The Coronavirus Has Not Halted Trump's Power Grab

[Newest Reality]

Both the president and his party are committed to a long-term project of impunity from both the law and the electorate.

An hour or so into Monday’s daily presidential briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, Trump declared that his political opponents should “not be allowed” to win the 2020 presidential election.

Democrats “want to make Trump look as bad as they can, because they want to try and win an election that they shouldn't be allowed to win based on the fact that we have done a great job. We built the greatest economy in the world. I'll do it a second time,” Trump declared. “We got artificially stopped by a virus that nobody ever thought possible and we handled it and we've built a team and we built an apparatus that's been unbelievable.”

Even for Trump, who spits falsehoods at a breathtaking pace, that paragraph is remarkable; as a retired moisture farmer from Tatooine once put it, every word of what he just said was wrong. Job growth under Trump has been slower than during his predecessor’s last three years in office. The president was warned about the danger posed by the novel coronavirus in early January, and chose to ignore his advisers, believing it was another public-relations problem he could bluster his way through. The economy had to be “artificially stopped” because the federal government dithered until early March, as Trump insisted the Chinese government had the outbreak contained and falsely told the public that cases would “soon be down to zero.” The Democratic Party, despite its criticisms of the president, is prepared to hand him another $1 trillion in stimulus funds to prop up the economy, which is $3 trillion more than the zero dollars Republicans were willing to give his predecessor to prevent a severe economic downturn from becoming a depression.

Although the pestilence that has killed more than 10,000 Americans and shut down the U.S. economy is understandably dominating the headlines, the Trump administration’s efforts to erode democracy and the rule of law have not subsided. The authoritarianization of the federal government has hampered its response to the pandemic, squandering scarce resources on shoring up the president’s lies and pursuing his political interests at the public’s expense. This is the predictable result of an authoritarian logic in which the preservation of the regime takes precedence over the safety of its own citizens, because the leader is the incontestable expression of popular will.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/the-plague-has-not-halted-trumps-power-grab/609643/

[eleny]

1. Of course not. He views it as an opportunity

[abqtommy]

2. It looks like a case of God and COVID-19 help those who help themselves. That means we're on

our own to find a way or ways to get rid of tRUMP and his cultists. Ready? Let's go!