is an ill-informed narcissist, concerned not with the actual number of infections, and how to contain and treat them, but only with perceptions.

snip//

Presidents set the tone during emergencies. Trump’s tone on Wednesday was panicked, ill-informed, bigoted, and blustering. Absent was any sense of international solidarity, any notion of global cooperation in working to solve not just the public health crisis but also the economic implosion, which is ravaging financial markets and will soon ravage labor forces.

The result? An accelerating panic. Far from calming the markets, Trump’s blundering intervention triggered a global meltdown. If the sell-off continues, the global economy could be headed into a deflationary cycle with no easy exit. The tools that should have been available to fight this are absent or inadequate, with central-bank interest rates already at historic lows and with tax cuts for billionaires having frittered away financial resources, already meager because of public health spending cuts and funding lavished on the military.

If there has ever been a time for US global leadership, for the marshaling of resources and creative thinking, it is now. Yet Trump’s only response is mindless nationalism. It is far past time for this man to leave the political stage. He has been a catastrophically bad president, and he is incapable of exercising leadership during this crisis.

That’s the Signal. Everything else is mere Noise.

[riversedge]

1. " Presidents set the tone during emergencies. Trump's tone on Wednesday was panicked, ill-informed,"

That about covers it

[central scrutinizer]

2. A loose cannon is more like it

[uponit7771]

3. K&R, We need unfettered testing, isolation & treatment! We can't get that right now so we're screwed

[Jim__]

4. This was always the nightmare scenario. Something serious goes wrong while this idiot is in ...

... charge.

[Arkansas Granny]

5. This jumped out at me from WaPo Covid-19 update.

When Trump was asked Friday why he disbanded the White House pandemic office, he denied it, saying, “I didn’t do it … I don’t know anything about it," and told the reporter it was a “nasty” question. He also said "I don't take responsibility at all” for the disastrous delays in testing. During that event, the president shook hands, patted backs and touched the microphone 31 times.

[philf99]

6. Not much different than 2008

We had an idiot in charge.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse.