The Evangelical Universalist Forum

How To Live Under An Unqualified President by John Piper

Right, it has been a no-win situation for Trump, given his treatment by some on the left and the media. The White House Task Force update today was practically begun with an explanation by Fauci about the quotation. His explanation of the quotation, which he, too, implied was a foregone conclusion, and the issues surrounding it, was right on target.

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I think the ideal concern is less that Trump would have avoided the poo pooing of saying that COVID was no threat, and more that he would have retained the epidemic task force, and listened to his scientific advisors and begun accelerating production of PPE’s and testing resources at the same time as he wisely blocked travel from China. But as Fauci implied on saving lives, hindsight is always 20/20.

Trump actually did the one thing he could at that point in time, ban travel from China & the Dems who always try to be helpful immediately called him racist & xenophobic.

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That’s just incorrect. He could also have listened to all the professionals who were telling him that we faced a major breakout and needed to mandate production and distribution of more PPE’s and testing supplies, and prepare mitigation. Instead Trump wasted those two months before beginning any of that.
Fauci clarified, that cost us many lives, and our lag in testing other nations produced, kills our economy.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10222688711477196&set=a.1148469682686&type=3&theater

Here’s DT just walking all over the press idiots earlier today.
My ‘evaluation’ - he kicked some serious booty.

Quote: It sometimes seems as if they’re actually trying to make it easy for him to kick their asses up between their shoulder blades, don’t it?

http://coldfury.com/2020/04/14/fish-in-a-barrel/

And you have GOT to love this. I do/

"A former senior advisor to Joe Biden speculated that it’s possible his former boss could choose a vice-presidential running mate who identifies as a woman.

Moe Vela, the founder of Vela Group, told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News host Joel Pollak on Sunday that it is possible that Biden’s vow to pick a woman running mate could include a transgender woman… Or, apparently, a manwymryn . Whichever.

No mention whatsoever of trivial considerations such as qualifications, political acumen, ideological compatibility, principles, experience, etc. But hey, as long as the right boxes are checked that’s all that really matters. Right, Gropey?"

Hahahahahahaha the best the Dems have got?

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I do have a relevant climate change article. :crazy_face:

And a Trump claim. :crazy_face:

P.S. The states and the courts, will have a field day - with that claim. :crazy_face:

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Footnote: Going forward, I’ll be using the terms modern and natural (i.e. homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, Native American Medicine) medicine. BOTH will be useful, in fighting this pandemic and any virus attacks. Your odds of survival will increase dramatically if you become familiar with both systems.

Fauci in Feb & early March said there was little to worry about as did everyone else. You were not in the White House to my knowledge at that time & as usual the NY Times article is from undisclosed sources as it usually is which means they made it up.
The NY Times, Wash Post and other like minded “new sources” always comes out with these “gotcha” stories so their audience can lap it up & never question them.

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Steve replying to Bob. :smiley:

If I compare the stories of the New York Times and the Weekly World News…well, the stories of the Weekly World News - are far more believable (IMHO). And I’ll continue to share them, in these forum threads. As they claim to be “The World’s Only Reliable News”. :crazy_face:

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Bill Vallicella You need to understand that the Left, and thus the current Democrat Party, opposes our very system of government. They are not interested in working within it to achieve their goals. They are out to destroy it. Trump won fair and square by the rules of the game set forth in the Constitution. But the Dems, being hard-leftists, won’t accept this result which is why they have engaged, and continue to engage, in their vicious obstructionism and knee-jek oppositionalism which extends unto the childish antics of Nancy ‘the Ripper’ Pelosi.

Everyone agrees Trump’s great skill is trying to shoot or denigrate the messenger.

Can you document this? Every source I know concludes that such ignorance is bogus.

They cite Nat’l Security Advisor, Matthew Pottinger, in early January warning that the outbreak was serious and spreading, and Trump’s official, Peter Navarro, on January 29 urging serious action to fight the virus or “leave America defenseless.” Has either denied this?

Also Human Health and Service Secretary, Henry Azar, warning about a pandemic in February, the CDC stating that it presented a “serious public health threat,” and their Director for Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, warning of this and announcing and urging “Community Mitigation to Prevent a Pandemic.” Further that Trump’s own Corona virus task force completed a “Four Step Mitigation Plan” on February 24. Which of these personnel have denied these accusations?

Also Time, April 20 (The Brief, pages 14,15), reported an interview of FDA commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottileb, as beginning warnings on Dec. 31, and speaking to administration officials beginning Jan. 18, and writing multiple op-eds about the need to scale up U.S. testing capacity fast.

Like Trump, all politicians prefer to be a cheerleader, and he deserves compassion since he wasn’t alone in his persistent denial of how uniquely serious this virus was. Indeed it’s not surprising that someone who has denigrated other scientific consensus, and ridiculed most sources of intelligence and fact gathering, would not want to face the truth of such an unusual threat to his reelection. But ignoring realities that professionals provide will be seen in history as costing lives, and economic recovery.

And on the economic front. :wink:

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I saw Fauci say this on video two separate times. Peter Navaro did send a memo to certain people but Trump said he didn’t see it, but even if he did, should he close the country based on a memo from someone who is not even in the health field? Trump banning travel from China on Jan 31st met huge resistance from Dems who resorted to their usual name calling like “racist.”

