Donald Trump who described himself as a “wartime president” wants Americans to adapt to the COVID-19 virus in his rush to open the economy before the November election. As he put it, “Americans are warriors in the fight to re-open the economy.” He pushes Americans into the workplace despite the risks to their health. As he said, “Will some people be affected? Yes,” and followed with, “Will some people be affected badly (Die)? Yes. But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon (before the election).”
Rush Limbaugh mentioned the Donner Party as an example of how we should adapt to the virus. The Donner Party was trying to get to California over the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. They made the mistake of trying to make the trip in the middle of winter. They got to the peak and it got so bad that they had to turn to cannibalism to survive. According to Rush, the diaries of the leaders of the party had only one sentence about how cold it was, “It was a particularly tough winter.” It is just what it was. He said they didn’t complain about it because there was nothing they could do. They adapted by eating each other. Oh, just 45 of the 81 pioneers survived. They didn’t do such a good job of adapting.
Of course there is something we all can do and that is to wear a mask, social distance and wash hands regularly. That is adaptation. We don’t have to resort to cannibalism as suggested by Rush. The Trumps response is, let them eat beans. On July 9, 2020, Goya CEO Robert Unanue appeared at the White House and praised the president. This resulted in Trump’s critics calling to boycott the Goya brand. Trump and then his daughter Ivanka posed for a photos to promote the beans.
These idiotic and petty photos earned criticism from government ethics experts, who said that the product plugging violated anti-corruption rules. “As a pictorial representation of the Trump administration’s war on government ethics, both photos are perfectly clear,” wrote Walter Shaub, the former director of the U.S. Office of Governmental Ethics. “They scream ‘the rules don’t apply to us,’ a central message of the Trump administration from the start.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “If it’s Trump, it has to be corrupt.”
What is so sickening about “Beangate” is that this is the presidents priority as the COVID-19 virus has taken more than 137,000 American lives and is surging to higher case numbers every day. Trump has been undermining the work of his own infectious disease experts instead of doing everything in his power to combat the virus. Though largely sidelined by the president, Dr. Fauci said, “The problem is, since we started our baseline so high, as we tried to open up, what we saw was it went from 20,000 cases a day to 30, 40 50 and now we are hanging around 60,000. That’s untenable we have to turn that around.”
New data from the John’s Hopkins School of Public Health showed more than 75,000 new cases on July 18, 2020. That is the highest number of cases in a single day anywhere on earth. By current mortality estimates about 2,700 of those people will die. Nationwide cases are rising in 38 of 50 states. Miami-Dade Couunty in Florida is now out of ICU beds. Dr. Aline Marty said, “On a scale of 1 to 10, we are at maximum urgency, we need to turn this thing around right now.” Florida Governor Ron DuhSantis has still not issued a state wide mandate to wear masks. On July 16, 2020 Trump refused to wear a mask on his trip to Atlanta Georgia. He has more interest in pimping beans. Body bags and 14 refrigerator trucks are being sent to Texas to handle all the bodies.