It should surprise no one to know that the United States will indeed have hundreds of thousands of cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus, given the absolutely incompetent response of the Trump administration. But for Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo to do it on a channel that Trump watches religiously is quite a thing.
After the markets closed with the Dow down 1,000 points after being up yesterday, Bartiromo was asked by Bill Hemmer asking her how to factor in the virus' impact on the markets.
“We have to expect constant volatility," Bartiromo cautioned. "Up 1,000, down 1,000. A lot of back and forth. Why? Because there’s so much nervousness on Wall Street and throughout the country. We don’t know enough. We have not gotten enough administration. The administration tried to get ahead of that. They said we will see more cases."
She continued, “My sources are telling me, and I don’t want to panic anybody … we’re going to see tens of thousands – ultimately hundreds of thousands of cases in the United States. This is going to happen. That’s why the administration is trying to get ahead of it."
Except the administration isn't trying to get ahead of it. Not at all. Trump is engaged in some kind of magical thinking. Elizabeth Warren ripped into his incompetence during an interview with Rachel Maddow. “An incompetent administration is like its own natural disaster,” she explained.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes has been sounding the alarms all this week on Twitter about how behind the United States is about testing. Here's his latest:
Seriously running out of ways to communicate how dire the lack of testing is in the US. We are way way way behind and every day that goes by without testing at the scale we need, the worse it's gonna be.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) March 6, 2020
And this is the problem. Because our government insisted on developing their own flawed test, they're not scaling the testing kits at a rate to test enough people to even KNOW how many people have it, where they're spreading it, and how to contain it.
Here's the glib, imbecilic response Trump gave at a town hall about the harm to the economy:
Trump tries to find a silver lining to the coronavirus during Fox News town hall: "I have to say, people are now staying in the United States, spending their money in the US -- and I like that." pic.twitter.com/lbERhrSq6t
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2020
Donald Trump is an incompetent dolt who has no clue how to handle this crisis. He cut funds for all the departments that would actually understand how to handle this crisis. And so there are going to be hundreds of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths, the markets are going to falter and the economy is going to go down the tank.
Not because of the virus. Because of an incompetent, anemic, ignorant response.
