I used to say “We’re doomed,” in a somewhat histrionic manner. I don’t do that anymore.
President Donald Trump announced Friday that the US government’s coronavirus testing apparatus, which has lagged badly behind other developed nations, would soon get an assist from Google. The search and advertising giant will create a website, Trump said, that would help Americans figure out if they need a test for the virus, and if so where they can find one.
The only problem: There is no nationwide site like the one Trump described. And Google had no idea the president was going to mention one.
A source at Google tells WIRED that company leadership was surprised that Trump announced anything about the initiative at the press conference. What he did say was also almost entirely wrong.
The president is a sociopathic dunce and it’s literally getting us killed at this point. There’s no hyperbole involved in that statement anymore.
There will be a coronavirus testing site, not from Google but from Alphabet sister company Verily. “We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing,” Google tweeted in a statement. “Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time.”
Even that, though, was not the original plan. The Verge reported Friday afternoon, Verily had intended the site for health care workers only. After Trump unexpectedly publicized the effort, Verily decided it will let anyone visit it, but can still only provide people with testing site information in the San Francisco area.
This from a guy who affirmatively didn’t want people tested because he figured if the voters knew how many people were being infected they might not look favorably on giving him a second term.
Electoral defeat no longer seems proportional to the offense. Running him out of town on a rail, tarring and feathering, exile on an Antarctic island, and life imprisonment all seem like fairer sentences.
Add the testing fiasco to the list of crimes to try him and his horrible children for.
What a mess. Runs on stores, the quickest bear market in the modern era, and no clue when we will be able to resume our normal lives. Thanks, you orange clown!
The Dow closed today just a few points over what it was on his inauguration 2017. I’m sure the Orange Clown is kinda upset about that.
I still prefer my punishment. The whole administration, including his family except for Barron since he’s suffered enough, is executed publicly at the Super Bowl half time show. Trump has to watch all of them get mowed down—in one particularly gruesome act, Ivanka is decapitated (Trump forced to pull the lever), and then her head is used to score a field goal—before being drawn and quartered.
Barron is then exiled. Not out of revenge, but because the poor kid looks like he’d prefer it. And as long as he promises never to reproduce and to never leave whatever exotic island that’s selected for him, he gets to live.
No, no, no. We don’t need to indulge that kind of fantasy. Don’t be that person. Please.
What Trump has done is no different than going to your oncologist and him telling you that you’re fine, totally cancer-free, and then going back to him two weeks later and saying that I’m just kidding you have cancer I was lying to you. That’s pretty much what Pres. Lump did. First calling the pandemic a hoax and encouraging people to go to work only to finally admit in his oval office address the other night that it’s real. And then in addition to that deliberately encouraging no testing on people because more positives would look poorly upon him. The man is a sociopath who should be up a manslaughter charges.
Of course, this really isn’t Trump’s fault. I thought from the beginning that Trump never believed he would be president. He thought he could run around and make the Trump brand bigger than life and make buckets of money. He thought he would be able to play king-maker by throwing rocks from the sidelines.
The fault is the Republican Party – every rotten bit of it. They are still running around praising dear leader for his wonderful handling of this mess as the whole world pukes. And as bad as he is, Trump is a piker compared to McConnell in damage done. He is an amateur compared to the person the religious Reich would pick if they could.
Yes, Republican Party voters and elected officials have enabled and empowered him throughout this nightmare. But that sociopathic, racist, sexist, kakistocratic asshole has agency. He could quit any time. He chooses not to. I will be goddamned if he is allowed to escape every bloody bit of his personal responsibility for all of this.
That said, yes, the entire Republican Party and conservative movement needs to be pushed into the ocean. We need to rout them electorally for a decade and strip them of power to the maximum degrees possible. Only then might there be change from the people leading and supporting their toxic movement.
“Running him out of town on a rail, tarring and feathering, exile on an Antarctic island, and life imprisonment all seem like fairer sentences.”
And yet his approval rating hasn’t budged. That so many people in my country could be this ignorant or evil is shocking and depressing.
It is obvious these people do not share the values of truth and justice I grew up with. We were the good guys. When things got bad in the depression our Government was there for us. I was extremely moved by my Grandmother getting choked up while telling me about listening to FDR’s “Fear itself” speech – 40 years after it happened!!!
One of my earliest jobs sent me to the Netherlands where the people still considered Americans heroes for our role in WWII. And after the war we re-built the place!
My parents got me up early to watch every single space launch from Freedom 7, the rest of Mercury and Gemini. I watched them all through the entire Apollo program. We were Americans, we were experts in science and there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do…
I see now that I only saw what I wanted to see. The ugliness of America has always been there. Nixon went to China in 1972. Has our country really done anything of note since then?
e pluribus unum
And with all of that he remains close in the polls to anyone else. Someone tell me why, please. Are we the stupidest people on the face of the earth or is this simply proof positive that entrusting life to democracy is a fools errand?