Trump Era Days 1,168 - 1,258
What was reported?
- 701,000 people lost their jobs in March – the first monthly average loss in jobs since September 2010 - and unemployment rose to 4.4%. 20.5 Million people lost their jobs in April – and over 30 Million filed for unemployment from the start of the pandemic through to the end of April - due to the pandemic response, leading to an unemployment rate of 14.7%, the highest rate since the Great Depression and seeing a decade of job gains wiped out in one month. In May, with states gradually allowing the economy to reopen, 2.5 million jobs were re-added to the economy and the unemployment rate dropped to 13.3%.
- With states like Ohio deciding to reopen – featuring, at least in Ohio, cases where more radical members of the Republican Party actually threatened to revolt by revoking the emergency powers used for the shutdowns - just two month into the pandemic, the pressure was on to crackdown on crisis spending. In Ohio, the state told employers to report workers who refuse to return to work despite the dangers of exposure to the virus.
- Trump threatened to shut down all immigration in the wake of the virus to prevent immigrants from taking American jobs.
- Trump announced that he would withhold funding from the World Health Organization, calling them bias toward China and accusing them of not being honest about the coronavirus.
- In a test of the free exchange of information, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg indicated that Facebook could restrict posts about police brutality and coverage of the demonstrations if there was prolonged social unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
- After Trump was subjected to a fact-check notification by Twitter for all his followers to see, Trump lashed out at Twitter and signed an executive order meant to punish social media sites which dare to hold him accountable for his dishonesty.
- Twitter was forced to censor President Trump after he tweeted that “when the looting starts the shooting starts”.
- At the height of the civil unrest in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, President Trump raised the military’s alert status to “near-wartime levels” and federalized the D.C. National Guard.
- In the stimulus bill that was passed in March, millionaires benefited from 82% of the tax law changes which came with it, and less than 3% of those changes benefited people who make less than $100,000 a year.
- Amnesty International warned that the American authorities were failing to respect and protect the right to peacefully protest, as guaranteed by international law. Even a sitting member of Congress was subjected to subversive measures.
- Trump came out opposed to the idea that the Federal Government should consider helping states and local governments struggling as a result of the pandemic.
- In the midst of the pandemic, Trump argued that schools should reopen “soon”.
- Trump verbalized his adamant opposition to bailing out the Post Office if the rate for postage weren’t “hiked” and he even threatened to veto the stimulus passed in March if that bill had included a bailout for the Post Office.
- The National Bureau of Economic Research convened and determined that the U.S. Economy officially entered a recession (driven by the pandemic) after the economy peaked in February 2020. The peak ended the history-making 128-month expansion.
- As eviction court proceedings were planned to be resumed in Columbus, Ohio, holding mass eviction proceedings in a Convention Center to facilitate social distancing was contemplated.
- The White House blocked Dr. Fauci – the leading medical expert in the nation helping with the pandemic response – from testifying before the House of Representatives again (after his previous testimony before the House had been conspicuously cut short after he had said things would get worse). Yet, he was slated with ease to testify before the politically-friendlier Senate.
- The Trump Administration earmarked $600 Million via the Pentagon’s budget for a defense contractor’s machine that was supposedly going to permit the same n-95 Masks to be used up to 20 times. The problem is that the original cost was supposed to be $60 Million and the reality from numerous analyses have found that the masks can only be reused up to 4 times at max!
- Trump fought back against calls for increasing access to ventilators, suggesting that it would be a better use of public dollars to invest in a scientifically-unproven and quite risky cocktail of drugs which had been rumored to possibly combat the virus.
- President Trump mocked a reporter for wearing a mask, claiming that the reporter’s mask made it hard to hear him and that the reporter was being “politically correct”.
- The Trump Administration issued an order which had set to end the emergency
- Trump threatened to withhold federal funding for Michigan and Nevada in response to those states expanding their vote-by-mail which came in the wake of the pandemic.
- National Guard deployment for the coronavirus pandemic response on June 24th, one day shy of when a significant number of National Guard troops would qualify for retirement and educational benefits.
- Given the fact that the Trump Administration had done such a terrible job of preparing for the pandemic – reportedly wasting nearly two months of time which could have been exploited to enlarge mask stockpiles, for instance -, it was doubly insulting that the military under Trump instructed soldiers to fashion their own masks in light of the mask shortage.
- After the Democratic Governor begrudgingly came to his senses and tried to postpone the Wisconsin Primary in April amidst the rising danger of the pandemic, the Republicans in the State Supreme Court and the Legislature successfully blocked his efforts, forcing the primary to go forward as planned. This was forced because Republicans had hoped to secure some gains in the State Judiciary.
- Trump used the pandemic as an excuse to empower federal regulatory agencies to broadly cut regulations across the board and to “leave it that way”.
- Jared Kushner had left open the possibility that the Administration could seek to delay the presidential election.
- Seeing the numbers of Americans dying from the virus and thinking about its impact in an election year, President Trump insisted that the Centers for Disease Control change how it calculated the number of people killed by the virus, in order to produce a more politically-acceptable number.
- President Trump vetoed a bill that would have protected students from having to owe loans for attending a college which closed due to fraud.
- Senator Rand Paul blocked from unanimous consideration a bill passed by the House of Representatives which would have FINALLY made lynching a federal crime. Paul’s reason for blocking unanimous passage of the bill is that the language would supposedly make “bruising” punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.
- Fox News was caught intentionally using doctored-images and then lying about their intent for such regarding their coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle, including the establishment of the so-called “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” which was being temporarily occupied until a list of demands were met.
- The Trump Administration argued that the Supreme Court should allow religious adoption agencies which receive tax-dollars to refuse service to gay couples and other couples based on religious objections.
- The Trump Administration officially issued a rule change which stripped the LGBT community of protections in healthcare coverage, saying that the Affordable Care Act’s “sex” protections do not protect sexual identity or orientation, but only “male” and “female” from discrimination.
- Despite efforts by the Trump Administration to defend the power of employers to fire people for their sexual affiliation or identity, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision – with Trump-appointee Justice Gorsuch writing the majority opinion – that employers can not terminate anyone based on such grounds.
- The Arctic reportedly reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Siberia experienced forest fires.
- There was a bit of a political and legal mess when the President tried to remove a federal prosecutor by not officially doing so. The prosecutor at issue, Manhattan leading federal prosecutor, Geoffrey Berman, has been at the helm of a series of investigations into Trump-connected interests. Initially, Attorney General William Barr tried to suggest that the prosecutor was “stepping down” voluntarily, but when the prosecutor openly denied such, Trump wound up directly firing him.
- The House Democrats made history by passing a resolution approving statehood for Washington D.C., which would grant the U.S. Capitol full representation in Congress.
Tonight’s Conclusion
2020 is changing the landscape of the world as we know it. I believed that the first quarter of this year was the most tumultuous I had seen up to that point and the second quarter actually out-did the first. From President Trump stripping funding from the World Health Organization and recommending that people inject disinfectant into their systems to the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic and the instability of our economy’s fundamentals. Then, we have to remember the historic mass movement jump-started by the murder of a man by members of law enforcement and the seismic changes and tests of the rule of law which has followed since.
We are now at the cusp of a revolutionary transformation of not just American society, but the global community as well. We can either take a leap towards a more just and democratic reality or plunge deep into the authoritarian abyss. This is the moment that humanity decides its fate.
2020 is quickly becoming the most important year in the human history.
#NotMeUs #OurRevolution #TheResistance #ImpeachTrump #ClimateCrisis
Purchase my manifesto, “The Pillars of Unitism”.
Until next time…
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