“Trump faces backlash for removing mask on return to White House”
backlash /ˈbaklaʃ/ noun: a process in which people who dislike a politician continue to dislike him, but more loudly, whilst supporters continue to support them, also more loudly
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Alexa? What is a ‘backlash’?October 6th, 2020 |
 30 comments to Alexa? What is a ‘backlash’? |
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Trump faces a “backlash” from the left wing bedwetters who would never vote for him, not never ever.
Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
All the executive power of the United States is vested in the President, and he removed his mask, and as the excellent lockdownsceptics.org put it on the President’s return, ‘He is Risen‘. And he has shown that the infection can be treated, and beaten. Only He has that message.
The Left wanted Mr Trump to die from this, and by recovering he has shown that for the vast majority, it is a nothing-burger, without fries.
There was never a man so hated, as he who told the truth.
Edit: This Breitbart article https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/06/white-house-physician-president-donald-trump-reports-no-covid-19-symptoms/
and this comment (Breitbart comments are exceptionally rich in great observations):
“proreason Snappyjo • 31 minutes ago
Today is the saddest day in millions of libwit lives.
But take heart!!!
Nov 3 is going to be far FAR worse, buttercups.”
It’s not just the mask, it’s Trump’s failure to die that is naturally being criticised – it sends quite the wrong message about how cautious one must be. By surviving instead of becoming a cautionary example of what happens when you take Trump’s advice instead of the media’s, the president is yet again putting his personal convenience in front of protecting the country from the virus, an attitude typical of the man’s selfish disregard for the community, the science, the experts, … .
Above, I’ve done my best to out-backlash CNN, whose front page is captured here, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded.
To me this is why Trump screwed up the debate so badly. The press do a very unfair job on him, at best portraying his positions in the worst light possible, at worst just making stuff up. However, there are moments when the veil of the press is ripped away and the public can see the real Trump, the real position, the spin free truth, and this is one of them.
Unfortunately, the debate was another, when he could really have used that open mike to portray the unspun truth. These opportunities are rare and precious, and I think he squandered it. All he did was make the story about his interrupting, bullying, loudmouth tactics, playing right into the narrative of the media.
A few crisp one liners.
* “Let’s talk Russian collusion: what did your son do to get $4 million dollars from the mayor of Moscow, best friend of Putin? And you accuse ME of being compromised by Russia!”
* “You say voters should get a say in the Supreme Court, but with you the voters don’t get a say because you won’t tell them who you’d nominate, hell you won’t even tell them how many seats you want to pack the court with!”
* “I believe black lives matter, which is why I want you to explain why you pushed through the 1994 crime bill and put thousands of young black men in long jail sentences for minor crimes. How can you claim you support Black Lives Matter, when you worried about your kids mixing with black kids being like a Racial Jungle?”
* “Can you explain why your Vice Presidential partner is such a megalomaniac that she can, by her own words think you are both a racist and a rapist, and she still signs on to your ticket? You want such a woman a heartbeat from the presidency?”
That with a sense of a total command of the issues, and allowing Biden to do the Biden bumble would have been enough to swing many voters his way. Yet, instead, although he made some good points, they were buried in the noise. To me, the president was simply not very well prepared.
Normally it would be one and done, and he would have blown the chance because nobody except people who have already made up their minds watch the second and third debate. However, because of the Covid thing I think a lot of people will watch to see if he has really recovered, and he has a second chance to do it right. I fear, though, that we will instead get more of the same.
I think about this, and why I think his approach to communication is totally off the rails, then I remember he is President and I am not. So perhaps there is a genius to his presentation I don’t see. It is really off-putting to me, but I am very far from the typical voter. So, who the hell am I to judge?
Nobody’s perfect
We still have 28 days until the election, and already the progs amongst my relatives and acquaintances have hit frantic seething rage. The next four weeks are going to be entertaining.
I give it a week before they start lighting themselves on fire in intersections like the Vietnamese bonzes.
I had my doubts about COVID, but Trump is slowly making things clear.
