Trump's incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign?

[bluewater]

f you’re lucky enough to live in New Zealand, the coronavirus nightmare has been mostly over since June. After more than two weeks with no new cases, the government lifted almost all restrictions that month. The borders are still shut, but inside the country, normal life returned.

It’s coming back elsewhere too. Taiwan, where most days this month no new cases have been reported, just held the Taipei Film Festival, and a recent baseball game drew 10,000 spectators. Italy was once the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and remains in a state of emergency, but with just a few hundred new cases a day in the whole country, bars are open and tourists have started returning, though of course Americans remain banned. According to The New York Times’s figures, there were 321 new cases in all of Canada last Friday.

And America? We had 68,241. As of last week, the worst per capita outbreak on the planet was in Arizona, followed by Florida. The world is closed to us; American passports were once coveted, but now only a few dozen nations will let us in. Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, told me he doesn’t expect American life to feel truly normal before summer 2022. Two years of our lives, stolen by Donald Trump.

As our country plunges into a black hole of unchecked illness, death and pariahdom, the administration is waging a PR war on its own top disease expert, Anthony Fauci, trying to convince news outlets that he can’t be trusted. “The move to treat Dr. Fauci as if he were a warring political rival comes as he has grown increasingly vocal in his concerns about the national surge in coronavirus cases,” reported The Times.

Trump has also undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, retweeting the conspiratorial ramblings of the former game show host Chuck Woolery: “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid-19. Everyone is lying. The C.D.C., media, Democrats, our doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.” There are now so many stories of Trump fans dying after blithely exposing themselves to the virus that they’ve become a macabre cliché.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/opinion/us-coronavirus-trump.html

[Doodley]

1. Is it incompetence? Or is it deliberate for his puppet master?

[Chainfire]

2. I hope Trump toughs it out until November

He should be the easiest candidate to beat in the elections.

[Va Lefty]

3. That's what I thought last time

Just sayn'

[NCjack]

4. Apparently, all of America's newspapers are owned by fascists. nt

[Tbear]

5. I'll Call

Please resign Donald.
And just go. Somewhere. I don't even care about all the crimes.
You don't need the crap you get for being president anymore. You will be much better off playing golf all you want.
We know you really don't care about us. So just do it for yourself and your family.
Please, resign.

[UTUSN]

6. Prime for resigning: SHITLER, Greg Abbott, deSantis, Cornyn/Cruz/Rubio, Graham, Turtle

[Baclava]

7. If he resigns wouldnt Pence take over? He might be harder to defeat in Nov than the Doofus

[gratuitous]

8. A good question

Certainly there was no shortage of media outlets, respectable ones, baying for Bill Clinton's resignation during the everlasting Whitewater investigation. Right-wing vendors made a lot of money selling "Character Matters" bumper stickers, because even though no actual crime had been committed, "everyone said" that for the good of the nation Bill Clinton had to resign the presidency.

These days? Practically no responsible voices in the media are calling for Donald Trump's resignation. I recall a newspaper (the Fresno Bee?) had an editorial saying that Trump should resign, but if that voice from the wilderness couldn't be any loner. The New York Times and the Washington Post catalog the atrocities, but there's no pressure from them calling for Trump's resignation. Broadcast outlets are too busy repeating whatever foolishness falls out of Trump's mouth to stop and say, "Maybe this guy shouldn't be in the White House."

Would it make any difference, like, would Trump resign if the media started calling for his resignation? Probably not. But that's not the media's call. Their obligation is for the country's best interests; that's why they get the First Amendment protections they currently enjoy. Nobody has to protect a "free" press that's toadying to a lethally corrupt president.