@Zaknel
In the end it’s not even something all that important. It’s like what former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell said about gambling, the people who gamble and lose all their money would gamble and lose their money anyway, whether gambling was legal or not, so it’s best to legalize gambling in Pennsylvania than to have them go to some different state and have Pennsylvania lose the revenue. People have snorted condoms, ate tide pods, and injected bleach before Trump, and they’ll continue to do so long after the dust from our bones is gone. You can’t protect people from their stupidity. If people want to eat tide pods and huff paint and drive motorcycles without helmets I say let them. As long as taxpayers don’t have to pay the medical bills of people who are injured or killed from self-inflicted stupidity and as long as they don’t hurt anyone else I don’t care what people do to their own bodies.
As for a “colossal black mark”, I bet the number of people who tried to snort lysol or inject bleach because they saw 30 seconds of a Trump speech is less than 100 people. It’s already legal for people to inhale poison tobacco and drink poison alcohol, and they die in the hundreds of thousands and there’s no great big call to reinstate prohibition. If anyone other than Trump said anything like that it wouldn’t even be a story.
The number of people who died doing stupid shit misinterpreting Trump’s speech is lower than the number of poor black men Kamala Harris purposefully extended the prison sentences of to exploit their free for-profit prison labor. I don’t know, there are a lot of people here who don’t seem to like black people, and that means nothing to me, I’m not judging one way or the other (I even had friends who hated black people, and that’s something they have their reasons for, they have to live with that, not me), but I grew up with a lot of black friends and had a lot of black coworkers I hung out with and I really like the machismo of the black and Hispanic communities and the strong Christian faith, so I’d like to see them as allies instead of as enemies and I think fixing the prison system is very important. I think prison reform, school choice, the child tax credit, and ending foreign wars far overshadows the ten or twenty people tops who misinterpreted a 30 second clip and died pulling a Jackass stunt.
As I said in the book, there’s literally nothing any president could have done better to fix the covid problem in America, because there’s no one-size-all solution for every country. What worked in South Korea wouldn’t have worked in Sweden, and what worked in Sweden wouldn’t have worked in the US. We’ve known about the inadequacy of the disaster response and healthcare infrastructure in the US since 2000 during the Clinton admin when they ran TOPOFF 1, and three presidents before Trump did buttfuck nothing to fix it, and I’ll bet the problems won’t get fixed after Trump is gone either.
The only real scandals of covid are the four governors (NJ, NY, Michigan, and another one I can’t recall off the top of my head) all put covid patients in nursing homes which killed tens of thousands of elderly people who were immune compromised. THAT’s the real scandal. 30,000 dead in New York when Trump sent hospital ships and converted the Javits Center into a field hospital and none of the beds were used because Cuomo put sick people in nursing homes. He says his executive order was misinterpreted, and I give him the benefit of the doubt in the book, but 30,000 people dying on his watch from a mistake that big far outshadows anything Trump has done.