Courtesy: Kevin Rudd, Ex-Australian Prime Minister
Smartmouthing Donald John Trump has become an international sport.
Former Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ripped Donald Trump’s botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic in a new op-ed, describing the U.S. president as a “quack apothecary” for hyping unproven cures.
Trump last month pondered injecting disinfectant or using powerful lights to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Following widespread anger and disbelief, Trump claimed he was being sarcastic. He also has touted unproven drugs that were later shown to be ineffective and dangerous. Rudd, who led Australia from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013, this week called out the Trump administration’s “chaotic management” of the crisis in a lengthy column for Foreign Affairs. The article headlined “The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy,” explores the future relationship of China and the U.S. and their standings in the world.
Wrote Mr. Kevon Rudd:
The world has watched in horror as an American president acts not as the leader of the free world but as a quack apothecary recommending unproven “treatments.” It has seen what “America First” means in practice: don’t look to the United States for help in a genuine global crisis, because it can’t even look after itself. Once there was the United States of the Berlin airlift. Now there is the image of the USS Theodore Roosevelt crippled by the virus, reports of the administration trying to take exclusive control of a vaccine being developed in Germany, and federal intervention to stop the commercial sale of personal protective equipment to Canada. The world has been turned on its head.
Rudd also warned that the U.S. may emerge “as a more divided polity rather than a more united one, as would normally be the case following a national crisis of this magnitude.”
COVID-19 pandemic uncovered Trump's deficiencies as America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections with the wealthy having gotten wealthier off the pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and the rest of us come out of the rabbit hole and realize, "Oh, my God, it's not just that everyone we love is unemployed or underemployed and can't make their maintenance or their mortgage payments, or their rent payments, but all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own island that they go to and they don't care whether or not our streets are safe. From the G-101 algorithm, it concluded massive political disruption - nothing will be back to normal.
Look no further than 9/11.
A new normal was the result as the United States became a securitized society and an antiterror state. We couldn't go into a federal or state building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector or get on airplanes the same way ever again. Yet, we adopted. These examples underscore we are under surveillance, and a seismic shift as occurred that give the federal government more control.
The next new normal means more federal controls, less freedoms and regrading of economic efficiency to the begin the long slide into subordination that Great Britain endured after 1895.
Today, the COVID-19 proved that the United States lost its place in world affairs because of federal mismanagement. Shockingly, America isn't in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been degraded under Trump. You only need to understand this statement by pointing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Trump gutted the agency, claiming it was a "waste on money," meanwhile giving the rich a $659 million tax cut. Trump had decided that "public health care" was not important. What now, Mr. Trump?
What happened to the American dream?