No doubt, there must have been quite a lot of stage management, but essentially, if a fat old guy like Trump can beat the virus in a matter of days, then it probably really isn’t a big deal.
By what standard do we support shutting down economies and infringing on the rights of people? 2 times the death rate of flu? 5 times? 10 times? 100 times? Never?
This COVID-19 situation would be an interesting case study for the future.
@ Fraser
True about your points. It’s also true that Trump didn’t change any minds about who he was – everybody knew who he was – a bragging alpha male. But the real purpose of the debate was to show the undecideds who Joe Biden was, away from the safe protection of the controlled MSM. And their first look at him wasn’t great.
Trump could have further hammered into Biden with some discipline, but that’s not really who he is.
Let’s hope the next debate further exposes Biden.
@bobby b
I give it a week before they start lighting themselves on fire in intersections like the Vietnamese bonzes.
Unfortunately, I think the selfish little shits are more likely to light you or me on fire than themselves.
Not that I’d advocate immolation of anyone, but if I remember right they did try to seal up a police station with a bunch of cops inside and try to light it on fire.
Of course, if Trump had died, think of the massive sympathy vote!!
“if a fat old guy like Trump can beat the virus in a matter of days, then it probably really isn’t a big deal.”
It is a big deal. Some million people have died already and another million or two will die before it ends.
Trump was lucky. As usual.
But the deadliness of the pandemic is no justification for the massive abuse of human rights. Human rights need to be respected not only when the weather is nice.
The spectacle of the whole West copying the brutal and abusive and totalitarian measures of Communist China is appalling.
I don’t know. Backlash against Trump or the media? By harping and carping about this image, isn’t the media highlighting Trump’s quick recovery? Doesn’t this undermine the media histrionics about the seriousness of covid for 95+% of the population?
Was anyone here shocked by the quick recovery? I expected him to be seriously ill for about a week; so, I was surprised, but not shocked. If Trump had contracted Covid when Boris Johnson did, I’d have been worried. Hard to believe that was in April. Has the press been in a coma for the last six months; I don’t think so. I think they just suppressed the stories on the successful therapies that were emerging.
Trump is past being infectious, and since he already has had the infection cannot be infected… so him wearing a mask serves no purpose irrespective of whether masks are effective (they are not).
I really don’t think anyone in the West would have been able to dream-up a total lockdown. It was clearly inspired and copied from Wuhan, China.
The only ones who avoided a lockdown were the totalitarian Lukashenko in Belarus and the “socialist” Swedes, who declared they are going to respect the human rights mandated by their Constitution.
A ‘backlash’ is defined as a confected event by the Left on Twitter and amplified by the media.
Whenever I see the word I know someone moderately famous has done or said something fairly normal and mainstream and the Twitter Leftist Borg has gone into meltdown, with about 80% of the media following suit.
bobby b et al:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI_hQcrzDbE
This is known as being hoist by your own petard.
Cloth masks do not work – the virus goes through them.
The media do not wear them when they are off camera. They are hypocrites.
President Trump was no where near anyone. And he could hardly speak wearing a mask – so this was an effort at CENSORSHIP (silencing him).
In short – the media are LYING, as they LIE about everything.
@Jacob
It is a big deal. Some million people have died already and another million or two will die before it ends.
FWIW, I don’t think that is true. I think the number of Covid death cases has been very, very substantially exaggerated. It is very clear that doctors are under a lot of pressure to declare any death vaguely connected to covid as a Covid death, and that is just plain dishonest. There is clear video of public health officials (including here in the Democratic People’s Republic of Illinois) specifically saying in essence “if we can blame it on Covid we will”. Remember that about a third of a million Americans die every month so 200,000 in eight months is not a large number, especially when you consider that the large majority of these deaths were in people who were already pretty close to the end of their lives. Of course people who were not on their last legs died too, and all these deaths are terrible, but we need to maintain perspective.
