Reminds me of the movie Dave. This is a way to switch in or out the doppelganger.

No, it does not make sense this would be a scam. Trump has been trying to downplay the virus.

You make some fair points enorbet. But it's also fair to say that there is a place for humility and respect in politics, and by appearance your current President displays neither.

He may be a brilliant President. As a non-US resident, in all honesty I can't say that I know any different. But I know what I see, and that is someone who regularly makes himself (and by extension the populace that elected him) look stupid.

It is truly terrifying to see that the "leader of the free world" doesn't know how to conduct himself in a debate. Again, I can only tell you what I see and that is someone who has all of the communication skills of a 12 year old boy.
For the way they handled this pandemic, I'm more than happy. They've done a brilliant job at all levels of government. We've got it good here. I wouldn't trade places with anyone.

To the OP: We wish the President & Mrs. Trump a speedy recovery. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and the American people.

I don't think we simply "lose". We just struggle along at snail's pace as we always have. I still have confidence in Checks and Balances but wary of Social Media algorithms effect on Free Speech, but remain daily in awe of the brilliance of Our Founding Fathers, especially since it is also so obvious that they were all mere men, complete with faults and frailties as well as influence of the times.

Are you suggesting DT is faking his & his wives infection to win the election???

I wouldn't. Not even from US American politicians.

I enjoyed your post as well, rkelsen. To be clear I hardly think of Trump as "a brilliant president"... not even close. He simply capitalized on a large segment of the population that lost any trust or accommodation for "politics and politicians as usual". The Presidency is not a monarchy. We elect a Party of leaders, advisors, and in effect all who influence them. The power of that should be evident in how much what appeared to be Obama's most dear concerns and goals were never realized, for good and for ill. It may be why every president seems to age 10 years in four. The polarization that exists today in the US is problematic and disturbing but THAT seems to be what got someone like Trump elected in the first place. It really does matter who gets elected but the lack of turnout for Primary Elections (if not understanding of it's importance) is how we get in this sad state today.

Thankfully, the Constitution itself is still robust and resilient, despite many who'd act to subvert it.

I'll agree inasmuch as the whole "political" system in the US of NA is barely democratical and extremely divided.
And if a candidate has to assert himself as an alpha male before the populace will even consider him worthy of leading a country, I'd say the system is broken. It is sad that Biden had to do that, but he came out OK imo.
You think it's only me or "some leftists" who sees things that way? Look at how countries are being run elsewhere, it really is possible. Teamwork, not posturing.
In that respect, the USA tend to compare themselves with Russia, China, Brazil and the like, and think: that's the way of the world! - but a larger part of the world really has sane governments.

Oh, and I agree that if voting were compulsory we'd see a very different picture. Plus one for that.

Thank you.
Once more I have to say that practically all of Europe looks at it this way, not just "some leftists".
I can't imagine one European news article that would praise Trump, or say something positive about him without also pointing out that his flaws probably outweigh that - and that's not politically biased.

Yes, complete with checks and balances and no single individual holding absolute power. Even in Monarchies these days, the King or Queen's powers are approximately at the same level as the Vice President of the US, in that they preside over the Senate but do not necessarily control it.

We've already lost and honestly I don't see that changing anytime soon. This is just the latest iteration in the inane theater known as the American presidency. This is all about money, just look at the way the fed has gradually sabotaged the economy and value of the dollar for nearly a century if not longer. Do you really think they are just incompetent?

I think the likely outcome is that we end up regretting not learning the lessons from the fall of Rome.

The above was deliberately taken out of context. So deliberately the forum's quote tool wasn't even used.

Or it was a thoughtful explanation of the meaning of schadenfreude for thoese who didn't know and can't google. Yeah, that what it was.

Trump’s lying about Covid has become one of the most lethal events in our nation’s history. He politicized mask wearing and thus sentenced tens of thousands to cruel and lonely deaths. There is no person in America that has done more to spread Covid than Donald Trump and no one has tried harder to catch it. Trump couldn’t have been more personally reckless than if he went to Sturgess and licked the doorknobs on the porta-john’s. He has let loose a national insanity that manifests itself in the lunacy of antimask protesters storming Walmart’s in spasms of idiocy and craziness.

Trump has lied to the country on more than 25,000 occasions, assaulted the rule of law, assailed our institutions, stoked racial animus and been spectacularly corrupt. He is singularly responsible for one of the great tragedies in American history. His campaign is imploding. Paracale, Miller, Guilfoye, Melania, all of them have disgraced themselves and stained the Presidency. They are a wretched, corrupt and self interested gang of incompetents and maliced people who have done profound damage to this country in four short years.¹

So when I heard he contracted Covid part of me said "Ha Ha". Not that he might suffer, but in a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate context. Image.

Here's the concept of my post that was left out:

The purpose of my post was to ask that question; where do we draw the line?

Trumpism is an authoritarian and UNAMERICAN ideology that teams with menace and intimations of violence. It is a cult of personality led by a lethal liar who lacks intelligence, grace empathy and competence. Trumpism is a scourge. It is a metastic cancer. We need to crush it. Should Trump be disadvantaged in this moment then we should rejoice. Pour it on. Vote him out. No let up. The pace and intensity of attacks should be increasing and should not stop until he is humiliated and sent home to face the judgement of history and in hopefully a good long time, his maker.²

That line works for me.

8bit

¹,² Steve Schmidt on twitter.

