My cousin Mike and I have this ongoing argument that goes like this: My cousin is convinced that Trump might be the best politician to ever grace the White House. His argument is predicated on the belief that Trump has elevated politicking. He doesn’t believe that Trump is racist, but he admires how Trump uses racism to work his base. He thinks that the whole thing is a savvy display of fuckshit which Trump has mastered. He doesn’t care for Trump or his policies, just simply admires the way that Trump has manipulated the system and those around him to do his. bidding, and to him, that’s the highest level of politics.
My position is that my cousin’s argument implies that Trump is some kind of manipulative genius, but I think Trump is an idiot—something like a broken clock that just so happens to take credit for landing on a correct time twice a day. It isn’t even that he’s an idiot so much as he’s nothing close to the political mastermind that my cousin believes him to be; mostly because he struggles to do the easy shit. How hard was it not to create beef with a pandemic? How hard was it to wear a mask and make masks a thing amongst your followers? Or buy up all the possible COVID-19 vaccines available to the United States—because why the fuck not?
Oh, you didn’t know? Let me tell you.
According to the New York Times, Trump and his bumbling collective of fuckups had an opportunity to commit to buying millions of additional doses of the coronavirus vaccine and passed on it. That decision could delay the delivery of a second batch of vaccines because Pfizer sold the order it had reserved for the United States to foreign countries. So now, the U.S. has to get in the back of the line.
If you’re confused as to what kind of person wouldn’t buy up all the vaccines available, let me explain. Earlier this year, Pfizer agreed to make 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, which would inoculate 50 million Americans. They then gave the federal government a chance to purchase up to five times that amount and the federal government said, “Nah, I’m good.” Pfizer then called this summer and asked, “You sure you don’t want to get these 100 million doses of the vaccine off me?” and the federal government was like, “What part of ‘Nah, I’m good’ are you not understanding?”
So Pfizer said “Bet,” and sold those to foreign countries who were like “Fuck yeah, give me all the vaccines!” Now, Pfizer’s got to fill large orders from other countries, including some 200 million doses from the European Union, before even thinking about making something for the U.S.
The Trump administration isn’t worried as they have the initial order for 100 million with Pfizer and are shopping around for vaccine candidates.
“We are confident that we will have 100 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine as agreed to in our contract, and beyond that, we have five other vaccine candidates, including 100 million doses on the way from Moderna,” a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said in a statement to the Times.
The failed businessman turned failed president has struck again.
What is this, the 1950s?
Just when you think America has made some advancements—especially when it comes to workplace discrimination because that just requires everyone not to be an asshole to everyone they work with—the Trump administration said, “fuck that.”
From Slate:
On Monday, the Trump administration finalized a sweeping new regulation that allows federal contractors to discriminate against racial and religious minorities, women, and especially LGBTQ people in the name of protecting “religious liberty.” It effectively abolishes critical workplace protections for these contractors that have been in place for decades, reframing religious freedom as a near-limitless license to discriminate. Monday’s move will force the Biden administration to waste countless hours and resources reversing this radical rewrite of federal law.
The rules restricting discrimination by federal contractors springs from Executive Order 11246, which President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965. Johnson’s order barred discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Presidents later added sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity to the list of protected traits. Today, there are about 4 million employees of federal contractors who benefit from these protections. The Department of Labor enforces presidential prohibitions against discrimination in these workplaces.
But the current Labor Secretary, Eugene Scalia, the son of late Justice Antonin Scalia, just crushed all of the Labor Department’s federal regulations that protected workers’ rights, health and safety...in a pandemic!
Slate notes that Scalia has always been an asshole and his legacy will be stained with the blood of people who died from COVID-19 because he refused to enforce basic workplace safety rules in the middle of a pandemic. Did I mention that we are in a pandemic?
The Biden administration is surely going to repeal this bullshit once in office, but that could take months, even years as the process to roll a regulation back is clunky by design.
Never forget everything that the Trump administration has done to ruin American life so that we can tell our grandchildren just how fucked up things used to be.