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Donald Trump is in the early stages of hanging blame around Tony Fauci’s neck for Trump’s own negligent coronavirus response and the floundering US economy.
The Trump administration has always maintained a transient relationship with reality. From the start, Trump has used an arsenal of slippery tools to misdirect attention away from the question he should be answering, or the problem he should be working to solve.
Here are three of Trump’s devices at work—an unflagging yes-man, a faulty premise, and the shift of blame to the innocent:
Bryan Lanza, a top official from Trump’s 2016 campaign, says,
“The president is eager to shepherd this economy again. It was sidelined by a bunch of unelected scientists, and now he is looking at it as an opportunity to do what America hired him to do: Act as the CEO and guide this huge mass of bureaucracy through these challenging times.”
Yes-man? Check. Faulty premise? Take your pick. There is the Trump “shepherded” the healthy economy he inherited from Obama, or there is America “hired” him to be a bureaucratic CEO and not a leader—not to mention the fact that whether Trump was “hired” at all relies on one’s attitude toward the electoral college. Blame? Oh, yeah. The economy was “sidelined by…unelected scientists”.
Trump acts as if the current coronavirus pandemic isn’t a problem, or if it is, it was never his fault, and his role in the pandemic doesn’t matter because he has totally killing it anyway. Meanwhile, as the US surpasses 1.2 million cases of COVID-19 and 70,000 deaths from the disease, the president is busy regulatory suspensions to boost economic recovery before there is actual medical recovery.
Former aids like Lanza are just part of the JV squad in the blame game. Let’s see who Trump, the first string varsity star finger pointer, takes aim at with his tiny digits.
Screenshot / ABC News
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been at the tip of the spear through U.S. efforts to fight viral diseases including AIDS, SARS, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, MERS, and Ebola.
Dr. Fauci has been the top US epidemiologist through six administrations. During this pandemic, he has tried to balance delivering honest messaging and keeping his boss’s rage at bay: Tony Fauci is a genius, but solving that equation may be impossible.
Trump has moved this medical hero steadily away from the public discourse, distancing Dr. Fauci from his original place at the podium and even retweeting a #firefauci message. Now the president is ready to heap the blame onto this talented epidemiologist, and he doesn’t mind lying to do it. “Everybody, even Tony Fauci, was saying, ‘It’s going to pass, not going to be a big deal.’”
Trump lackeys Mike Pompeo and Rudy Giuliani are eager to facilitate Dr. Fauci’s downfall. While Pompeo touts a conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus was created at a laboratory in Wuhan, Giuliani transmogrifies previous coronavirus research funding from NIAID into Fauci paying the Wuhan Institute of Virology to develop the virus.
It was only a matter of time until Trump threw Dr. Fauci under the bus. Trump will blame anyone to push the facts out of the spotlight.
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In mid-April, as deaths mounted in the US and federal response failed to materialize, Trump blamed the United Nations’ World Health Organization for the spread of this new coronavirus.
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Trump blamed the European Union for having “failed to take the same precautions” as the US to stop the spread of COVID-19. “A number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.“
It must have also been Europe’s fault that Trump announced one of his famous travel bans without any interagency planning, causing chaos among Americans who were in Europe at the time.
Flickr/Obama White House
Is there anything Trump has not blamed on Obama?
For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it. It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped. President Obama made changes that only complicated things further…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020
Pixabay
As the National Stockpile turned up mysteriously empty of needed medical supplies, Trump laid the blame on all past presidents. “Many administrations preceded me.”
In fact, Trump’s own administration may have disrupted the function of the US Strategic National Stockpile. With weeks to build this readiness, the Trump administration did not move to expand supplies of medical equipment.
Besides, Trump thinks the stockpile was never really for the states anyway.
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As hospitals scrambled to amass the ventilators they would need to fight the wave of coronavirus patients, Trump blamed “hospital chains, we call them,” for the ventilator shortage in “areas where there’s big problems.”
Shutterstock / Courier
When asked about the immense shortfall in personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies Trump blamed hospital staff, theorized that they might be stealing masks, taking them “out the back door”.
The president wants his base to think medical professionals would steal equipment that they themselves need to work and treat patients without spreading the disease—or dying from it themselves.
Source: Pixabay
In the weeks that he might have been leading a timely, aggressive federal response to the novel coronavirus, Trump poo-pooed press attention on the approaching pandemic, saying these news accounts were the latest Democratic hoax.
Now that news coverage has come to include warning people against trying Trump’s toxic “cures“, the president blames the press for paying attention to those too.
Here’s Trump at his rally tonight in South Carolina dismissing worries about the coronavirus as the “new hoax” pic.twitter.com/Q58d7dI1cb
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 29, 2020