Trump was able to start quarentining the country because Governors were willing to work with him, but in early Feb they never would have because Nancy Pelosi was busy telling people to visit Chinatown as a response to the China travel ban. The Dem Governors would never work with him until it was obvious what was happening & now some of them get to act like dictators.

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Love is fun, but often blind :slight_smile: For actually, Trump is claiming that he has total power over governors and states. Yet the truth is that it was Democratic governors/mayors who led in starting mitigation and calls to stay home while Trump was still ridiculing such quarantines. And it’s Republican governors who’ve refused to follow even after Trump at last changed his tune about the virus and quarantining. Though in fairness, some GOP Governors have boldly resisted his cries that the cure is too great.

Trump is calling the shots, on when to lift the lockdown. But he will unleash a firestorm, in the courts, congress and the press. :crazy_face:

What could he possibly do NOT to raise a firestorm? Anything he does, the Democrats will vilify. They are vile that way.

You are right Bob about love but now you don’t have to choose because Bernie and Biden have merged and now you have Bernie Biden. Like a dream team. Trump may mean he has the power because he controls the purse strings and they need the funds because of tax revenue losses.
BTW nobody knew how contagious Covid was because China lied, the WHO lied and China had said it didn’t pass human to human. Even Fauchi didn’t know. The China ban was a big move but what apparently happened was that Chinese travelers went to Italy and it came here via Europe.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-and-faucis-conspicuous-non-denial-denials-about-early-coronavirus-warnings/ar-BB12CJZk?li=BBnbcA1
But keep spinning :slight_smile:

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/why-trump-fauci-tension-matters/)

After 24 hours of tension, President Trump and infectious-disease specialist Anthony S. Fauci presented a united front at a coronavirus briefing on Monday. And in doing so, they appeared to cast doubt on a New York Times report that set off the whole thing, including Trump retweeting a call for Fauci’s firing.

What they didn’t do, though, was actually dispute the reporting.

The source of the tempest was a Times report that had said health officials concluded in the third week of February that they needed increased mitigation efforts to stop the spread of the virus. Trump didn’t wind up taking that step until nearly a month later, on March 16.

In response to the story, Trump on Sunday night retweeted a false allegation against Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The tweet said Fauci had said in late February that Americans had nothing to worry about from the virus — the implication being that health officials couldn’t have made such a conclusion about mitigation in the weeks before because Fauci was still minimizing the risk. (Fauci didn’t actually say that, though.)

Early in Monday’s briefing, Trump set aside his usual lengthy prologue to allow Fauci to clear the air. Fauci proceeded to deal obliquely with comments he had made the previous morning on CNN and then turned to the Times report.

“The first and only time that Dr. [Deborah] Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a, quote, shutdown — in the sense of not really shutdown but to really have strong mitigation … the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation,” he said.

Fauci said he didn’t know the date, but he suggested that Trump acted relatively quickly in approving the guidelines on March 16.

Fauci then said that he and Birx again recommended extending the guidelines after the initial 15-day period was up, and Trump agreed, pushing them out an additional 30 days.

The impression left is that the Times report about a February conclusion may have been faulty. But if you look closely at what was reported, Fauci’s version isn’t at all contradictory. Here’s what the Times reported Sunday:

By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging, and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

The paragraph summarized a report from the day before by the Times’s Eric Lipton, in which he obtained emails that backed up the account.

But — importantly — the report also made clear that the recommendation wasn’t actually made to Trump . That’s because a top health official offered the kind of warning that other officials had desired and Trump reacted negatively:

[Department of Health and Human Services official] Dr. [Robert] Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day [Feb. 24] to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.

This appears to refer to a statement made on Feb. 25 by Nancy Messonnier, an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the spread of the coronavirus was “inevitable” in the United States. In other words, the health officials came to the conclusion that mitigation was needed, but they backed off their planned recommendation after Trump made his feelings about such warnings abundantly clear.

It’s also important to note that the Times report wasn’t about Fauci and Birx specifically, but about other health officials. So Fauci saying that the first formal recommendation came later than this is completely consistent with the report. (It’s also worth parsing the fact that Fauci referred to “formally” making the recommendation, which could be read to suggest there were less formal suggestions earlier on.)

Neither did Trump technically dispute the report on Monday. Pressed on his lack of action in February, he repeatedly pointed to shutting down travel from China in January. He also propped up a straw man, saying it would have been crazy to shut down the economy in January , when there were very few or no cases. In fact, there is no documented call for such a shutdown in January; the Times report says this conclusion was reached in mid-February.

“But how do you close up the United States of America? So, on January 6, no deaths. On January 11, no deaths, and no — no cases on January 17, no cases — no cases, no deaths,” Trump said. “I’m supposed to close up the United States of America when I have no cases?”

He added later: “How do you close down the greatest economy in the history of the world when, on January 17, you have no cases and no death?”

Again, nobody was suggesting as much. Trump was disputing something that hasn’t been alleged.

As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted Monday, Trump’s chosen timeline here is conspicuous. Even the propagandistic video played at the briefing Monday skipped over nearly an entire month between early February and early March. That period is when health officials’ concerns were truly starting to register, according to the Times report, but Trump was so focused on playing down the threat that they concluded it wasn’t even worth making their planned recommendation.

Whether they should have is a valid question, and Trump certainly isn’t the only one here whose actions deserve scrutiny. But the briefing Monday didn’t do anything to dispute that what health officials had decided was necessary in mid-February wasn’t turned into actual policy until mid-March.