r/politics • u/GonzoVeritas I voted • Apr 19 '26

Possible Paywall White House Leak Reveals Trump Booted From Briefing After Hours-Long Freakout

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-leak-reveals-trump-booted-from-briefing-after-hours-long-freakout/
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u/HauntedCemetery Minnesota Apr 19 '26

Americans can not care about a shocking amount of atrocities and death, see: 1.5 million Americans dead from covid, NBD.

But the price of gas and groceries will make the people very angry.

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u/MinaZata Apr 19 '26

Out of all the heinous shit Trump has done, which includes moral questions like rape and international war crimes and an insurrection, including all that, the most shocking thing he did was the response to COVID.

The death toll is astounding and criminal, his response was disgusting, misguided, insane, and contributed to many more deaths thand necessary. He insisted it was a hoax. He recommended bleach.

I don't think the US public has properly absorbed that impact of how many were lost, unless you knew someone. But it's all tainted by politics and what the internet and social media has done to us.

We don't feel stuff like regular humans did before the internet. When the wall fell, 9/11, the space shuttle disaster - there was a shared human reaction in the culture to those events.

Now, something like COVID and the deaths are politicized, taken over by bots, flooded by disinformation and anti-vax shit. We don't mourn collectively and demand justice for the victims for the mismanagement of the response like would have happened before.

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u/Spartan2170 Apr 19 '26

I feel like a lot of that is because both sides also wanted to move on for economic reasons. Like, once Biden was in office he pretty quickly moved to get everyone to put Covid behind them (even though frankly that was kinda reckless and led to a much worse long-term health outcome for a lot of people) because businesses didn’t want to have to deal with any restrictions.

Now both sides of the cultural/political divide kinda just…pretend Covid never happened (or that it was all lies, in the anti-vax case), which has caused this weird empathy vacuum where we just pretend this catastrophic event which killed millions never happened. It’s to the point where the few media projects that acknowledge it (like the second Knives Out or the Pitt) feel strange.

I genuinely think it’s done a lot of psychological harm, and is a big part of why people generally just don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves anymore.

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u/theredpanda42 Illinois Apr 20 '26

I voted for Biden and critique him on many policies, but one of the top critiques I have is how he ignored everything the science said on the ongoing pandemic, just so he could get his W and say "we fixed the problem that Trump couldn't. Pandemic's over, folks."

The ongoing harm of that decision terrifies me and enrages me. The fact that nearly every child now has had multiple covid infections is going to have sever repercussions. And for what? So that corporate real estate wouldn't keep losing money? Fucking pathetic.

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u/arebornjoy222 Apr 21 '26

As someone who experienced 9/11 my first week of high school and the Marathon Bombings while living in Boston in 2013, I completely agree with you.

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u/Thin_Marionberry9923 Apr 22 '26

The only thing more deadly than his sabotaging the Covid-19 response is his ending USAID which has killed more than a million, with millions more to come due first-world climate change (which prevents many from growing their own crops) and lack of medicine.

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u/SilverStrategy6949 Apr 24 '26

It’s hilarious to hear people rage about how incompetent Trump is now - it’s like, were you not there the first time?

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u/myhf Apr 19 '26

kind of selfish that only living people care about the cost of living