Update with some links at end

Enough already. I keep reading shock and horror that the thing in the White House is letting people die, doesn’t care, how can he?

This is what he has always been. His “management style” is to set the underlings squabbling and then extract power or profit or praise, or all three, from the free-for-all. (I’ll get links eventually. That’s in a biography written years ago by ? not sure, Tony Schwarz?)

That’s what bullies do. He’s always been a bully. Bullies work by setting people against each other and then picking off the defenceless with a following of the fearful.

The people who voted for him wanted a bully. They wanted someone who would hurt the “right people” for them. His campaign in 2016 wasn’t going much of anywhere until he stood on a stump and bleated about Mexican rapists. Then his popularity shot up, and stayed up as long as he was dumping on somebody.

The only difference now is that he has the power of the Presidency to amplify him. Of course that leads to suffering and death. It always would have. If not from disease then from one of the other three horsemen of the apocalypse. Plus, they’re still there. A disease doesn’t have to be the end of it.

People don’t and never have meant anything to him. He has always been that way. In his mind, people are about as significant as aphids are to you or me. He is never going to see the suffering or death of aphids as something he needs to consider. Stop being stupidly shocked and start acting on the knowledge of what he is to limit the damage!

Now the structure of his latest crimes against humanity are starting to loom through the fog of chaos.

There’s an epidemic in China, so he (and his cronies, of course) profit from selling medical supplies and protective equipment to them. Once covid-19 is a pandemic and it’s here, the US runs out because too much was sold off overseas. And now he’s using taxpayer money to funnel half the imported supplies to private business. (See, e.g. Katie Porter.) They sell at black market prices to the states that he’s made sure have to fight each other for what they need. And somewhere in there I’d bet the entire farm he and his cronies are getting their cut at every stage of the extortion.

Remember what Adam Schiff said? If you give him a pass on extorting Ukraine, next he’ll extort the USA. [Correction 2020-05-20: It was Pam Karlan who said that, not Adam Schiff.]

It’s the truth. It has to be faced. Hoping that ignoring it will make it go away before we die is not working well for us.

News of the transnational crime syndicate parasitizing the government and hijacking — HIJACKING — essential supplies away from hospitals is popping up everywhere. In no particular order:

In Pursuit of PPE | NEJM       [The New England Journal of- freakin Medicine!]

Feds are seizing coronavirus supplies, hospitals say – Los Angeles Times

Denver Post, Editorial: Trump is playing a political game with our lives during coronavirus

Josh Marshall “Another endangered GOP senator, another ventilator announcement. They’re almost like campaign contributions at this point”

The Coronavirus and How the U.S. Ended Up with Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags | The New Yorker

Hospitals Face a White House Blockade for Coronavirus PPE. NY Magazine