Breaking Promises

A BIT MORE than one month ago, president Trump declared a national emergency, belatedly, and made many promises, rather impressive promises, after the fashion of a hyper emotional demonstrative fear mongering demagogue. He promised a massive, coordinated effort between the government and the private sector to manufacture and distribute urgently needed medical supplies, including Covid 19 testing on a massive scale, including drive thru one stop testing, as well as an assortment of equipment such as face masks, ventilators, protective gowns, and other necessities. one month later,, all these things are still in short supply, for the most part, nowhere to be found. States, communities, and hospitals are involved in a desperate competition for all of them, driving up prices, slowing down distribution. There are as of now no more than half a dozen drive thru testing sites in the U.s.; Walgreens and CVS have made token efforts, but Target and Wal Mart have not been heard from. Virus testing in America is among the lowest rate in the world, and the United States has by far the most deaths from the pandemic, and the most sicknesses, fully one half of the world's supply of both. Trump promises a new website which would provide an enormous amount of relevant information for the American people to use in determining their personal strategy for dealing with the virus; no such website exists, one month after the promise. Now, the president has announced thaqt the U.S. will stop funding the World Health Organization, at the worst possible time; in the middle of a global medical catastrophe. The WHO was founded after World War Two precisely to deal with situations like the current one; Trump, wanting to deflect attention from his administration's chaotic and ineffective policies in dealing with the pandemic, is trying to put the blame on the WHO. This is possibly Trump's most idiotic, petty, criminal act yet, in a long line of them; to defund the world's leading health organization at precisely the time when it is needed most, simply for his own political again, to avoid responsibility for his disastrous handling of the epidemic, which has cost tens of thousands of America lives, with many more thousands to come. Soon enough, we will look back on the Trump administration's litany of criminal behavior, and this will surely head the list.