Here's the problem. Since, specifically, 2015, I have said, on the record, over and over, "don't vote for Trump."
The # 1 reason I have said this is because of the story of the USFL. Donald Trump showed his stripes to America over 30 years ago. If you watch the movie Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL, it is clear who the villain is and it's Mr. Donald J. Trump. You learned that Donald Trump was incapable of putting any entity above himself. Everything he touched turned into the Donald Trump Show. Which is fine when you're a private citizen and you're talking about Trump Tower or Trump Casinos or Trump Resorts.
But when Trump was voted President, he came to power with the slogan Make America Great Again. I could argue that Donald Trump thought of himself as bigger than America. If you've played sports before, you've met players who are bigger than the team, that's not uncommon. There's also administrators who are bigger than their organizations.
You're personally thinking of someone who fits that description right this second. The point is, as President, America should take priority over yourself. Now if you're a Trumpie, you're already on the defensive, "Donald Trump was sent by God...."
I'm going to stop you right there. I'm not going to rehash everything Donald Trump has done right or wrong in his political career. There are literally hundreds of websites that can do that for you.
I am speaking on one specific topic and one specific topic only. The coronavirus is being UNDER-reported, not over-reported, here in America. There is a massive cover-up in China and every time citizen-journalists report on flu casualties they disappear.
Right now, everything is more or less okay on Main Street USA, a few hundred Americans now have the coronavirus and only a few have died. But what's going to start happening, within a month or so, is supply chain interruptions. People I know in the medical field are already experiencing flu supply-related shortages.
As soon as the coronavirus stories started hitting the news sites at the beginning of January, that was the time to act. Trump should have mobilized the CDC to have testing kits in all ER's on the west coast. That was the President's error, but that wasn't a fatal error. The President has said that everything's "under control." He was wrong, but that wasn't a fatal error, either.
When the Grandpas of the country start overwhelming the spread sheets with coronavirus death stats, relatives aren't going to buy the excuse that the coronavirus is just another variation of the flu that hits the country every year. The elderly people I know are actually fairly vigilant about getting their flu shots and they know this strain of virus is different. The uninformed will unfairly blame the President for no vaccines. There will be a vaccine, just remember that it's a process to make it.
But, at the end of the day, Americans don't even really care about their Grandpas, they only care about themselves. Once they can't buy their favorite groceries at WalMart or can't go on vacation, rightly or wrongly that is all going to start getting pinned on Trump based on his oversized persona. Even Trump's staunchest supporters will turn on him if their own daily lives are severely disrupted.
Trump is not going to do everything in his power to solve the problem, he's going to do what he thinks it takes to get re-elected. Trump doesn't realize that the coronavirus is a War-Level event. Chinese Leader Xi Jinping publicly declared a “People’s War” against the virus last month, and if people had the whole picture of what was going on on the ground in Wuhan, they would realize that we're not being pro-active enough in America now.
Because you don't really know how many people in China have the coronavirus. You don't really know how many people in China have died of the coronavirus. And you don't really know how many people have been arrested in China because they spoke of the coronavirus. Are we as Americans getting the information we need from China to fight the first wave of infections? (Of course we're not.) Trump's problem will be that he won't be able to circumvent civil liberties like they did in China to aid in containment. In the age of social media, real panic will be hitting America in, let's see, today's March 4? Look for that in about 2-3 weeks when America, not just Beacon of Speech, realizes that China has been suppressing important information from the rest of the world.
98% of the people who get coronavirus will live through the Coronavirus Event.
As soon as the word Coronavirus gets associated with the name Trump, his re-election will be sunk.
Fairly or Unfairly.
Half of me almost feels bad for the President, because if Donald Trump loses in November, I would want him to lose on his own merits. Very few politicians are prepared to fight an unpredictable epidemic.
But then the other half of me thinks of the coronavirus as the great equalizer. Trump takes credit when he has nothing to do with things going right in America, maybe it's poetic justice that he gets the blame when it's (mostly) not his fault for the coronavirus spread.
Addendum 3-4-20 4:00 PM