Michael Moore floats conspiracy theory that Trump may be faking Covid diagnosis

[Alli]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ethics of my feelings regarding Trump having COVID. I almost created a thread about it. This article and the comments speak to it.

If You're Happy President Trump Tested Positive for COVID-19, You're Just as Bad as He Is

Regardless of my feelings about his politics, Donald Trump is a human first. A husband. A father. An uncle. An American. And today I am deeply saddened by the news that both he and his wife, Melania, have tested positive for COVID-19. Yes, he is an abhorrent person who has said and done terrible...

verysmartbrothas.theroot.com

That’s it exactly. Part of me is disturbed that yet another American has contracted Covid, but then I realize this particular American felt no empathy for the 7M other Americans who had it, or sorrow for the 200,000 who died from it.

Do I want him to recover? Absolutely. Do I wish him a speedy recovery? Absolutely NOT!

 

[Eric]

That would be the best thing that could come out of this, and I will hold onto this as a prayer.

The fact that there are at least three infected Senators who have to vote on her confirmation, who likely picked up at her formal nomination, is not without a sense of irony.

 

[lizkat]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ethics of my feelings regarding Trump having COVID. I almost created a thread about it. This article and the comments speak to it.

If You're Happy President Trump Tested Positive for COVID-19, You're Just as Bad as He Is

Regardless of my feelings about his politics, Donald Trump is a human first. A husband. A father. An uncle. An American. And today I am deeply saddened by the news that both he and his wife, Melania, have tested positive for COVID-19. Yes, he is an abhorrent person who has said and done terrible...

verysmartbrothas.theroot.com

The thing I try to remember is that feelings are feelings. They stem from emotions.

Where ethics come into play is in how and whether you act on the feelings. Those are cognitive decisions.

 

[Renzatic]

I'm not sure they'd cop to understanding it that way. Some Trump supporters now seem just to be saying that "anybody can get it" -- as if it's random, like a scratch-off lottery ticket win-- and so not related to whether any precautionary or deterrent protocols are observed.

Duh, so why should I wear a mask if anybody can get covid.​

"I assume no responsibility" was Trump's mantra, and I guess they get that part all right.

"Isn't it strange how it's always us who end up getting electrocuted, and not those other guys who keep telling us to stop sticking butterknives into these wall sockets", they said, as they jabbed their butterknives into the wall sockets.

 

[JBaby]

Nope. I will not be concerned about individual 1.

Hell no!!! I’m never going to worry about him. I meant worry about us. Didn’t Trump decide to not transfer power temporarily to Pence. Not that that really matters in the long run. But if he dies does anyone think people will think Pence is more reasonable so that could hurt Biden?

 

[lizkat]

Hell no!!! I’m never going to worry about him. I meant worry about us. Didn’t Trump decide to not transfer power temporarily to Pence. Not that that really matters in the long run. But if he dies does anyone think people will think Pence is more reasonable so that could hurt Biden?

tbh what I'd worry about if Pence landed in the Oval Office before the election (due to Trump's death or permanent incapacity) would be what the GOP would do about a couple things and they both have to do with the vice presidency.

Pence gets to pick a new VP to replace himself upon ascension to the Oval Office if Trump dies or resigns. But his pick is subject to confirmation by the Senate. Right now that seems simple enough since the Senate does have a Republican majority and only a simple majority is required for confirmation of appointments. The question would be whether enough R senators are healthy enough to vote in person or if rules can be changed to favor virtual voting.

On the other hand the RNC by its own rules is entitled to select a whole new ticket if the president or vice president dies during the runup to an election.., yeah even if the ballots are out there and voting has begun. They could also revive any 2020 candidacies of pols who had suspended campaigns before the renomination of Trump-Pence. They probably would not do any of that except for nominating a different vice presidential candidate and stipulating that Pence stands in for Trump at top of the ballot.

