Trump’s Mass Manslaughter
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
The last four years, when an issue became too toxic for Trump he came up with something out of left field and changed the topic. Most recently he tried to leave COVID and the economy behind him by only talking about riots and law and order, but this week his tactics backfired. First Bob Woodward brought back COVID with his book ‘Rage,’ revealing that in early February 2020 the president knew how dangerous the corona virus is and that it can be airborne, in March calling it ‘a killer.’ Meanwhile in public Trump called it ‘a Democratic hoax,’ said that it would ‘just go away in April,‘ urged his armed goons to ‘liberate’ states under lockdown, criticized the wearing of masks, organized superspreader events and pushed for schools to fully reopen, potentially putting millions of children at risk. The president’s response to Woodward’s revelations was a classic doubling down. He had not wanted to create a panic by ‘jumping up and down’ yelling ‘this is a disaster.’ Apparently either that or lying to the American people were the only options he saw, and the idea that he could have managed the crisis and saved lives never entered his mind.
This week nature put climate change on top of the agenda, with the largest wildfires in known history raging in the western states and another major hurricane hitting the gulf coast. Visiting California Trump repeated his earlier opinion, expressed during the 2018 Paradise fire, that climate change is a fable and that the fires are caused by dead leaves and underbrush that haven’t been removed, conveniently forgetting that 57% of the California forests are owned by the federal government. He told environmental scientists he met with that it ‘would get colder,’ and that he ‘doesn’t think science knows’ anything about climate change, before he flew off to another indoors rally in Nevada, violating that state’s Governor’s orders. When asked if he didn’t worry about getting infected because only few attendees wore masks the US President said ‘no, because I’m on a podium, far enough removed from the crowd.’ Before attending such events Trump’s followers still have to sign a waiver stating that they won’t sue the Trump campaign if they get infected, which may absolve the president legally but not morally from the carnage he causes.
The Russian front was also full of action. A whistleblower revealed that DHS had been directed to no longer focus on Russian election interference, ‘because it could embarrass the president,’ after oral reporting to Congress had been halted. Simultaneously the monitoring of white supremacist groups, according to official intelligence reports the number one internal security threat in the US, would have to be toned down. It turned out that Giuliani worked with a Russian agent to smear Biden, and John Durham’s main associate quit for fear of DOJ pressure on his probe.
Other than by threatening to selectively and prematurely bring out information about Durham’s investigation of the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016, Bill Barr is helping Trump by having his department substitute for the president in the defamation suit of E. Jean Carroll, who accuses Trump of rape. And to top it off the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into John Bolton’s book ‘The Room Where it Happened’ for possibly having revealed state secrets.
It’s now obvious that Trump is not trying to regularly win the election but that he’s just trying to consolidate power. ‘If I don’t win it’s rigged,’ is his mantra, and made men of his mafia family like Michael Caputo, who freaked out in his misinformation job at DHSS and will soon check into a funny farm, and Roger Stone, are urging his followers to stack up on ammo respectively for Trump to institute martial law.
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