Donald Trump is a tall, physically unprepossessing guy, and he towers over Dr. Anthony Fauci, the prominent immunologist who is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases
at Trump’s National Institutes of Health.
He thinks he is the Savior of our nation.
And he always shakes hands with those he likes, as he did today in the Rose Garden, as CEOs of Walmart, Target, CVS, and Roche surrounded him to support his claim that everything is under control in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Because our Liar-in-Chief, aka Embellisher-in-Chief, so frequently mistates or lies, those serving under him, including world-renowned Dr. Fauci, often have to correct the misinformation which he constantly spreads.
Today, Trump stood at a podium in the Rose Garden with, as usual, an unsmiling Mike Pence right behind him.
Next to him stood Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, whose conservative creds include serving as a law clerk for hyper-conservative SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia; working on the Bush Two side in Bush v. Gore (in which one vote tipped the 2000 presidential election to George W Bush because of hanging chads in Florida). Azar also ran the U S Division of pharma giant Eli Lilly & Co, and he always strives to please Trump — because he knows that if he did not do that, he’d be out of a job.
South Korea knows how do deal with Xi Jingping’s COVID-19 pandemic, because it's a communitarian society, while ours is a society based on personal individual freedom (especially for those who treasure the Second Amendment rather than the First Amendment).
The Trump Administration is on total defense now because of its late, late response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Today at his Rose Garden news conference, the most pertinent question came from PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor, a topflight professional reporter who is a Member of the White House Press Corps.
She asked Trump whether he takes any personal responsibility for having axed the part of the National Security Council (which is embedded in the West Wing) which had been set up well before January 20, 2017, to deal specifically with potential global public health emergencies.
So how did Trump respond to Alcindor’s question?
He said it was “a nasty question” and then proceeded to deny any personal responsibility for the crisis which he and his minions caused by not acting in a timely fashion to prevent widespread worry, and panic, with wild stock market swings, empty shelves in grocery stores, and millions and millions of dollars income lost by hard-working Americans, some of whom even voted for Trump — and now we are hearing talk of bailouts for the cruise ship industry (of which TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, clearly disapproves — an industry that Trump says is essential, only that industry clearly contributes to global
warming — and the airline industry, which also does a great deal of harm to our precious environment (https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/politics/donald-trump-emergency/index.html).
Not seen on camera during Trump’s highly defensive and often incoherent press conference were associate solitary reporters Johanna Jones and Keith Coleman.
As soon as the unrosy news conference was concluded, that dynamic duo simultaneously texted us, saying that it was just another day in the Era of Trump.