Tuesday, April 14th, 2020
Simon Tisdall, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Yesterday I ran a report about the damage Trump was doing to the reputation of the United States. Today I give you the lead article in The Guardian, the most prestigious English language newspaper in the world.
The fact is, Trump is trashing America in a myriad of ways, and the result is that we have gone from world leader to world screwup. It is going to take a long time and a very deft hand to repair this... if it can be repaired.
Trump telling his usual lies at the daily campaign rally he holds in the press briefing room, where he tells the world nothing is his fault; he’s doing everything wonderfully, and he has great TV ratings
Credit: Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.
Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.
Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.
“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.
“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to […]
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Tuesday, April 14th, 2020
Robert J. Shapiro, - Washington Monthly
Stephan: The coronavirus debacle is not only a human disaster perpetrated by the monster in the White House; it is also an economic disaster. Not just the closing of the country, but because of the added costs arising from the incompetent manner in which the pandemic has been handled. What are we talking about? Here is some data.
Credit: The White House
Most of the economic carnage we see Americans suffer today is the result of measures that federal, state, and local governments have had to adopt to stem the spread of COVID-19—the social distancing, social isolation, and closing of borders and businesses. It follows, then, that the severity of the damage depends largely on how quickly and effectively a country responded the virus’s spread. South Korea moved quickly and dramatically, as did Germany. Here, Donald Trump became the Denier-in-Chief, and the deadly virus burrowed through American communities as the federal government and some governors dithered.
What if we had moved as quickly and decisively as South Korea or Germany? How much of our mounting economic costs could we have been spared as businesses closed down and jobs disappeared? Economic analysis can give us a rough estimate, and it suggests that America could have averted at least 40 percent of these terrible costs and perhaps as much as 86 percent of the economic damage. If President Trump had listened […]
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Tuesday, April 14th, 2020
Jayne Mayer, - The New Yorker
Stephan: Please Kentucky, do the world a favor and vote this man out of office. It is up to you, no one else can do it.
Moscow Mitch Credit: Ward Sutton/The New Yorker
On Thursday, March 12th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, could have insisted that he and his colleagues work through the weekend to hammer out an emergency aid package addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he recessed the Senate for a long weekend, and returned home to Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell, a seventy-eight-year-old Republican who is about to complete his sixth term as a senator, planned to attend a celebration for a protégé, Justin Walker, a federal judge who was once his Senate intern. McConnell has helped install nearly two hundred conservatives as judges; stocking the judiciary has been his legacy project.
Soon after he left the Capitol, Democrats in the House of Representatives settled on a preliminary rescue package, working out the details with the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The Senate was urgently needed for the next steps in the process. McConnell, though, was onstage in a Louisville auditorium, joking that his opponents […]
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