Your fixation with attacking the Trump administration is becoming a caricature. Why don’t you just save the opinion page for more ads and just have your opinion pieces read: Trump Bad! Democrats Great!Â
You state in the editorial that “Epidemiologists say that if the U.S. shutdown had taken place two weeks earlier, 90 percent of the deaths would have been prevented as well as the collapse of the economy.” Are these the same epidemiologists who predicted 2.2 million deaths or the same ones who originally said that wearing masks was not necessary nor useful and then reversed course and now say everyone should wear masks in public. These are among other contradictory and/or wrong pronouncements made by epidemiologists. But we are to believe that this one is correct?
So let me get things straight: When Trump banned certain flights from China early on before any deaths in the United States had occurred, he was lambasted and called every kind of pejorative imaginable by the Democrats and the media (one in the same). When he later banned European flights, it was round two of the pejorative fest. But we are to believe that Trump acting two weeks sooner in spite of his main medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, publicly and repeatedly downplaying the dangers of the virus and very few deaths having occurred, would not have been greeted with accusations of tyrant, wanna-be king, dictator, etc. And that the public would have been understanding and compliant. I think not.
Let’s talk about the results of the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis. Approximately 43 percent of deaths have occurred in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut (with NJ and CT commuters being exposed in NY) and most of those can be laid at the hands of Gov. Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio for their documented incompetent handling of the situation. Cuomo, because he made the fateful decision in 2015 to ignore the recommendation to stockpile respirators due to a severe shortage and for making the even worse and deadly decision to place COVID-19-positive patients in nursing homes and adult care facilities where the most vulnerable folks reside and the majority of deaths have occurred. This, in spite of the fact that the Jacob Javits center and the USS Comfort ship were available and severely underutilized. Unconscionable!Â
Mayor de Blasio, because he not only downplayed the dangers of the virus and encouraged New Yorkers to continue living their lives normally and urged people to go to restaurants, movies, plays, etc. but even after the seriousness of the virus was apparent due to information coming out of California and Washington state, refused to shut down schools and the subway system, which is where your vaunted epidemiologists believe the majority of cases where transmitted.
So, if we assess these facts (pesky little things, aren’t they?) and rightly not blame Trump for the majority of deaths in NY NJ & CT, we are looking at less than 40,000 deaths in a country of over 320 million. As sad and tragic as those deaths are, that is not a bad outcome. Will you put aside your blind hatred for Trump and reconsider your views? Sadly, I think not.
The Trump administration is not without fault and has had missteps and, in hindsight, could have handled some things differently. Would the outcome have been much different. Probably not but who really knows? And one thing that you cannot accuse him of is not listening to the experts. He often doesn’t but in this crisis he has (almost to a fault).
He has endeavored to provide the states with everything that they’ve asked for, worked well with many Democrat governors and has been more accessible to the media and the American people than any president ever has. You would engender some credibility in your criticism of him if you occasionally gave him the credit that he deserves.Â
John Mangin
Great Neck
“So, if we assess these facts (pesky little things, aren’t they?) and rightly not blame Trump for the majority of deaths in NY NJ & CT, we are looking at less than 40,000 deaths in a country of over 320 million. As sad and tragic as those deaths are, that is not a bad outcome.”
We’re up to 67,000 and we’re still in the fifth inning, but go ahead. What’s a few tens of thousands of dead people? As long as YOU’RE not dead, we’re cool, right?
-Trump blew off intelligence reports given to him before New Year’s. He makes a point of NOT ever reading the Daily Intelligence Report that is prepared for the President’s use every morning. No other President in history has ever done this.
He cut the CDC’s budget by 80% almost immediately after taking office. Normally, the world looks to the CDC at a time like this, but this institution that was once the pride of this country was summarily trashed. Trump castrated it.
For F.Y. 2021, he proposed cutting the National Institute of Health’s budget by 7%. The equivalent of reducing bomb production during WWII.
On January 22, he said he “had it TOTALLY under control, with just ONE person coming out of China.”
February 2nd: “We have pretty much shut it down.”
At a meeting on February 5th with Congressional leaders, he blew off taking ANY preparatory steps in terms of getting equipment, training or resources for local hospitals.
On February 10, “you know in April, it supposedly dies with the warmer weather.”
Feb 25th: “People are getting better. They’re all getting better”
March 2nd: “They’re going to have vaccines, relatively soon.” Around this time, he starts pushing Chloroquine, a quack cure that wound up killing a few people in a nursing home, administered because “Trump suggested it.”
March 6th “Our numbers are lower than just about anybody’s.”
March 13th: “No, I don’t take any responsibility at all.”
March 17th: “This is a pandemic. I though it was a pandemic before ANYONE ELSE did.”
If you think you can lay the responsibility for the response to a global pandemic on a Governor and a Mayor for a national calamity, I think you better sit down for a few quiet minutes and examine your conscience.
What an idiotic piece.
Mangin is a typical trump supporter. Deflect and blame everyone else. Trump could not have done a worse job (slow to react, divide the country between blue and red states, make states compete against each other for supplies, tell people to inject disinfectants!) . Blaming Obama for no supplies (although trump had over 3 years) then, if you can believe it, he blamed the Democrats for the impeachment as a reason nothing was done.
I will never understand why these people still support trump. Have his lies become so common that they are just accepted as truth to them?
All I can say is, for the sake of this country, VOTE BLUE.
Where did you study journalism the school of I don’t know shit? 80,000 Americans dead