Tag: Trump unfit to be president

Trump Promotes Posts From Racist and Sexist Twitter Feed

New York Times logoOn a somber Memorial Day weekend, the president did not mention the mounting coronavirus toll and instead retweeted personal attacks on his political rivals.

WASHINGTON — On a weekend when the nation was bracing for the approaching toll of 100,000 lives lost to the coronavirus and honoring the many more people who have died in wars, President Trump amplified a series of demeaning personal attacks from a supporter with a history of racist and sexist online commentary.

Mr. Trump reposted eight tweets from John K. Stahl, a conservative former political candidate, including attacks on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Stacey Abrams, the black former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives who is considered a potential Democratic vice-presidential pick.

Mr. Stahl, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in California’s 52nd District in 2012, has a history of derogatory posts, especially against black women. He has referred online to Senator Kamala Harris of California — who is of Indian and Jamaican descent and is another potential running mate for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — as “Willie’s Ho,” an apparent reference to Willie Brown, the powerful California State Assembly speaker who was her mentor and onetime boyfriend. Continue reading.

Trump doesn’t have a plan — he’s fueled by boredom, humiliation and narcissism

AlterNet logoIn March, after months of ignoring the looming threat of the novel coronavirus, Donald Trump decided to recast himself in a new role, declaring he was now a “wartime president,” clearly imagining himself in the mold of FDR or, more likely, as Bill Pullman’s presidential character in the 1996 film “Independence Day.”

This was a total joke from the beginning, as Trump’s behavior wasn’t hard to predict. As a sociopath and narcissist, Trump would enjoy a stint play-acting as president while doing nothing. But when it began to dawn on him that waging war is like, hard work, he would just drift away, letting the “war” effort fail.

Unsurprisingly, that is what exactly happened. As Heather Digby Parton explains in her Wednesday column for Salon, what has “become clear in the last few days is that the Trump administration has made a decision” to give up any semblance of trying to flatten the curve, stop the spread or do anything meaningful to defeat the coronavirus. Continue reading.

White House prohibits coronavirus task force members from testifying before Congress in May

The Hill logoWhite House coronavirus task force members are prohibited from testifying before Congress this month under new guidance issued by the Trump administration Monday.

Task force members and key deputies have been instructed not to accept invitations to participate in congressional hearings in May, while other agencies responding to the pandemic are being advised to limit the number of hearings they attend.

Top administration officials argue the coronavirus task force and the primary agencies responding to the pandemic need to focus their attention and resources on response efforts, and that having them testify could use up critical hours. Continue reading.

Trump Moves to Replace Watchdog Who Identified Critical Medical Shortages

New York Times logoThe president announced the nomination of an inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, who, if confirmed, would replace an acting official whose report embarrassed Mr. Trump.

WASHINGTON — President Trump moved on Friday night to replace a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services who angered him with a report last month highlighting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

The White House waited until after business hours to announce the nomination of a new inspector general for the department who, if confirmed, would take over for Christi A. Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general who was publicly assailed by the president at a news briefing three weeks ago.

The nomination was the latest effort by Mr. Trump against watchdog offices around his administration that have defied him. In recent weeks, he fired an inspector general involved in the inquiry that led to the president’s impeachment, nominated a White House aide to another key inspector general post overseeing virus relief spending and moved to block still another inspector general from taking over as chairman of a pandemic spending oversight panel. Continue reading.

President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat

Washington Post logoU.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. Continue reading.

Trump Blames Obama For Fumbled Pandemic Response

If President Donald Trump can find a way to blame his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for something, he likely will — including coronavirus.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “The Obama Administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion.”

A reporter later asked Trump to clarify what he meant by an “Obama-era rule that you had changed regarding this virus. I didn’t follow that.” And when Trump and Vice President Mike Pence responded to the reporter, there was still a lack of clarity. Continue reading.

Trump Infuriated By Leak Of Schedules Proving His Laziness

Credit: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters

Trump is awfully unhappy that someone keeps leaking his daily schedules — the ones that show him doing next to nothing all day long. After three months of schedules were leaked, Trump launched a hunt for the White House staffer who confirmed Trump’s deep and abiding laziness to the public.

But despite that hunt, even more daily schedules have leaked. And they show the same thing: vast swaths of “executive time” — the code phrase everyone has settled on to describe the many, many hours Trump spends not doing the work of being president.

Over the weekend, Trump went on Twitter to claim that when his schedule says it is executive time, “I am generally working, not relaxing.” He also insisted that the media getting his work schedule was actually “something very easy to do.” Finally, he deployed his characteristic nonsense bombast and declared, “In fact, I probably work more hours than almost any past President.”

View the complete February 11 article by Lisa Needham with the American Independent on the National Memo website here.