Vox Populi:

On a day the U.S. saw over 139,000 cases and at least 2,425 deaths, the ever-classy Trump boasted his briefings’ “ratings” reached “Bachelor Finale, Monday Night Football type numbers.” The photo of these bodybags was taken by an anonymous New York City hospital nurse who said he wanted to show “the ghastly reality” of COVID-19 deaths.

Nigh on speechless: Thanks to months of criminal-level denial, delay, extortion, ineptitude, “hoax” bullshit and then the breezy claim a U.S. coronavirus death rate of 100,000-ish would show he’d done “a very good job,” Trump said Tuesday that the country could see up to 240,000 deaths – an obscenely preventable number that dwarfs the roughly 3,500 deaths in China, with over four times our population, as well as deaths in Italy and Spain. The scale of Trump’s governmental failure, “so complete and so sweeping it borders on the incomprehensible,” began as far back as January – or in truth three years ago – with a White House that was a “ghost town of scientific expertise…rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated.” It remains on grotesque display every day as COVID-19 spreads and Trump has “chosen to stand down, do nothing, let people die and (let) it ravage America” – especially, grotesquely, its blue states. Left to their own devices by a leader who miraculously hasn’t heard about any problems with testing, states are struggling to get masks, beds, gloves, ventilators and other vital equipment from a narcissistic toddler-cum-mob-boss who’s repulsively playing politics with people’s lives by demanding fealty first.

In hard-hit New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has described an insane “eBay-style” bidding war for ventilators between all 50 states plus FEMA; the week before, he asked for two million masks, and got sent 78,000, all marked expired. California, which has seen their cases quickly double, was sent 170 ventilators that didn’t work. Illinois received 325,000 of a requested 7.4 million gloves, none of the requested 47,000 goggles and 4,000 respirators, and 247,000 of a needed 2.34 million masks – and they were the wrong kind. This, while a deranged lout posing as a leader floats incendiary conspiracy theories about health workers hoarding masks and respirators because…umm…Heroic, furious, overworked doctors and nurses have started speaking up, wondering if anyone in this feckless administration has been inside a hospital in the last few weeks (or in their lives), and posting evidence of the chaos. “I’m a physician at a hospital in NYC and THIS IS THE “PPE” I WAS JUST HANDED for my shift,” wrote one doctor on the furious new hashtag #TrumpGenocide, alongside a photo of a crappy rain poncho you can get for a buck on a street corner. “Our federal government has completely failed its health care workers. #GetUsPPE.” The feds  did, though, just add guns to “essential” items to have during a pandemic, so there’s that.

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