President and the Coronavirus

Reb Eliezer: Combine his age, morbid obesity and predisposition to contradict medical experts, don’t be surprised if we soon see one of his right wing evangelical galachs arriving at the White House to perform a viral exorcism while showering everyone with chlorox and zinc.

Poor taste

Mod: Probably so, but with all respect to the “Office” of the presidency, there are literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been put at risk by the actions of the incumbent. Per my comment on another thread, I wish that he, the First lady and all of his Staff infected have a refuah shelamah but I cannot have any expectation that his actions will now suddenly shift towards setting an example for millions of his followers who have disregarded the guidance of public health and medical experts, whether it be masks, social distancing or therapeutics. Rather, I fear he will cite his quick recovery and mild symptoms as affirmation of his reckless behavior.

Syag: I grant you mechilah and I share your warm feelings for other posters who candidly express contrarian views. However, I have no apologies for the contempt I hold for the way the President and this administration have put the country at risk by their reckless approach to the virus. If that “delusional”, so be it.

GH -“there are literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been put at risk by the actions of the incumbent.”

What do you care? You and all Libs don’t do anything he does.
So if everyone from the right wing follows him – the country will be just Leftists!

GH, you’ve displayed an steadfast, unrelenting hatred for the President for the past four years, starting with the disrespectful name that you use.
You seem to have no concept of our Federal system of government when you ascribe responsibility to the President for all or most of the 200,000+ deaths. The states and localities have a major role. Trump provided a Navy hospital ship and had the Corps of Engineers construct a hospital in the Javits Center. However, they sat empty as Governor Cuomo chose instead to force nursing homes to take in Covid patients. It took over 10,000 deaths and 6 weeks for Cuomo to rescind his order.
You seem to have perfect 20/20 hindsight and selected forgetfulness. The Democrats and you claim that Trump did nothing until March. However, in January Trump instituted his travel ban and in February established his commission to run the process and began to ramp up production of masks, ventilators and testing. What were the Democrats doing? Calling Trump xenophobic ( Biden ) , inviting people to visit Chinatown ( Pelosi ) and restaurants ( DiBlasio ) and doing nothing until mid March ( Cuomo ).
Did Trump make mistakes? Of course, everyone did. Did the press take comments out of context ( i.e. claim he wanted to inject Clorox) ? Also of course. Did the CDC and Dr Fauci flip flop on masks? Yes.
GH, what is the major difference between people like myself and Syag and yourself ? It’s the ability to recognize the shades of grey in the actions of our political and medical leaders. We are able to acknowledge his faults as well as his accomplishments. You, and others like you, seem incapable of putting your hatred of Trump aside and consider his positives or Biden’s and the Democrat’s negatives. Could Trump have expressed himself in the past more clearly? Yes, but he is clearly not a racist if you judge him by his actions

Reb Eliezer

Please open your own blog and stop opening new anti Trump threads. We know you don’t like him.

Thank you,

Klal Yisroel

I am not sure why i feel the urge to slam my head into a brick wall but here goes…

Jackk- you are welcome to your propaganda party lines as is anyone else, but do you realize how infantile you sound when you blame Caine’s death on trump because he held the rally that Caine attended? You sound exactly like a 10 year old when he blames rebbe for him punching a kid who made fun of him for his low test score.

Unless trump handcuffed caine and brought him to the rally before anyone knew covid was contagious, It wasn’t his doing!!!!! Unless of course you believe caine was cognitively impaired and couldn’t make his own decisions. Oh, wait, maybe he’s blind and thought he was being forcefully driven to an empty room but it ended up being a rally during a pandemic that he hadn’t heard about.

Calling it grasping at straws is too generous. It’s nuts. But carry on, i know you’re doing auto pilot.

<<removes helmet>>

Oh jackk, you are really just too much. I didn’t write a post about trump having no respect, i wrote a post about how honesty and integrity seem to suffer from deep twists and turns when anti trumpers speak.

And me not respecting you? Cute.

“If masks are what saves lives is [Fauci] not then directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths?”