It would be nice if next to the Covid death statistics we maintained a “lock down death” statistics, where we counted the number of people who died or will die, because of the lock down. I read that 50% of chemotherapy patients missed at least one dose, cancer screenings are down by 2/3, people are en-masse delaying going to the doctor because they are more afraid of this boogey man than the radiating pain in their chest, 25% of teenagers have ideated suicide.
But it is almost impossible to judge and get decent numbers because the whole thing is so politically charged that it is very hard to get clean honest data.
@Jacob
Trump was lucky. As usual.
What odds would you have put on him surviving a positive test result? Personally I don’t consider someone with a 95-99% chance of recovery – who then recovers – to be “lucky”, but YMMV I guess.
Fraser Orr, you overstate our monthly deaths by over three times, it’s about 2,850,000 a year per CDC.
The only meaningful stat, free from false virus attribution, will be the increase of deaths over the pre Coronavirus number during a given period.
A number that is known for some months already, but that we’re not hearing.
Jacob:
Think again. Or rather, watch Outbreak (1995). Scripted by Westerners (as far as i can tell by their names), directed by a German.
In that movie, POTUS directs the Air Force to bomb a small American town to smithereens to prevent an epidemic.
It puts lockdowns in perspective.
Fatalism again?
Trump is ‘lucky’ in that, in spite of at least 3 risk factors (body fat, age, and (biological) gender), he is asymptomatic.
But… if it was luck, what kind of luck was it? was it the luck of the draw, or was it because he happens not to have risk factors which we do not know about, yet?
True libertarians should not trust government to take care of them.
Therefore, they should feel personally responsible for taking care of themselves.
First of all, they should find out what they can do to survive — and to stay out of hospital.
Ranting against whatever measures government takes, right or wrong, should be a very low priority for true libertarians.
(Especially since, by the time their ranting is heard, the measures will be gone.)
“Ranting against whatever measures government takes”
It is not “against whatever measures”. It’s against lockdowns. It’s against ordering people to stay home.
This is a very big and substantial violation of human rights.
It should not be done EVEN IF it reduces fatalities somewhat.
Fraser Orr:
The Covid-19 is a grave illness that many people die of. One that didn’t exist before 2020.
There is no point in arguing that this is not so and numbers are not perfectly correct. It does not matter. The number of deaths is so big that this argument (about accuracy) is irrelevant. Even if you guess that only half the reported deaths were caused by Covid-19 – the number is still big.
I saw a statistic that the number of deaths from all causes per month was greater in 2020 than for the same months in 2019 – by about 10%.
However you count it it’s huge, and it’s a nasty illness.
“In that movie, POTUS directs the Air Force to bomb a small American”
It’s a movie, isn’t it?
Some movie creators are crazy… what else is new?
But maybe craziness is not so rare….
What is remarkable is that ALL leaders and governments, in ALL countries (except a few) imposed the same kind of lockdown. I cannot imagine that they didn’t copy this from one-another. I cannot imagine that it occurred to all of them, independently.
@staghounds
Fraser Orr, you overstate our monthly deaths by over three times, it’s about 2,850,000 a year per CDC.
Hardly 3x, a twelfth of that number is 237k, and I said 350k, so I may have been wrong, but certainly not by that much. FWIW, I think that number sounds dubious. The average lifespan in the US is about 80, so 1/80th of the population dies each year, which is 4.2 million, not 2.85m. But I guess there is no point in pursuing that point. Just that number seems very low to me.
The only meaningful stat, free from false virus attribution, will be the increase of deaths over the pre Coronavirus number during a given period.
Unfortunately not. All that will tell you is the increased death in the Covid period. It will not tell you the cause of the deaths. Specifically people who died due to the lockdown will be mixed in with that (plus people who died from the flu, since we really don’t know much about this year’s flu, since it is deliberately conflated with Covid.) Plus, and this is perhaps the most dangerous of all, the lockdown deaths are going to linger with us for decades. People who delayed testing for cancers, for example, will be dying prematurely for years because their diagnosis will be at a later stage. People who have become addicted to drugs and alcohol might take years before their addiction causes their death. Which is to say it will not tell us if the lockdown was a good idea from the pov of public health. (It has been an excellent idea from the pov of the garnering and centralization of political power.)
