This is our president, and it’s sickening.
This is the complete letter Trump sent to Senator Schumer on April 2nd. It is beyond embarrassing.
Senator Charles E. Schumer
United States Senator
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Senator Schumer:
Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way.
- As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job.
- The Defense Production Act (DPA) has been consistently used by my team and me for the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, medical supplies, ventilators, and other related items. It has been powerful leverage, so powerful that companies generally do whatever we are asking, without even a formal notice. They know something is coming, and that’s all they need to know.
- A “senior military officer” is in charge of purchasing, distributing, etc. His name is Rear Admiral John Polowczyk. He is working 24 hours a day, and is highly respected by everyone. If you remember, my team gave you this information, but for public relations purposes, you choose to ignore it.
- We have given New York many things, including hospitals, medical centers, medical supplies, record numbers of ventilators, and more. You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus. As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most others.
If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the “invisible enemy.” No wonder AOC and others are thinking about running against you in the primary. If they did, they would likely win.
Fortunately, we have been working with your state and city governments, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, to get the job done. You have been missing in action, except when it comes to the “press.” While you have stated that you don’t like Andrew Cuomo, you ought to start working alongside him for the good of all New Yorkers.
I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became President.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call. Or, in the alternative, call Rear Admiral Polowczyk.
Sincerely yours,
Donald J. Trump
The Dumpster® cannot be embarrassed.
You cannot shame an inarticulate narcissistic sociopath.
I was thinking it was embarrassing for us, we the people to have a person such as Trump as our president. Certainly Trump and his family have no psychological capacity for the experience of embarrassment.
Yes, this is worse than his usual. I suspect he may have begun to hear that his poll bump from the virus is over and people are getting bored with his daily TV show. So time to show some teeth and get nasty.
“You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus.”
WTF – on the one hand he is saying he was worked with my mayor and my governor but then he writes this crap. Look – every part of our government could have acted sooner but every part of state and local governments especially New York sooner than Trump did. This clown is so wrong on the facts as usual and my city is having one hell of a medical crisis while the Clown in Chief fiddles like Nero when Rome was burning.
Daniel:
One thing we do know, he did not write the letter. It is too coherent and would require an 8th grade education.
Yes everyone should have acted faster, says the guy who acted damn near dead last.
Faster if we had advance warning, like from the CDC position you just eliminated in China to monitor for emerging viruses? Was pulling that person out at just the right time to miss SARS-CoV-2 just luck? Good or bad depending on your perspective, of course.
@ Run75441,
Correct you are.
Ivanka probably wrote it.
My IPad is freezing when I come to Angry Bear.
Any thought what I can do (I have dumped Safari and rebooted the device and done both, and I have waited minutes before touching the screen too). Ideas welcome.
Anything Angry Bear can do on your side?
Thanks.
Jim
JF:
I know Dan Crawford (owner) is trying to make the site IPhone and Android friendly. We are not there yet. I will mention it to him also. A lot of people use their cell phones for blogging too.
Bill
JF,
MEV is our technical company and has begun to re-build part of our site to make is responsive to various screen sizes, add editing capabilities to the comments section, and to re-configuer our right side bars for links to other websites etc. I have also passed along your concern,
Dan
Wait until the Trump/3M scandal comes out. Insider dealings, self-profitting.
Basically the US had 280 million made masks in storage and they “mysteriously” all left the country. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Now Trump is trying to steal European orders to replace the masks he sold at a personal profit. Another impeachable offense.
Bert, do you have any links to the articles on the 3M/Trump thing? I did hear an NPR report today that Canada is threatening the US not to try to stop it’s purchased from coming to them.
pick one: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=c9GHXvnIHJjXtAbVgZHwAQ&q=Trump+sold+3M+masks+to+China&oq=Trump+sold+3M+masks+to+China&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQDDoFCAAQgwE6AggAOgQIABAKSi0IFxIpMGcxMDBnOTFnODdnOTBnOTFnMTEzZzg3ZzIyN2cxMDVnOTNnOTBnOTNKHQgYEhkwZzFnMWcxZzFnMWcxZzFnMWcxZzVnNWc5UIMKWOpYYNxraABwAHgAgAHVAYgBrxSSAQYyMy40LjGYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwi5zuDdvs3oAhWYK80KHdVABB4Q4dUDCAw
Sometimes I think I spend too much energy raging against the F***ing Moron in Chief, but he absolutely continues to F*** up by the numbers and it is my fellow citizens who are dying, my medical system which is being destroyed and my country—I go back to the 1840’s one hell of a longer than Trump—which not only is an embarrassment to the rest of the world but will have forfeited all leadership roles except military by the end of this year. That doesn’t even touch the personal and I have a lot of that too. Apologize for the 9th grade language and syntax.
“Donald Trump’s Acting Navy Secretary shot the messenger – a commanding officer who was faithful to both his national security mission and his duty to care for his sailors, and who rightly focused attention on a broader concern about how to maintain military readiness during this pandemic,” said Mr Biden.