Although I didn't use the words "alpha male" I suppose I did imply it as an opposite to "shrinking violets" but nowhere did I state asserting oneself as an alpha male is a requirement for the office, though I do think it's "in the mix". I think one of the reasons Hubert Humphrey didn't do well in his presidential election was his tendency to concede nearly everything. He exhibited a lack of strength of will to stand fast for anything. I don't find that a bad requirement. I am far more concerned that the intellectuals like Adlai Stevenson didn't do better simply because he was rightly viewed as an intellectual even though he did posses strength of will. To me that demonstrates one may think it wise to hire a plumber to do heart surgery.

Who proposed compulsory voting? I think that's a horrible idea if that means in every election. I could possibly agree to an assessment based on what percentage one votes, perhaps with a penalty beyond a specified low score of not being able to vote again unless a vote is cast in a specified next election period, but I favor better education for what is loosely called "Civics" here in the US. It is my understanding very little time is even spent on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution these days. Shameful! and dangerous.

I don't like Trump either, but he's not the Dark Lord and he certainly is not single-handedly responsible for the way covid has played out in the US. No matter what any goverment did, there was always going to be a lot of covid deaths there because a lot of people live there. We didn't do all that well in the UK either and we are not led by a madman. And the highest fatality rate in the world has been in Belgium, a very civilised country.

Trump came to power by appealing to a substantial segment of the American population who felt they were being overlooked by the people who did all the talking. They felt unrepresented by the political (especially the Democratic) establishment and by the media. Of course Trump didn't really represent them either; he's a millionaire after all. But he saw that they existed and that there were a lot of them, when no one else apparently saw that, and he worked out how to appeal to them. That means that he earned his victory, however little you may like it.

There is a very substantial tradition of lawlessness in America. It's part of their history. The whole point of the "wild frontier" is that it was lawless and therefore appealed to people who didn't want anyone telling them what they could or couldn't do. So they went west and found a cruder and more violent society where they could feel at home. That safety valve no longer exists. If you go west now, you get to California or Oregon, the "wokest" states in the Union. So those very numerous people just sat in their rustbelt towns, fuming and cursing until Trump came and swept them up into voting for him.
Authoritarian yes. But unamerican is precisely what he is not. The menace and intimations of violence are very American indeed. They come from the same America as all those school and college shootings. And anti-vax movements are an old American tradition too. A country that owes its very existence to a general refusal by its citizens to pay their taxes is not likely to believe that anything the government orders is really for their good.

Ah, you're a little of date: Peru has been the highest since the end of August.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavir...ickerSort=desc

I posted that and the next time I looked there were 28 posts. Some apparently hadn't googled schadenfreude, I thought, so yes I defined it.

This is all getting fierce political here. Carry on without me, by all means. I was wondering how folks felt. I do think it's worse than he's saying. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/03/trum...dows-says.html

In terms of "The buck stops here" he is. Compare the US to countries that got it right/better. Deaths/Million: New Zealand - 5.2, Singapore - 4.6, South Korea - 8.2, USA - 632.6.

These countries had leaders that locked down early, mandated masks, social distancing, etc. USA was late to the party because of Trumps playing down the virus (Covid is a democratic hoax, 15 cases and soon it will be down to zero, and on Feb. 27 - It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.)
Total numbers and percentage rates in the same paragraph. It's not about total deaths at all, but Deaths/Millions.
-1 point for making it personal.

An antiquated electoral gave him the victory over a majority of the voters.

The whole Trump brand, and by extension his 2020 campaign, is nothing more than a white coming-out party. After decades of watching LGBT supporters celebrate pride month, Black people marching to demand equal rights and justice, Native Americans trashing the legacy of Christopher Columbus, and leftists staging radical and shocking performance art — and, perhaps just as importantly, seeing these movements validated by the mainstream media — only to have it all topped off with eight years under Barack Obama, the first Black President in American history, millions of alienated white voters have come to idolize President Trump for supposedly giving them “their turn” to show pride and assert their white identity in a way they’ve either never felt or else haven’t been able to feel in a long time.

It turns out that millions of white people have been desperately wanting an excuse to do the equivalent of holding a pride march and chanting “I’m here, I’m white, get over it.”
I emphatically disagree with you here. Going West was far more about free land and wide open opportunity than lawlessness. The violence of the "wild frontier" was a burden coped with just until they could find a sheriff who could stay alive.

That safety valve petered out a hundred years ago, and is not part of the current psyche.

Authoritarian is the poster child for unAmerican. Threatening violence to stay in office is unAmerican.

School shootings are a minute fractional part of America, and that's giving them too much weight. Just like the media. If it bleeds, it leads.

This country is awash in conspiracy theories, anti-vax'ers and five dozen others. I blame the school system and the lack of teaching critical thinking.

That was taxation without representation. Not rebellious citizens refusing to pay any taxes for any reason. Just to be clear.

8bit

What a Negative Nancy post. Do you actually believe there was some shining, glorious, better time in the past? Progress, especially social progress, is grindingly slow that's all. More people live longer and healthier than ever before, and that's just one element.

The US was also the first (and only) nation nicknamed The Melting Pot for it's incredibly diverse citizenry so we are a bit ahead of the curve in dealing with issues of so-called race, actually a bit more about Culture. Don't worry. Other nations are catching up.

In addition the entire world is in transition from a Manufacturing economy to an Information economy, and since the US invented PCs and the Internet, we are at the forefront of that change. Despite that we still have people in power that have VCRs and those they have blink "12:00". OK that may possibly be an exaggeration but you know what I mean. Not only are they living in the Past, but it scares the daylights out of them. Maybe it is scaring you, too, to be so like Eeyore.