Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Trump’s Psychotic Puerto Rico Tweets Erase Human Beings From Existence for Political Gain

Well articulated and spot on. Molly


 He's unfit for office, and everyone knows it.


The President of the United States is not fit to hold the office. Every day the Republican majorities in Congress and his infotainment apparatchiks at Fox News prop him up is another day of disgrace for the nation. The president does not care what happens to most anyone, a function of what is one of the clearest cases of malignant narcissism—bordering on what's been called "radical solipsism"—ever seen in a public official. But he particularly does not care what happens to black and brown people, whom he thinks are, at best, hangers-on to the American experience and should just be happy they're allowed to stay.
Never has this been more readily, gobsmackingly apparent than in his handling of Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico, which is an American territory where Americans live. In the initial aftermath, Trump dragged his feet on going to the island. He explained the response was difficult because the island was surrounded by "big water." When he arrived, having spent previous days fighting with the mayor of San Juan on the Internet, he announced that Maria was not "a real catastrophe" and told people to "have a good time." He "joked" that the island—at least 90 percent of which was without power at the time, and where food and clean water were in short supply—was ruining his administration's budget. Then he started jump shooting paper towels into a crowd of hurricane survivors.

Recently, it was confirmed that nearly 3,000 human beings—or, if it matters more to you, American human beings—died as a result of the storm and, it increasingly appears, the government's poor response to it. Here is how Donald Trump, American president, handled the news that significantly more people died in Maria than in Hurricane Katrina:
Imagine you lost a family member in a natural disaster and the President of the United States not only displayed his typically blunt indifference, but also suggested their death was faked as part of a hoax by his political opponents. Imagine he lied while doing it, making up conspiracies about how the deaths were counted. (The figures have been certified by both the Puerto Rican government and independent researchers.) Imagine he tried to erase you and your family for his own political gain.

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