Doctors and public health experts have been warning for months "Winter is coming," and when Winter finally showed up, 40% of the country went, "It's our right as Americans to become ice zombies, and you can't tell us otherwise!" https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/trump-covid-pandemic-dark-winter/

"I think [Trump] put [coronavirus response] on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it." - Trump advisor

That orange man wants to be president, but he doesn't want to BE president. He likes the office and the perks (like getting to order people to murder other people and media attention), but he doesn't want to do the job.

I can't believe 74 million people voted for him AGAIN.

Trump is that guy in the group project who never shows up for anything, doesn't do any work, then tries to commandeer the final presentation and take all the credit, ultimately fucking it up and bringing your whole team down a full letter grade.

"[T]he help Kushner provided was often ad hoc rather than part of a long-term strategy... 'It was entirely tactical troubleshooting and to be fair it was pretty successful, with the ventilators and this and that, but it was whack-a-mole.'"

This is a weird definition of success.

I'm a career project manager. If I'm running a project and the only way shit ever gets done is if someone has to make a phone call to me and I have to step out of the standard procedure to expedite the request personally, that project is a massive failure.

Sometimes I wish I were born a billionaire so that I could be handed high-profile positions with no relevant experience, completely fuck it up, but occasionally get a couple of things right and still have folks pat me on the back.

"[P]roblems quickly emerged with Kushner’s team of volunteers. The group was not issued government laptops or emails, forcing them to use their personal Gmail addresses — a practice that often hindered their efforts..."

Instead of mobilizing a federal response, the Trump administration treated federal resources as their own personal stockpile, to be doled out to sycophants and supporters at their whims. It was a way to extort fealty and adulation, not HELP anybody.

None of this is new. It's still infuriating to read, especially given that it's pretty clear with the vaccine roll out it's probably still happening.

Ditto the ongoing attempts from Trump admin officials--and Republican state leaders generally--to downplay the virus and cover-up the full extent of their ineptitude and malfeasance. I truly hope we don't forgive and forget in 2021.

Folks need to go to jail for this shit.

"The knock against Jared has always been that he’s a dilettante who will dabble in this and dabble in that without doing the homework...but will be there to claim credit if things go well and disappear if things go poorly."

"[A]s someone who was in the room, it was very clear it wasn’t taken seriously. It was well understood what measures could be taken to save lives, to reduce the severity of the pandemic, and the administration and Jared Kushner made an active choice not to pursue those actions."

So masks for all early on in the pandemic was scrapped because they "looked like underwear," and--oh yeah--Trump was trying to destroy the USPS so he could win the election, and he has never gotten over the fact that Jeff Bezos is richer than he is.

And then Trump replaced Pence at the briefings, not because he knew or gave a shit about what was going on, but because he was jealous of the attention Pence was getting. My god.

"By late spring — after he infamously suggested people ingest bleach to cure themselves of the virus — Trump stopped appearing at coronavirus briefings... 'He felt it was a loser message...So why message on covid?'"

"[Birx] would circulate her daily report, and more often than not, there would be no responses from anyone on the email... I remember there were times where she would flag something massive, like, we are within weeks of a massive remdesivir shortage, and no one would reply."

"After [Birx] advised Florida’s political leaders in August to close bars and restrict indoor dining, Atlas visited the state and contradicted her. Atlas told Gov. Ron DeSantis and other local leaders to...direct their efforts to opening the economy back up and opening schools."

"'[Pence] knows, like everybody else knows, that covid is the last thing Trump wants to hear about or see anybody making news about. If not touting Operation Warp Speed, it’s the topic that shall not be spoken of.'"

This is a horror movie.

"Pence and second lady Karen Pence also hosted holiday parties at the Naval Observatory... Members of military bands, servers and others were forced to work and exposed for hours to guests who were not wearing masks, officials said."

"At least one worker who got infected never heard from anyone in the White House about the illness. They were replaced for the next party."

The callousness of this administration is absolutely bottomless.

It's not like it's a surprise that Trump is a vain, petty, incompetent, unserious man, more concerned with how he looks than with actually doing a good job. Still, reading all of his pandemic transgressions back to back is grim.

We let this man in the White House.

323,000 people are dead and who knows how many thousands or millions more are living with the long-term side effects of a virus Trump decided to pretend wasn't happening because it was a "loser message" and simply too hard for him to tackle.