On March 5, Trump tweeted, "Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled." Watch what happens with that number as the weeks go on.
On March 12, he decided to make it as political as possible, tweeting, "Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record." For the record, Joe Biden was not in charge of the response to the swine flu.
Praising himself (as he has done over 100 times on the coronavirus response) on March 13, Trump said, "Interestingly, if you go back — please — if you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this. They didn’t do testing like this. And actually, they lost approximately 14,000 people. And they didn’t do the testing. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late." Reminded that the Obama administration had tested over a million people by the same point during the H1N1 crisis, Trump retorted pissily, "Ask them how they did with the swine flu. It was a disaster."
On March 17, Trump once again offered a middle finger to the previous administration: "If you look at swine flu — the whole thing in, I guess it was 2009, and what they did and the mistakes they’ve made, they were terrible. They were horrific mistakes. Seventeen thousand people died. And I’ll be honest, they shouldn’t be criticizing because we’ve done a fantastic job."
This very week, on April 7, he seemed to sense what was coming and moved the goal posts: "Take a look at the swine flu. Right? That’s H1N1. Take a look at that. And it’s not the other way around, by the way. It’s H1N1. Take a look — you know what I mean by that. Take a look at the swine flu. It was a disaster; 17,000 people died. The other administra- — they didn’t even know — it was like they didn’t even know it was here. And that was peanuts compared to what we have, in terms of the power, the magnitude of what we’re going through. This is attacking 182 countries, simultaneously." For the record, according to the CDC, 214 countries had H1N1 cases simultaneously.
Still, even as he hiked the death stat, from 13k to 14k to 17k now, it's like Trump understood that the metric he had been using as an indicator of the "disaster" of Obama's response was about to be lapped by COVID-19.
And guess what, motherfucker? Today, the number of deaths in the United States has topped 18,000, the upper number in the estimates of H1N1 deaths. That's a goddamn self-own right there, bitch. If this cockzit had any shame at all, he'd be out there flogging himself, weeping and blubbering, "I'm the disaster. I'm the debacle. I'm the mistake. I'm the worst." But he won't.
And fuckin' no one will hold him to account for his constant slanderous debasement of the Obama record. In a just world, Barack Obama would get to punch Trump in the dick every time the bloated tangerine of hate talked shit. But, no, no, we have to pretend to be dignified when dick-punching would be more appropriate.
This is the shit that Trump's been allowed to skate on. He repeats a lie so fucking often that it's the only thing even semi-rational people believe. Like the one that's gotten in my craw and plunged in its nails. Trump says over and over that he "shut down" travel from China early in the coronavirus outbreak. He says he "closed the border" and shit like that. Except he fucking well didn't. Read his own fuckin' proclamation on it. It applied to "all aliens who were physically present within the People’s Republic of China...during the 14-day period preceding their entry." And there were a shit-ton of exceptions, including Americans and people with green cards, spouses and children of Americans and people with green cards, and many other categories. It's like saying, "I've decided to be celibate. I'm not gonna do anal anymore, but blow jobs and firm handies are always welcome." And when those 40,000 or so exceptions to the ban came back into the U.S. from China, they faced almost no health checks.
On top of the general lie about the "ban," the date it started, which was on February 2 in the U.S., was two weeks after the first confirmed case in Washington state. The fucking virus was already here. So the sieve of a shutdown of Chinese travel had virtually no effect, despite Trump constantly saying that he himself saved "millions of lives." No, that was the social distancing and hospitalizations. Oh, and one more thing: Trump didn't issue the "ban" until the day after the WHO declared COVID-19 an international health emergency. That's right. Mr. Blame-the-WHO took his cues from the organization.
Look, this motherfucker, this loser of a president, this despicable, soul-free, degraded carcass of something that appears human, he's trying to spin shit every which way so that he escapes blame, again, for something that is his and solely his responsibility. He'll blame the WHO, Democrats and impeachment, governors, Obama, fuck, I'm sure Hillary will get in there at some point.
But it should never take away from the truth: He failed. He is failing. He is a failure. He will be a failure. He needs to wear his failure like a hair shirt for the rest of his miserable and hopefully imprisoned life. If Trump can slip away from any kind of comeuppance for this murderous ruin and wreckage, this country is even more fucked than it seems.