However, the Republican Party is famously fractured, so both the Presidential and VP selection for 2020 subsitutions that only emerge from the electoral college, i.e., not on actual ballots, could be fraught especially if the VP slot is not the same person as Pence picked to stand as VP in the remainder of Trump's first term... and the kicker would be in the electoral college anyway... where some states now have laws explicitly binding delegates to cast their electoral votes for the candidates they represented on the ballot.

So.. If a GOP candidate for prez or VP on the printed ballot is no longer able to serve for any reason including having ascended to the Presidency in the meantime, it's probable the election outcome for a bunch of states would have to head to the courts to be resolved. It would be interesting, in that even having loaded up the federal bench with "republican conservatives", the question before those jurists would be one where Republican voters might disagree with any ruling those guys come up with.

Good thing it's only lefties that run riot in the streets. /S

 

[JayMysteri0]

Honestly, when I hear about people saying whether it's good or bad on what your feelings are with the president sick, I can't give a fuck. Yeah, I know he's a human, I also know he's a sociopath. He recovers, there still won't be a lick of sincere concern about others, it will be about how he defeated it. When it comes to this ONE human being, I can no longer care. The situation he himself is in, is in parts due to his actions or more correctly inaction that allowed this to spread so 200K+ are already dead.

Do I wish him ill? No. Do I want to hear about NOT wishing him ill? No.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1312437980485697538/

My feelings...
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1312439861370970112/

 

[Edd]

Do I wish him ill? No. Do I want to hear about NOT wishing him ill? No.

Reminds me of a comment I read online today. Something like they say not to speak ill of the dead, but sometimes the dead have done a lot of ill.

 

[Alli]

Hell no!!! I’m never going to worry about him. I meant worry about us. Didn’t Trump decide to not transfer power temporarily to Pence. Not that that really matters in the long run. But if he dies does anyone think people will think Pence is more reasonable so that could hurt Biden?

Pence has been complicit, so no. He is of no concern.

 

[lizkat]

Pence has been complicit, so no. He is of no concern.

Agree completely. Pence has never hidden his willingness to be Trump's lackey . If there could have been a more subservient one, that would have required making a false floor under the White House, so someone could go around removing a tile adjacent to wherever Trump stood whenever it was time for Pence to stick his tongue up and lick the very sole of Trump's boot,

 

[Mark]

on a couple of points touched on in this thread...

soo before opening my computer this morning to take a look at PoliticalGroove's overnight musings,, while making my 1st of my daily 3 double macchiato in my Bialetti Moka, i was wondering if i should waste an entire new thread or not on this...before i saw the mention of michael moore's comments. fortune.

trump is only a showman. a selfish showman. those two attributes are the best description of him and the cause for his actions.
he's going to lose the election. (his former campaign manager is suffering mental breakdown because he knows how the trump family will take retribution on him)

so. what to do? imagine this:

trump lies about everything else, why not fake the illness?
the last 24 hours shows that his current medical team is incompetent and playing politics. i have no more confidence in this current team. i wanted them to be straight professional doctors. they are not.
but the point is:

can you imagine how recovering from COVID plays with trump's rabid base
to normal people, even though its The Anti-Christ Comes Back to Life
the “fatal wound [that] had been healed“; so much so that many will worship him (Rev 13:12).
would play very very well in ALL SWING STATES AND SUBURBAN WHITE NON-COLLEGE EDUCATED WOMEN.

but i can't stop from commenting on michael moore.
seeing as so much in this thread has been said that michael moore's meaningful shelf life having expired, i say with some trepidation, that i find his comments still and maybe even more relevant than ever.
- he knows middle america. specifically the blue wall states. you will benefit from his thoughts on what's going on there.
- he understands environemental issues. you will benefit from his thoughts on what's going on this.
- he is grounded with a fundamental faith in supporting the 99% of us to the degree that his enthusiasm is a yardstick for any of us. measure ourselves using this yardstick.

when michael moore says that he thinks that trump would lie about being infected, you don't believe him?
i do.
because we know trump. entirely possible. entirely probable given that trump will lose the election if as Anti-Christ he doesnt come back to life.
its about ratings, after all.

