Dear Donald: Thank you for allowing our Governors to do their jobs under their State Constitutions. I sure that you will arrange your granting of Authority to each one with the individual ceremony for each, in a form to enhance your reelection chances. Probably, you will insist on a public TV event during prime time for each, and insist that they praise you profusely. Some will be followed by ticker-tape parades, which poor public servants will have to clean up.
So I give you this helpful warning. The nation’s stockpile of ticker tape and ticker tape flinging machines is almost empty. Since it is only two weeks until May 1, Winning-Day, you had better use the Defense Procurement Act to produce the needed machines and ticker tape for 50 parades. Since the production of that much ticker tape will seriously reduce the country’s paper supply, which is now used for toilet paper, we should all run out and stock up on toilet paper as soon as possible. You just said that you would open up the country in beautiful little pieces, hint-hint about the ticker tape. I got it.
Companies can do testing weekly, and take temperature every day, you said. Wow, that deserves re-election. Restaurants going back to 150 seats. Sports stadiums. Worrying about hand shaking, how charitable of you.
By the way, the WHO is just a health organization, as its title states. It is part of the UN. The same UN which the right wing of your party has opposed, since it would not be told what to do by any international organization. It is not the WHO’s mission or authority to cut off transportation of one country to another. But this is a crucial time for WHO to fight the spread of the Coronavirus to the poor and underdeveloped countries of Africa. Thanks for pulling the rug out from under them when even doubling our funding would be the humane thing to do. We spend $10 billion for yet another nuclear aircraft carrier, but can’t afford a half billion to protect an entire continent from a ravaging invisible plague. The third largest contributor in 2019 to 2020 is the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, which has vaccinated 760 million children in poor countries. Trump has already tried to cut US government funding of the WHO even before the present kurfuffle. In the 2019, 2020, and 2021 budgets Trump proposed cutting the WHO contribution by half. By the way, the favorite White House model for Coronavirus projections, by the IMHE, that we have used for many articles, relies on fitting foreign data compiled by the WHO.
What about WHO not condemning China? WHO is just a service organization. If Trump wanted China condemned, he should bring up such a resolution to the UN, and pursue it. That is something which only Trump can do for the US. What Trump could also do, is call up his buddy Xi Jinping in about a minute, and vent his anger. So lay off of the WHO.
In the 2017-18 budget for the WHO, I see that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave about 2 1/2 times the US assessed amount. When people cite US funding, they sometimes include the much larger voluntary contributions. China was way down the list of contributors for Trump to single them out for comparison. It turns out, that the $900 million, two year US government contribution, has been appropriated by the US Congress, and Trump is violating the law by suspending it for 60 days. Much more is given by voluntary US sources, which Trump also should not be able to block. Do you remember when Babe Ruth quit baseball because someone on his team only hit 15 home runs instead of the 60 that Ruth hit? I don’t either, because it wouldn’t make sense. I am sorry to say, that this looks like Trump’s compulsive retribution against the WHO director for criticizing Trump’s blockade of travel from China. It turns out, that many Americans returned home from China anyway.
Since Trump realized that his delusions of grandeur in running the restart will not come to pass, his formation of all colluding industry leaders was presented as just a group that will have interesting ideas to contribute. They obviously refused to fly to Washington just so Trump could stand them up in another Name-dropping self-pat on the back. As the leaders of their own industries, in a free-enterprise country, usually backed by Republicans, they have their own authority and responsibilities to their own companies, not to the take-all-the-credit President. Obviously, by reading off their names, Trump hoped to capture the loyalty of all of their workers.
Trump again crushed any questions about his delays and too-little too-late record. Nothing new there.
Trump cast responsibility on the previous administration for having bare national reserve. Let’s put this in time perspective. Trump was only elected President for four years. When the virus struck us, he had completed three of those years, that is 3/4 or his time, or 75% of his time as President. If the reserve needed restocking, he had three years to learn that, or, three years to fill it. The buck lands on his desk, it doesn’t time travel years to the past.
Yes, I am angry that I wasted another two and a half hours, first waiting for an hour for his conference to start, for no apparent reason, and then listening to self promoting for an hour and a half. Yet I do it, like many Americans do, because it is the best and newest comedy show on TV.
I wasn’t going to actually publish this article, until I learned that Trump was going to put his signature on all of the $1200 checks. This is the cheapest way to buy an election. Previous Presidents could have done this with tax refunds, or social security checks, or government salaries. It is actually the American taxpayers who are going to be paying off the share of the $2.2 trillion involved, which aren’t loans. By the way, we still don’t know if Trump paid any taxes.
One very sad note: like China did, New York State today added 3,700 past deaths which were clinically due to the Coronavirus, but without testing, to their separate total, which now is almost eleven thousand, at 10,842. Of this, NY City is 7,905 deaths. The CDC now requires that everyone reports these extra deaths, in a separate category. The US now has 609,422 cases, of which a third are New York, at 203,348. US deaths are at 26,056. World cases have reached 2.0 million.
