'Putin First': Trump Gave Tyrant Covid Tests While Americans Were Dying
For Trump it's “Putin first” then Americans get whatever’s left over.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – By now we’ve all taken at-home COVID tests. For many of us, it’s a particularly stressful 15 minutes waiting for that second line to appear – or not. We also remember a time when home tests didn’t exist. We’d have to wait in line to use pop-up testing locations in parking lots using special machines – machines that during most of 2020 were scarce, not nearly enough to adequately handle thousands of new daily cases in the United States.
In Minnesota, the shortage caused the sudden closure of some pop-up drive-thru clinics. In West Virginia, the chief health official said she had to scrape together supplies from flu tests to make do. In Ohio, the Department of Health told CNN they’re focusing on “testing our most vulnerable patients” because of a “global shortage of supplies.”
Shortages continued throughout Donald Trump’s presidency even as new technologies were developed to confront the worsening pandemic.
Fast forward four years and in Bob Woodward’s new book, War, we learned yet another shocking truth about Donald’s deadly negligence. Woodward reported that Donald “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care COVID test machines for his personal use.”
There are so many unforgivably terrible things about this news, it’s difficult to know where to begin. In addition to the sad fact that the American people faced a shortage of the machines, the devices weren’t even part of a humanitarian aid package to help the beleaguered Russian people, they were personal gifts for the murderous dictator-for-life Putin.
So much for “America first.” More like “Putin first” then we get whatever’s left over.
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You might also recall how Donald held superspreader rallies during the deadliest phases of the pandemic in which he demanded that public health officials “slow the testing down, please.” Why? Because for every test there might be a positive result. And every positive result amplified the horrendous reality that the then-president failed to competently protect the American people from a preventable disease – a disease he could’ve stopped at patient zero, but refused.
In the warped, mashed-potato brain of that ungainly hobgoblin, testing meant bad news for Trump. What better way to slow the testing down than to exacerbate the shortage of testing machines by gifting a bunch of them to his role-model Putin.
Making matters worse, as though that were even possible, Donald’s notoriously germophobic hero advised him on the politics of the gift. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin allegedly warned the usually erratic, impulsive president. “I don’t care. Fine,” Donald replied, accepting the warning. When I first read these quotes, I had flashbacks to the news about their Helsinki meeting where it was obvious that Putin completely manhandled and emasculated Donald.
But if we lived in normal times, and we definitely don’t, Donald’s catastrophically negligent response to COVID, not to mention his obvious and suspicious servility to a dictator who, by the way, is committing war crimes in Ukraine as I write this post. It’s like a perfect storm of Donald awfulness: a toxic combination of his COVID incompetence and his fealty to Putin at the expense of the health and safety of the American people.
Toss this into the mix, too: according to Woodward, Donald spoke with Putin on the phone seven times – that we know about – since he left office in 2021. What did they talk about? I assure you it wasn’t the latest episode of the Real Housewives. Given the fact that Putin is engaged in an ongoing cyberwar against the United States, one in which Donald is a beneficiary, this news should send shockwaves through the corridors of the national security and intelligence community in Washington.
Speaking of that, you might recall some of the revelations from the Edward Snowden NSA documents, specifically how a so-called U.S. person, in this case Donald, could be the subject of wiretaps by NSA if he was discovered to be communicating with a foreign surveillance target. And there’s no bigger foreign surveillance target for America and the “Five Eyes” alliance nations than Putin. If there are tapes of the calls, I hope they’re being compiled and investigated for criminal breaches of national security. I’d imagine the FISC judges would approve such wiretaps.
So, yes, there are probably tapes, including the call about the COVID testing machines. Whether we’ll ever hear the tapes is another story, but the political press has a responsibility to hector Donald about the Putin calls just as often as they hectored President Biden about his age or Vice President Harris about her interviews. But I’m not holding my breath for that level of journalistic integrity from our corporate news media. But maybe, if Kamala Harris wins this election, we might get some sort of legal resolution to Donald’s continued anti-American, unpatriotic, treasonous loyalty to Putin.
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I can’t imagine no one ever asked Woodward (about this as well as other revelations), “This is important information. Why didn’t you reveal it four years ago?” I wonder what his response was. 🤔😉😊
Grovelers of Putin.