So, I’m afraid there are no easy answers, and their is no political will to give high quality answers either since this is a political football. I think it is possibly your grandchildren might know when enough time allows a more dispassionate view of things. (Though perhaps not, since that generation will have its own axe to grid.)
@Jacob
There is no point in arguing that this is not so and numbers are not perfectly correct. It does not matter. The number of deaths is so big that this argument (about accuracy) is irrelevant. Even if you guess that only half the reported deaths were caused by Covid-19 – the number is still big.
That is self evidently true, but it entirely misses the point. Every year about 40,000 people die in the US from road traffic accidents. We can stop that massacre tomorrow but setting the speed limit every where to 5mph and having the police confiscate the car of anyone who is caught violating it. Or force every car in the country to have a speed limiter fitted.
But we don’t, because all risks are a trade off. We chose to accept some risk because the risk of not doing so are worse. For the past decade the US has suffered an average of about 38k deaths from influenzas each year. Last year, 61,000. Yet we did not shut down the whole country for that. For sure Covid is more dangerous than the flu, but the numbers do matter. If the number is 20,000 then what we are doing is insane, if the number is 2,000,000 what we are doing is necessary.
The problem is that in the analysis of Covid only one side of the equation is considered. Locking down the economy may prevent hospitals from overloading (which if you remember was the original purpose) or even reduce transmission (though the evidence that lockdowns do this is not at all strong, in fact there is evidence that the opposite is true.) But if we allow that it does, you must measure it against the immense cost of that lockdown. Many, many people have died and will continue to die for decades because of this lockdown, for reasons I have pontificated above above. It is a case of, as the President said at the beginning, of the cure being worse than the disease.
BTW, here is an article that talks about how lockdowns may do more harm than good, and at best might be neutral solely from the POV of transmission.
“For sure Covid is more dangerous than the flu, but the numbers do matter. If the number is 20,000 then what we are doing is insane, if the number is 2,000,000 what we are doing is necessary.”
Two million is a number that is certainly on the table, but there are a whole range of options between there and here that are open to discussion. If the virus is permitted to spread until herd immunity is reached and it stops on its own, the number of deaths expected is the population of the USA times the maximum proportion needed for herd immunity times the proportion of infections that result in death. 330,000,000 * 80% * 1% = 2,640,000 dead. That’s the top end of your trade space. The likely worst case scenario. But it’s arguable that you don’t need a super-strict lockdown to reduce it to a much smaller number. How much smaller do you want?
And the same can be argued about anti-terrorism measures that impact on liberty. How many people have died from terrorism, on average, per year? How many died on 9/11, in comparison? Is that worth paying the price of the TSA gropers, and the NSA snoopers? Do we always use this same numbers-based weighing of liberty against precaution, or doe it depend?
Fraser: I also stated that the lockdown is wrong, for many reasons, chief among them – in my opinion – that it is a gross violation of human rights, a gross abuse of State power. This argument does not depend on the number of covid19 deaths. I think there is no use arguing about the accuracy or the size or the numbers of the pandemic. It IS bad. It is wrong to state that it is not so bad… Still – lockdowns aren’t justified. It would still be wrong even if the numbers were double.
Nully: “If the virus is permitted to spread…” – we (the Gov.) cannot “permit” or “forbid” the virus to this or that. We do not control it – until we have a cure. “How much smaller do you want?” – again the illusion that we have control over the virus… all the numbers you cite are pure guesses, they are meaningless.
The idea that lockdown=halting the virus is wrong. Lockdown may slow down the spread (not sure), which resumes later. So, nothing accomplished.
That Nullius is still defending the Covid restrictions is utterly despicable.
Obama never faced a backlash, the marxist journalist narrative was instead “republicans pounce” “republicans attack”