One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?
Washington PostPeople close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.
In recent weeks, with more than 146,000 Americans now dead from the virus, the White House has attempted to overhaul — or at least rejigger — its approach. The administration has revived news briefings led by Trump himself and presented the president with projections showing how the virus is now decimating Republican states full of Trump voters. Officials have also set up a separate, smaller coronavirus working group led by Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, along with Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
For many, however, the question is why Trump did not adjust sooner, realizing that the path to nearly all of his goals — from an economic recovery to an electoral victory in November — runs directly through a healthy nation in control of the virus.
“The irony is that if he’d just performed with minimal competence and just mouthed words about national unity, he actually could be in a pretty strong position right now, where the economy is reopening, where jobs are coming back,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to former president Barack Obama. “And he just could not do it.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
in his mind, and it appeals to a group of people who share some of those grievances and they like his simplistic language ("He talks like us." "He is the only politician that tells it as it is."
And he's good at making threats and insulting people to get his own way (what his ghostwriter calls the Art of the Deal). This, along with his bragging and exaggeration of his success (to compensate for feelings of inadequacy) are the only skills he has.
He has never written anything, never read a book, never understood a single problem, never made more money than if he had just put daddy's money in the stockmarket, never had an answer to any complex problem.
On every issue as president, he has no solution other than if he doesn't like it and has been attacking it, he will try to take it away without putting anything in its place - Iran Nuclear Agreement, Obamacare, immigration, NATO - he hasn't pulled us out yet but clearly wants to. His big issue with NATO is the investment by other nations. That isn't a vision. It's like Netflix only having a ten year plan to put up its prices and no other plan, not about increasing or improving content - that would require vision and strategy, and certainly more intelligence.
A man with an IQ of below 70 can do what Trump does. Never does he have a single idea to make things better, and consistently showing a complete lack of understanding of what the actual problems are.
He's unwilling to learn anything, unable to read and digest briefing papers, constantly feeling the need to boast about how smart he is. He isn't even smart enough to listen to experts who tell him how he can get out of the mess he is in.
I used to think he was controlled by Putin, but I realize he is just a simpleton who is mentally disabled and incapable of doing the job.
