Donald Trump’s graceless and disgraceful denial of an election he lost by the length of the straight amounts to the biggest dummy spit in US electoral history. The toys have been thrown out of the cot and caps set to lock so he can whine to the world on Twitter.
The oddest part about it is the man clinging to power by his manicured fingernails, appears to have no interest in leading the country.
The Covid pandemic is raging in the US. One million new cases have been diagnosed in the last six days. Deaths are running at 1300 a day across the country. A week ago, they were at 1000.
Besides a press conference on Saturday announcing a partnership with Pfizer whose vaccination has concluded clinical testing with impressive results, Trump has not said a word about the pandemic.
In reply, Pfizer sent out a press release saying the company had received no funding or support from the US government. Another day another Trump lie.
The absence of top down leadership in Covid management has led to ugly scenes in hospitals across the country.
Take this Twitter thread from Jodie Doering, an ER nurse working in a hospital in rural South Dakota. It was her first day off after a series of long shifts. She took the time to reflect on what she had encountered.
‘A f*****g horror movie that never ends’
“I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm (oxygen delivered by nasal cannula at 100 per cent concentration).
“They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens. These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a f*****g horror movie that never ends. There are no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.”
For her trouble, the mother from small town Woonsocket was labelled a crisis actor by the usual suspects.
She’s not. She’s a real ER nurse who in less troubling times hits up social media with messages about local high school sports. She added that many people she has treated are grateful for the assistance and understand the grave position they find themselves in.
South Dakota has the second highest rate of diagnosed cases of Covid in the US with 2047 per 100,000. One in fifty people have tested positive to the virus in the last six days.
The one state with a higher proportion of cases is North Dakota. On Sunday, the state’s Republican Governor, Doug Burgum finally relented and issued an executive order mandating mask-wearing inside places of business and indoor public spaces as well as outdoor spaces where social distancing is problematic.
But his counterpart in South Dakota, Kristi Noem, has refused to countenance mandatory social distancing or mask wearing in enclosed areas despite increasingly urgent calls from medical experts to do so.
Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Noem wrote, “The facts are simple, mask mandates, harsh lockdowns, massive testing and contact tracing haven’t worked in the United States or abroad.”
Obviously, there are no Australian news feeds available in the state capital, Pierre. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Harder still to accept that a pandemic that by its nature only knows one way – to infect as many hosts as possible could be effectively managed by ideology.
While the states make the running in public health in the US, the simple fact is Trump could resolve an issue like mandatory mask wearing if he so chose. But we all know he won’t. It is in the national interest for him to do so but alas not his own.
Back when the pandemic first hit the US hard, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a strong mask recommendation. In response on April 3, Trump declared, “It’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it.”
By 21 July, Trump changed his mind, “I will use it gladly. And I say: If you can, use the mask.” Then Trump changed his mind again periodically making false or negative remarks on masking up.
Robert Hahn, an epidemiologist and consulting scientist with CDC, examined the period between those two statements and based on a range of assumptions, attributed somewhere between 4200 and 12200 deaths to the President’s remarks.
Absent President, legal challenges falling apart
There is a battle between causation and correlation in Hahn’s study, but the conclusive answer is Trump’s addled response to mask wearing in the early days of the pandemic caused deaths and deaths somewhere in the thousands.
Now post-election, Trump has all but ignored the pandemic preferring to obsess on nickel and dime legal challenges that either don’t specify the number of votes in contention or where they do, reveal such a tiny proportion of them they could not change the result.
One by one, the legal challenges to the results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan are falling apart.
On Monday, four different cases brought by voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia which attempted to exclude some counties from being included in state certification of the election were withdrawn by the plaintiffs.
A request for a continuance in a case brought by the President in Pennsylvania was denied by a federal judge after four of the legal firms representing the President walked away. The case is now being prosecuted by a lawyer who specialises in business law and hosts a radio show. The lawyer’s About Me page on his website contains at least one glaring typographical error.
Conspiracy theorists circle. In one, Philadelphia mob boss, Joseph ‘Skinny Joey’ Merlino was said to have received $3 million to forge 300,000 ballots. “These people are crazy,” Skinny Joey said about the conspiracists. Even Trump’s counsel, Rudy Giuliani, had to agree.
“There is an allegation about a mobster, but I think it’s a far-fetched one,” Giuliani said in an interview on Fox Business.
For what it’s worth, Giuliani had promised to make disclosures about extensive electoral fraud this week. He was, he said, unable to provide details but it seems it was a clutch of straws at the so called hack or manipulation of data from Dominion Voting Systems which Trump claimed in his tweets amounted to the deletion of 2.5 million votes which should have gone his way. Dominion manufacture the software for many voting and counting machines in use in the US.
To date, those allegations remain undisclosed, unverifiable, without any evidence. The allegation was made by the pro-Trump news outlet One American News Network referring to what they called an unaudited analysis of data made by an election monitoring group, Edison Research.
The company’s boss, Larry Rosin, responded, “Edison Research has produced no such report and we have no evidence of any voter fraud.”
And that is a view shared by almost everyone who should know including the states’ election overseers, attorneys-general and everyone up to the Department of Homeland Security who declared the election on November 3, “the most secure in American history.”
A signatory to that emphatic remark, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency with the DHS was sacked by Trump this morning.
Nine states have already certified their results and by this time next week 27 states will have done so, including Pennsylvania and Michigan. Recounts in Georgia and Arizona will conclude later this week. All 50 states must certify their results by December 14 when the Electoral College meets.
Until then it is standing room only on the grassy knoll with the President preferring Twitter tantrums and garbage conspiracies to leadership. That he does so in a time of an ongoing disaster for the nation tells us everything we need to know about Trump and, more importantly, that the overwhelming majority of Americans have made the correct assessment of him.
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