Was Trump EVER right about anything?
[This is just a copy of my first reaction to the news that Pennsylvania had flipped. The context is that I was replying to a long appeal for unity after Trump, though the outer context was a story about a symptom-free woman who was contagious for over two months. The original is on Slashdot.]
Obviously Trump was not correct to say that Covid-19 would leave the news on November 4th, but maybe…
But first, I want to reply with a few thoughts to the comment from jellomizer with the Subject: Re:Election.
(1) The Subject is feeding an AC FP troll. Off topic, too. At least he could have changed the Subject to something substantive and bridging. I went one way, but based on jellomizer’s tone, perhaps something like “Subject: Time to heal from Covid-19 AND…”
(2) I wish he had included some more concrete “solution approaches”, and though I think mine are not likely to be enacted (due to the overwhelming but unifying problem at the end), I’ll go ahead and throw my favorite solution approaches out here.
(a) For Covid-19, split the economic problems away from the medical problems so that both of them can be focused on more clearly. I think the economic problems would best be handled with “insurance from the future”. The existing insurance companies are experts in examining claims for damages and paying the valid claims quickly. The government should borrow the money to pay the claims and pay the premiums out of future tax revenue. Now the parameters are for questions like “Over how many years will the premiums be divided?” and “How can we incentivize smaller claims?” However the government should focus on the MEDICAL problem as the highest priority. We should have had MUCH more testing MONTHS ago and we still need to do everything possible to expedite the vaccine.
(b) Get politics out of the courts. Focusing on the head of the fish, my favorite idea would be to recognize and recuse partisan Justices on the Supreme Court. Simple definition: A Justice confirmed by a majority of the Senators from the two major parties is nonpartisan. Any other Justice is partisan. And any nonpartisan Justice should have a power to compel the recusal of two partisan Justices from any matter brought before the Court. (Various details of how I got to that version available upon polite request, but if you just want to bitch and gripe you can Z off.)
(3) Ah! Debate. Brings back memories. Maybe I helped destroy public education and helped set the stage for Trump’s YUGE mob of naive and gullible idiots? The proposition we debated for my first year was about federal funding of education, but we wanted to fix problems, not help design the school vouchers that are now being used to defund REAL schools in favor of religious BS factories and pre-prison training.
So much for the reply part. Now for my actual response to the topic, which is that Trump was wrong about that, but maybe he was right about something else. No, Covid-19 has NOT stopped being a problem just because the election is behind us. Persistent symptom-free super-spreaders are a gigantic new threat and we need to study her case extremely carefully. However I think the main threat now is actually a new strain that defeats the current vaccines. Maybe those minks are already infected with Covid-20 that is already spreading? Or maybe Covid-21 will incorporate some genetic material from its fellow coronavirus, AKA the common cold? Gawd help us if there are 10 or 20 new versions coming… If so, only China and New Zealand and a handful of countries appear to be ready.
But was Trump right about anything? How about “America’s system of government is broken”? Yeah, Trump broke it worse, but in spite of the horrendous mess Trump will leave behind, Congress just staggered through this election with almost no change. Almost the entire ship of fools was reelected. THAT is seriously broken. Who said we need more democracy? Hint: He recently called Trump a dangerous criminal.
I see that Pennsylvania has crossed the Rubicon, so at least it appears the specific Trump problem is about to go away, but the system is still broken. And Trump’s Court is going to try to keep it broken for as long as possible. We are SO in need of checking our file system. That’s right. We’re fsck-ed.
