You’re doing a heckuva job, Clownie.
If you thought the breadth and depth of Donald Trump’s fucknuttery was limited to what’s currently in front of your astonished, bloodshot eyes, guess again.
From 2005 to 2017, a Department of Homeland Security office created analyses of the probable effects a pandemic would have on hospitals, transportation systems, and other U.S. infrastructure. According to a new Politico story, in 2017 the Trump administration stopped updating the models of these effects.
[T]he work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impacts the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swathes of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.
And while department leaders dispute that, others say the confusion is just the latest example of the Trump administration’s struggle to respond to an outbreak that has sickened more than 50,000 Americans and threatens to overwhelm hospitals and other healthcare providers.
According to the story, some of the modeling focused on what might happen if a significant number of Americans were unable to report to work: “The reports were meant to guide policymakers toward areas that would demand their attention in the event of an outbreak.”
And what was the Trump administration’s DHS focused on when the were dropping the ball on this? Oh, you guessed it. Borders and walls — and now we’re all paying for it:
Juliette Kayyem, a senior DHS official in the Obama administration, praised the quality of the NISAC [National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center] reports she received when she was at the department, and criticized DHS for being “singularly focused on border enforcement” under Trump at the expense of properly planning for other threats like a pandemic.
But never mind. It’s not like anyone could have ever predicted this:
“I’ve heard people say it’s a black swan. It’s not a black swan,” said one of the former DHS officials. “This is the whitest of white swans. This was absolutely inevitable, and the fact is we didn’t even maintain the capacity that we had or even the records of what we had done so that information could be quickly located and turned over to people who are making the critical operations right now.”
When I read Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk, which details the myriad ways the Trump administration is kneecapping the government and its safety measures, I was so terrified I nearly coughed up a lung. Turns out I wasn’t nearly terrified enough … and that lung could be coming any day now.
Is Trump still chafing your arse-cheeks? Then Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump and its boffo sequels Dear Pr*sident A**clown: 101 More Rude Letters to Donald Trump and Dear F*cking Moron: 101 More Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing are the pick-me-up you need! Reviewers have called these books “hysterically funny,” “cathartic,” and “laugh-out-loud” comic relief. And they’re way, way cheaper than therapy.