“The Navy sent a chilling message to the rest of the fleet about speaking truth to power. The poor judgment here belongs to the Trump Administration, not a courageous officer trying to protect his sailors.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-navy-captain-brett-crozier-trump-joe-biden-a9446126.html
Deja vu all over again.
” This Country Should Be Proud of Brett Crozier
To measure properly what Captain Brett Crozier, no longer the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, gave up this past week, it’s important to remember that the command of a nuclear aircraft carrier in the modern Navy is the express train to flag rank.
Commanding one of these beasts is essentially to be in charge of a floating city. The TR was built in 2007 at a cost of over $4 billion, and that’s in the dollars of the time. It is almost 1,100 feet long and carries a company of 3,200 souls. It also carries 90 aircraft of various types and is a veritable and massive jukebox of sensors, countermeasures, and processing systems of various types. Mistakes can be both deadly and costly; fourteen years ago, the TR collided with a guided-missile cruiser and its stern was damaged to the tune of $7 million. It is a complicated craft and only the most gifted, brilliant commanders get to run one of them. Brett Crozier was one of those people.
Crozier is a graduate of the Naval Academy and the Naval War College. The TR was his third command. On March 31, while the TR was docked in Guam, a letter that Crozier had written to the Navy Department found its way into the San Francisco Chronicle. There had been an outbreak of the coronavirus on board. More than 100 sailors were sick already and, despite the size of the ship, quarters below were still close enough that many more were likely to develop. Crozier begged the Navy to let him off-load and quarantine the ship’s crew. Crozier did not dispatch his concerns in code. He sent it, as the cryptologists put it, “in the clear.” He was desperate, and it showed.
‘This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do. We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors…Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure…This is a necessary risk. Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.’
Almost immediately, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly acted like any acting secretary of anything in this administration* can be expected to act. He initially refused Crozier’s request and then, when the public heat came down, he allowed the afflicted member of the crew to be brought ashore. Then, on Thursday, he relieved Crozier of his command.
Crozier had to know this was coming. Whether or not he personally leaked his letter—and the jury may be out on that one forever—his fate as commander of the TR was sealed as soon as the newspaper hit the streets. This is an administration that has made such an art form out of one-way loyalty that it would’ve made Jim Jones nervous. In his statement relieving Crozier, Modly defended his department’s handling of the case, and then got to the meat of why Crozier had to go. He had violated the chain of command, which, until next January at the earliest, is a big old ch-ch-chain of fools.
‘As I learned more about the events of the past week on board USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (CVN-71), including my personal conversations with the Strike Group Commander, Commander, SEVENTH Fleet, Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Chief of Naval Operations, and CAPT Crozier himself, I could reach no other conclusion than that Captain Crozier had allowed the complexity of his challenge with COVID breakout on the ship to overwhelm his ability to act professionally, when acting professionally was what was needed most. We do, and we should, expect more from the Commanding Officers of our aircraft carriers.
I did not come to this decision lightly. I have no doubt in my mind that Captain Crozier did what he thought was in the best interests of the safety and well-being of his crew. Unfortunately, it did the opposite. It unnecessarily raised alarms with the families of our Sailors and Marines with no plan to address those concerns. It raised concerns about the operational capabilities and operational security of the ship that could have emboldened our adversaries to seek advantage, and it undermined the chain of command who had been moving and adjusting as rapidly as possible to get him the help he needed.
For these reasons, I lost confidence in his ability to lead that warship as it continues to fight through this virus, get the crew healthy, so that it can continue to meet its national security requirements. In my judgement relieving him of command was in the best interests of the United States Navy and the nation in this time when the nation needs the Navy to be strong and confident in the face of adversity. The responsibility for this decision rests with me. I expect no congratulations for it, and it gives me no pleasure in making it. CAPT Crozier is an honorable man, who despite this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment, has dedicated himself throughout a lifetime of incredible service to our nation.’
The available evidence from the TR itself doesn’t support Modly’s conclusions. Almost immediately, videos of Crozier’s departure from the ship blew through the Internet, including one raucous and unbearably poignant one of Crozier’s walking down a gangplank alone while hundreds of sailors cheered him wildly, chanting his name every step of the way. They had confidence in him, if the administration* did not.
One of the most compelling reasons for civilian control of the military is that, theoretically anyway, the best soldiers and sailors have more space for independent judgment and initiative than they had in the old European model, as twisted as that was by unaccountable political power and unwarranted influence derived from a coat of arms and from what your great-great-grandfather did in the Crusades. Again, in theory, this keeps alive in our military the democratic spirit that should reside in every citizen, in uniform or out. And that, history has shown us, can produce miracles even in the middle of hell.
