Seems Like Trump Forgot to Tell His New Coronavirus Task Force They Were On the Coronavirus Task Force
NewsPoliticsAs Donald Trump continues to embrace the Republican death cult by pushing for people to get back to work in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed tens of thousands of people in the United States, he boasted on Wednesday night of his efforts to assemble a group of the nation’s most terrible CEOs in an effort to “achieve the full resurgence of the American economy.”
But it turns out his rollout of what he’s called the “Opening Our Country Council” and now has re-named the “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” was a predictably incompetent disaster.
Per the New York Times:
Some business leaders had no idea they were included until they heard that their names had been read in the Rose Garden on Tuesday night by President Trump. Some of those who had agreed to help said they received little information on what, exactly, they were signing up for. And others who were willing to connect with the White House could not participate in hastily organized conference calls on Wednesday because of scheduling conflicts and technical difficulties.
According to an unnamed “prominent Washington lobbyist for a leading global corporation” who spoke to the Washington Post, the Trump administration seemed to just assume that people would be eager to join what certainly seems like a hastily thrown together task force whose recommendations, like the need for mass testing, he is likely to ignore:
“We got a note about a conference call, like you’d get an invite to a Zoom thing, a few lines in an email, and that was it. Then our CEO heard his name in the Rose Garden? What the [expletive]?” said one prominent Washington lobbyist for a leading global corporation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “My company is furious. How do you go from ‘Join us on a call’ to, ‘Well, you’re on our team?’”
Still, some of Trump’s most ardent and dumbest fans are fully behind him. On Wednesday, dozens of idiots in Michigan took part in what organizers called “Operation Gridlock,” a protest of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders. Organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group funded by the DeVos family, protesters, many of them waving Trump campaign flags, gathered at the state capitol and chanted, “recall Whitmer” and “lock her up.”
They naturally ignored the organizers’ directive to stay in their cars and decided to assemble in person:
And in Ohio and Tennessee, Trump-loving protesters who are also upset about their states’ stay-at-home orders as well as the need to maintain social distance to slow the spread of the coronavirus have been doing their best to embrace the possibility of death, seemingly believing they are extras in a low-budget remake of a George Romero zombie flick.
As you can see, things are going great.