MA received 17% of requested medical supplies from the Trump admin. ME: 5%. CO: 1 day's worth.
FL got everything they requested. + an identical shipment the next week. oh, and a 3rd is on the way.https://t.co/4AmYkn70Jm pic.twitter.com/ZUCGF2NsfX
— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) March 29, 2020
To be fair, this may make some sense, although I don’t know the details. I can’t say for sure that I would not have made the same decision, given the authority. Florida is likely to be the state that will take the hardest beating in the long run, given the age of the population.
But you have to be suspicious every time Trump does something.
I will go with the leopard and the spots analogy.
All things being equal, any influence he has had over any of direction of supplies, given his proven way of thinking, would be only to his political and financial advantage.
Every neuron in h I s brain us wired to self agrandiasm and the pursuit of the dollar.
His business is hemorrhaging money… Response – Let’s get people moving again, don’t concern yourself with the current flu, more people die in car accidents!
Governors are saying very bad things about him… Response – don’t send them the supplies they request and ignore their phone calls until the glorify him and make shrines to his divine “gut”, because as he said recently he knew this was going to be a pandemic, even before he knew what the word meant.
Stay safe and stay the fuck at home
Is this distribution something Trump is doing himself? I hope not. It would take a very intelligent person with specialized knowledge of such things to make such decisions as well as they can be made, under the pressures of the moment.
That is the exact opposite of how Trump would do it. He would go with his “gut”. Your earlier post about his instructions to Pence, which was to ignore phone calls from state governors Trump feels have disparaged him, shows how he would make the choices: Bootlickers and true believers will get to the head of the line.
Of course, that is just the kind of thing Trump would want, wouldn’t he? It would increase both his personal political power and his public praise from the faithful. Any concern about the deaths that would result from such self-centered distribution would roll off him like water off a duck’s back.
I should not post so late at night. Everything seems worse then. It is more likely he does not want to do so much work and has fobbed the whole job off on Pence. Pence may at least attempt to do it rationally.
I’m sure he could not have the time to decide that case-by-case, but it does seem that he has influenced some cases, or tried to, like his directions to Pence about Washington State and Michigan.
In this particular case, the question would be, “Do we know whether he told Pence to take special care of Florida?” No. We do not and it is not fair to make assumptions either way. As of what we know at this moment, he may have intervened for the right reasons; he may have intervened for corrupt reasons; or he may not have intervened at all.