Forty-two years ago this past March, a U.S. Army warrant officer named Hugh Thompson, Jr. was flying with his two-man crew in a helicopter over a village in Vietnam called My Lai. They were supposed to lend air support to troops on the ground who had come into the area looking for Vietcong fighters. The aircrew’s attention was drawn by a number of bodies, presumably dead, scattered all over the landscape and also piled in a ditch by the side of the roadway. Thompson immediately knew something was not right.
“We started noticing these large numbers of bodies everywhere,” Thompson told a Los Angeles radio program 50 years later. “People on the road dead, wounded. And just sitting there saying, ‘God, how’d this happen? What’s going on?’ And we started thinking what might have happened, but you didn’t want to accept that thought—because if you accepted it, that means your own fellow Americans, people you were there to protect, were doing something very evil. They were not combatants. They were old women, old men, children, kids, babies.”
The three men in the helicopter saw some other civilians taking shelter in a bunker, and they also saw the American troops moving toward the bunker with murderous intent. Thompson landed his helicopter between the American soldiers and the bunker full of civilians. Thompson confronted the American officer in charge, a lieutenant named William Calley, and told him, flatly, that if his troops opened fire on the civilians, Thompson’s crew would open up on them. The My Lai massacre was over. Thompson then called in gunships, loaded the civilians in the bunker onto those helicopters, and they were flown to safety.
Thompson reported the events up the chain of command, and the Army immediately moved to cover it up, but they gave Thompson a Distinguished Flying Cross for rescuing the civilians. He threw the medal away. He did not have an easy life after that. Calley had a lot of support inside and outside the military—it was Vietnam, after all, and nothing made sense—and Thompson was looked on as something very short of the hero he was. He got death threats. People left mutilated animals on his porch. In his own words:
‘After it broke, I was not a good guy. I was sure not being invited to Annapolis or West Point or any other university that I’ve been to since, because I was a traitor. I was a communist. I was a sympathizer. I was neither one of those, I didn’t think. I was very confused about why I was being treated this way, because how wrong can it be helping a fellow human? And I’m no pacifist either. You know, I’m not one of these peacenik guys. So I was just very confused, and that went on for about 30 years.
I became invisible. When it first broke, people thought everybody was picking on Lieutenant Calley. Believe me, Lieutenant Calley was very guilty. There is no way to get around it. But we, being Americans, we cheer for the underdog, so that’s what people were thinking. They thought the establishment was picking on this little guy…And Congress came after me real hard. A very senior congressman made a public statement that if anybody goes to jail in this My Lai stuff, it will be the helicopter pilot.’
In 1998, he and his other surviving crewmen were awarded the Soldier’s Medal. Hugh Thompson died of cancer in 2006. He is remembered, both here and in Vietnam, as an American military man who acted out of his own heart and soul in the face of an epidemic of savagery. I think he would have understood Brett Crozier’s stand in the face of another kind of epidemic. I think the country should be proud of them both.”
Charles Pierce
Collin Powell did his best to cover it up also.
EMike,
You got me kinda liking this Charles Pierce guy from several of your posts.
Ron,
I think he is the best political writer in the US today. He was the reason I have Esquire as my only paid subscription. That post is not from Esquire, it comes in a email once a week I get for signing up.
EMike,
THX.
geez
“I try not to overuse the following expression, because one of the house rules in the shebeen is to try not to start every post with the same sentence. But Jesus H. Hairy Christ Almighty, what in the fck is wrong with these people? From CNN:
‘[Acting Navy Secretary Thomas] Modly told the crew that their former commander, Capt. Brett Crozier, was either “too naive or too stupid” to be in command or that he intentionally leaked to the media a memo in which he warned about coronavirus spreading aboard the aircraft carrier and urged action to save his sailors.
The acting secretary accused Crozier of committing a “betrayal” and creating a “big controversy” in Washington by disseminating the warning so widely.
“It was a betrayal. And I can tell you one other thing: because he did that he put it in the public’s forum and it is now a big controversy in Washington, DC,” Modly said, according to a transcript of remarks Modly made to the crew, copies of which have been provided to CNN by multiple Navy officials.’
In case you missed the latest news from this monumental administration* cock-up, the virus is running amuck aboard the Theodore Roosevelt—CNN reported that 177 members of the crew have tested positive, representing 10 percent of all military positive—and Captain Crozier himself has tested positive for it. So not only is Modly an arrogant apparatchik, he’s an incredibly tasteless arrogant apparatchik. Here he is, telling Washington Post columnist David Ignatius how he came to the decision to relieve Crozier.
“I didn’t want to get into a decision where the president would feel that he had to intervene because the Navy couldn’t be decisive,” Modly told me in a telephone call from Hawaii at about 1 a.m. Sunday, Washington time. He continued: “If I were president, and I saw a commanding officer of a ship exercising such poor judgment, I would be asking why the leadership of the Navy wasn’t taking action itself.”
Good boy. Roll over.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32053753/navy-secretary-thomas-modly-trash-captain-brett-crozier/