Donald Trump spent 35 minutes whining to Sean Hannity last night about how unfair everyone was to him while he was in office – while also boasting about what an awesome job he did.
One of Trump’s big successes, in his own mind, was his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. You know, the one where 400,000 Americans died on his watch after he announced at its beginning that his administration had it “totally under control.
“Nobody did as good a job with the pandemic as we did,” Trump told his adoring host, who said nothing to challenge his Bedtime BFF.
You may recall that Trump and Fox spent weeks promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID, until they suddenly stopped. Last night,Trump also declared, “Hydroxychloroquine, now great reviews are coming out on that.”
Again, Hannity let the falsehood go, thus putting his politics over his viewers' health.
Later, Trump repeated his lying boast, this time taking all credit for the pandemic recovery: “Nobody did as good a job with the pandemic as we did. And that's why we are leading the world in terms of coming back.”
You can see why 400,000 Americans died on Trump's watch below, from the June 16, 2021 Hannity.
I wish Bob Woodward hadn’t waited until his book was ready to release the recordings. Scared the book wouldn’t sell, Bob?
Had Mike Pence not gutted multiple cabinet departments and agencies, the pandemic could have been greatly limited. I note that it wasn’t just the CDC that Pence deliberately starved – he was doing this all over the Executive Branch, especially in the State Department, where longtime staffers were hounded out of their jobs and not replaced. With the CDC, Pence took the typical angry Right Wing approach that they were overstaffed with too many people being paid too much. They eliminated multiple positions, including the people who were on the ground in China who could have alerted everyone to the situation months before the situation had spread into an out-of-control worldwide pandemic. The angry Right Wing thinking was that they could bring in “the best people” if anything ever happened. But with potential pandemics, that doesn’t work. The whole point is to have people on the ground BEFORE a pandemic happens, so that it doesn’t mutate into what we just spent the past year enduring.
The Pence White House responded to the pandemic by initially denying it existed, and then taking only rudimentary and inadequate steps here and there, while repeatedly trying to convince the American public that it would all just go away. In nearly every aspect of this, Pence’s childish spokesman either proposed idiotic quack “cures” like Hydroxichloroquine and ingested Lysol, or just dumped the problem on the individual states. There is a strong argument that there are times when the US is 50 individual states and other times when we act as one nation. The angry Right Wing approach has been to deny the latter idea, and the disastrous failure with COVID only illustrates the depth of that fallacy.
When Pence’s childish spokesman realized he was likely to lose the election over how badly they’d bungled COVID, he resorted to flashy statements like “Operation Warp Speed”, which was not a program so much as a desperate hope that someone, anyone, would come up with a vaccine before Election Day and instantly solve the problem. Even when private companies developed their vaccines, the Pence White House proved unable to manage distribution, as they once again dumped the situation on the individual states to somehow manage themselves. The result was a chaotic mess that didn’t get resolved until the Pence White House was evicted in January of this year, and some actual leadership began to be shown by Biden and Harris.
The historical record of Pence’s childish spokesman will be fairly harsh, regardless of angry Right Wingers’ frantic attempts to rewrite the history themselves. The Pence White House will be remembered for:
-its massive incompetence
-its hostility to much of the world and to much of the American populace
-its hatred of the prior White House which it tried to erase
-its hatred for the judiciary
-its emboldening of hate crimes and bullying
-its refusal to even try to perform the basic functions of government
-its refusal to acknowledge that President Biden clearly won the 2020 Election, and its subsequent attempts to incite its supporters into an armed attack on the US Capitol in January
_and of course its spectacular mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, leading to over 600,000 Americans dying and to millions dying around the world.
If Pence’s childish spokesman is looking for one major achievement for the history books, it will be that he goes down as the only named US President to get himself impeached multiple times. I don’t know that any sane person would want that on their epitaph.