If he knowingly downplayed masks to win an election or to improve his public image or some other selfish reason, the answer is clearly yes.

If he downplayed masks because presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission was not understood (as I think he has explained), then no. Remember we were and still are learning about the virus.

If he knowingly downplayed masks because there was a shortage of PPE and he wanted to minimize PPE hoarding so doctors and nurses could get it, then it gets morally ambiguous. I don’t think it would be accurate to say he’s responsible for tens of thousands of death, because the justification is that by allowing PPE to flow to hospitals he saved more lives; on the other hand, it is in a sense playing god. Whether you would agree it was the correct moral decision, I don’t think you can say unequivocally that he was directly responsible for those deaths.

Aside for the hypotheticals about what he knew and why health officials did not recommend wearing masks at the time, how many people asking this question would have worn masks at the time? How many wear them now?

Let’s turn the question around. If we take it as fact that masks do save lives, and if someone does not wear a mask and infects someone and causes their death, is that person not responsible for the death? Of course, no one can prove in any given situation which person caused the infection or if a mask would have helped, so we’re not going to convene a beis din and make a capital case out of this. However, that person should at least wake up to the sofeik that they may infect and kill someone.

Secondly, from a community wide perspective, health officials say it is a vadai that people will get sick if the community does not adhere to masks and social distancing. If you’re not convinced, look around. So while we can’t say with certainty that one particular person is responsible for someone else’s death, we can say the community is responsible for the deaths in the community. And if you’re not convinced it’s a vadai, then it’s at worst a sofeik and people should act at least as stringently as they would act if there was a sofeik chillul shabbos deoraysa. If you want to argue it’s not even a sofeik, I’m all ears. My phone is lighting up with tehillim names; we all know people who are critically ill, and some of us know people who have died in the last few weeks.

I’d like to hear the argument that it is a mere coincidence that neighborhoods next to frum neighborhoods that were better about masks and social distancing are not seeing the same spikes. If anything, based on the logic prevailing in mid-June that the frum world has antibodies and herd immunity, those neighborhoods should see more cases, not fewer.

AnonymousJEw
Plus one on your comment.

I would add that comparing Donald Trump to a “Class bully” is laughable.

A class bully is one who does not simply talk against people, rather he directly hurts others.

The President has done the opposite. While he may be a tad willful in tweeting he has actually benefited people.

He is the first President to decades to make real progress towards peace in the Middle East, saving thousands of lives.

He is the first President in decades to actually work towards implementing trade policies that allow hundreds of thousands of Americans to actually support their families.

He actually implemented Criminal Justice reform to allow thousands of people a second chance at life.

And he actually tried to save lives by this pandemic by actually banning travel from China & Europe (overruling Doctors who later acknowledged he was correct) He actually ramped up production so that even Coumo & Newsom acknowledged his teams work.

While Newsom has overseen policies that have devastated California & Coumo implemented policies that actually killed thousands of human beings.

Ben Levi: Have you ever been to the WH press room downstairs where this incident occurred?? Its part of the standard tour in case you ever get to D.C. It is literally an oversized closet with terrible ventilation. Even with the new social distancing rules and empty seats imposed by the WHCA, reporters are literally on top of one another. The WH almost always has “guests” standing around the periphery of the room (aka OAN “reporter” etc> Plus, the WH press secretary, 3 of her staff and several other Trumpkins have tested positive which shows how carefully they have been taking the mask and distancing guidelines.. The reporters take the rapid tests with high false negative rates (up to 30 percent). I you were a reporter, even before the Trumpkopf got himself sick, you would be crazy not to wear a mask in that venue, even if the Trumpkopf wanted to display his macho by telling you to take it off. Anyone who thinks he takes masks seriously is halucinating.

I actually watched the entire clip of that exchange.

There was no one within 6 feet.

Trump simply asked for the common courtesy of the reporter taking off the mask while asking the question.

If reporters can take off the mask several minutes after the Press Conference is over, provided they think the video camera is not rolling ( there are several clip circulating showing just that) it seems reasonable they can do it while asking a question of the President with no one around them.