Trump Kicking and Screaming Transition Thread

My Mother, even in her last days under hospice care, always wanted to look nice and appreciated her caregiver’s efforts to dress and groom her. We did too, of course. One thing that has always stood out about Trump is his vanity. It strikes me as a sign that he might be in a depressed state. If that’s true, he might be having to deal with the humiliation of being the one thing he hates the most: a loser.

No symbolism there.

But yeah I commented to the nurse about it.

He's done it before. Probably trying to get sympathy.

https://www.vogue.com/article/donald-trump-gray-hair

Wow, someone who's living depends on perpetuating the US war machine refuses to recognize war crimes. Shocking.

Yes he is.

He and Blair evaded justice by virtue of the virtual impossibility of holding the US to account.

Prosecute either and you are declaring yourself an enemy of the US, which no-one is ever going to do, or even be in a position to do.

That doesn’t change the fact that he committed a war crime on a massive scale in full view of the world and defined his presidency and the global landscape since by that one decision.

My thought exactly, it's very much as though he's projecting an image of himself as victim.

Back in the 70s, my father commented on the hair color of all presidents. When they enter office, their hair is their natural color, when they leave, it’s grey. This, he said, is because the job is so stressful.
I’ve noticed since then, that most presidents hair does turn grey over that period. Is it because the job is stressful? Or because they happen to be in office at the age when most men go grey anyway.
Either way, it’s probably him trying to live up to that ideal. He was so stressed... yea, right...

Funny thing, most people's hair doesn't completely change in a week....

Reagan is purported to have said about gay men being infected by HIV, "By their blood shall they be known." A reference to a Biblical verse many see as condemning homosexuality.

Except that "by their blood shall they be known" is not a Biblical verse...

I didn't say it was, I said it was a reference to a Biblica verse.

Granted that the medical community knew about AIDS being a thing far earlier than it was taken seriously, I would say that is a different issue from when Reagan or even the most attentive possible president would have it get on their radar, let alone when they would reasonably process that this is something the federal government needs to address in a huge way. By contrast, Trump knew in January about covid and the potential for a pandemic, it was clear what role the federal government should/could take, and Trump fell short.

Another point in favor of Trump being worse.

Perhaps my Google-Fu is weak, but I have not yet found a site that says X number of people died from AIDS each year from 1981-X time. This site says that by 1989, the number of reported cases of AIDS had reached 100,000.

https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline

Even assuming massive undercounting, that's fewer than have died of covid since just March.

I included that earlier on in the post.

One thing I did not mention re: Trump and his crew was the evidence that they were slow to respond because they thought that coronavirus was largely going to be confined to blue states and Democratic cities. As monstrous as homophobia is, the notion that it might be OK to just let the coronavirus rage on because the majority of the people who it might hit aren't part of your base is exponentially more so, in addition to being fundamentally ignorant about how pandemics work. You can't confine a virus to places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, because people travel from there to all over, including the precious red states.

Agreed. Didn't specifically mention sex workers, but still...

Repulsive, obviously. But pretty sure that it would not take too much effort to see and raise you with any number of statements Trump personally and his staff have made about "kung flu" or the notion of Trump revealing a Superman shirt as he returned from Walter Reed, which would have been a slap in the face to the people who suffered from the disease and those who lost people from it.

What metrics are you thinking of specifically?

LOL NO

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids

https://lithub.com/ronald-reagan-presided-over-89343-deaths-to-aids-and-did-nothing/

https://www.factlv.org/timeline.htm (note there is mention of the CDC realizing the virus was possibly transmitted by blood/bodily fluids as early as 1982)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...y-ronald-reagan-aids-crisis-first-lady-legacy

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/open...-AIDS-Legacy-Silence-equals-death-2751030.php

Reagan absolutely knew almost from day one of taking office.

Granted, he didn't actively hamper efforts as blatantly as Trump has, but the fact that he was willing to let the bad ones die speaks to nothing good to his character.

Allowing the CDC to go public in '82 about blood testing would have saved the lives of many a hemophiliac and other blood transfusion recipients, aka the white Christians he and Nancy cared about.

I looked through most of those links, and they don't really contradict what I was saying.

AIDS showed up in about 1981 and not in the sort of way that even a micromanaging president would necessarily noted, let alone realize the need to do what we now know with hindsight should have been done in terms of spending on research. An early public education campaign would likely have saved untold lives, and it is shameful that more wasn't done. It is shameful that part of the reason why more wasn't done was because it was perceived as hitting "undesireables."

But I didn't see any indication that Reagan personally knew or understood about AIDS in the 1981-82 time frame. Certainly not like we know Donald Trump affirmatively knew and understood about covid.

And other than fail to devote more research money and failing to personally speak out about AIDS/correct mistaken impressions about it, these links don't talk about Reagan's failures on the subject much. That's in contrast with the known history of Trump's failures on covid, without the benefit of 40 years' time passing and the perspective and the level of public disclosure that comes with it.

By that reasoning, I can make any quote I want and claim it is a "reference to a Biblical verse"...

Trump makes Giuliani his legal point man signalling his endgame. This will be hilarious.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/14/giuliani-trump-legal-plans-436475

You wouldn’t be the first and I’m certain you wouldn’t be the last.

I also seem to recall that when AIDS was becoming a known thing, there were calls for quarantines that were met with cries of “Discrimination!” and “You want to put gays in camps!”

Minor detail: HIV/AIDS is not airborne. COVID is.

And . . . ?

You don't get HIV/AIDS from someone coughing in your face.

Lately, Lanz has been smashing himself in the head with the hammer marked "Dayton Kitchens smart-making machine".

And so quarantine is useless.

In the early days of AIDS the transmission mechanism was not yet known. The virus itself was not yet identified. A quarantine protocol would have been a perfectly reasonable precaution.

This is factually false. But just out of curiosity, in your world, whom would you have quarantined, and for long, given that in your world, you didn't know how to tell who was infected or how the infection would spread or develop?

People who had AIDS, obviously. Don’t make the common mistake of thinking AIDS and HIV are the same thing.

That's a quarter of the answer, and already it's the opposite of quarantine. Quarantine is where you separate a person for whom you don't know if they're sick until you do.

It’s also when you isolate someone who is or is suspected of being infected but is not necessarily showing symptoms yet. You know, like we do with COVID.