now, the reality:
i do think trump has COVID. but that moore said its possible that trump was faking it. that i find also totally accurate.
here is exactly what he wrote:
quote
"He’s an evil genius and I raise the possibility of him lying about having Covid-19 to prepare us and counteract his game. He knows being sick tends to gain one sympathy. He’s not above weaponizing this."
endquote

later on, michael writes that does anyone think that trump won't blame covid for losing the election?
go from there to what i posit:
won't the r conspiracy line be:
d party conspired with china to concoct and infect trump at the Barrett tea party so she won't become a supreme and trump would not be elected.
won't that be there party line after he loses the election?
won't it?
won't they find a lonesome democrat left over from the obama admin that there was there at the tea party that day and blame him as the super spreader?

 

[lizkat]

won't they find a lonesome democrat left over from the obama admin that there was there at the tea party that day and blame him as the super spreader?

Maybe, although lack of a scapegoat has not stopped the Trump administration or the GOP that he hijacked from just casting blame across the aisle anyway. It's a kneejerk reflex now. It comes with their first cuppa coffee of a morning.

The election period -- now until inauguration and a bit beyond-- was already going to be something of a zookeepers' nightmare. That is thanks to covid-19 and the new Postmaster General and Trump's pot stirring about mailed ballots. And more recently, his veiled threats about perhaps trying to send thuggish followers into the polling stations to "watch" the process (and so to intimidate potential voters). He carries on like this in the absence of evidence that bipartisan pollworkers and supervisors at the Boards of Elections are 1) all biased against him and 2) capable and wllling to collude in rigging a state's election results.

(Gotta love how Trump readily projects his own fraudulent inclinations onto all others.)

But now that Trump has been caught up personally by the coronavirus, the runup to the election and the aftermath could easily become even more fraught, with accusations flying around social media and not seeming to need any underpinning by facts -- which are hard enough to come by even if people care to find some.

The difficulty in fact-checking this administration pleases Trump most of the time. He wants us to rely on him for "the truth". And right now I suppose the WH staff would like us to be more credulous respecting whatever they dish out in absence of real information, but how could we easily just believe them after four years of their going along with Trump gaslighting the planet.

Guess we just have to make sure we have our own registration and vote-casting process squared away and then wait it out and hope for the best.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Personally I don't believe Michael Moore. Trump has been so irresponsible about distance and mask wearing so many times it's damn near a miracle that he hasn't gotten the disease before now.

I'd worry more about him making a quick recovery so that he and his creepy entourage can say, "See? It's not so bad after all!" In that sense I don't wish suffering on him for suffering's sake, I just wish he's in the hospital long enough so that he can't pass it off as a minor illness or, worse, his recovery as proof of his superior genes.

(And I'm making the assumption he'll recover. That's by no means guaranteed.)

 

[Scepticalscribe]

The thing is, I cannot conceive of this situation - whereby it is all too conceivable that Mr Trump would lie about having contracted Coronavirus in order to salvage his chances of winning the election - arising, or having arisen, with any other American President (no, not even Richard Nixon).

With nobody else would such the veracity of such a thing - if made public - ever have been called into doubt.

However, Donald Trump lies and gaslights so naturally, so normally, so pathologically, so sensationally, that one almost automatically assumes that anything he and his appalling administration, awful family, and yes, creepy entourage come out with is a lie.

The only question that then remains is to uncover the nature of the lie, to ask what kind of a lie, this is: Whether it is an egregious one, a sly one, a sneaky one, an automatic one, an obvious one, or an absolute whopper.

 

[lizkat]

The thing is, I cannot conceive of this situation - whereby it is all too conceivable that Mr Trump would lie about having contracted Coronavirus in order to salvage his chances of winning the election - arising, or having arisen, with any other American President (no, not even Richard Nixon).

Right, one wouldn't even wonder about this with other presidents, but I can't quite get there at this point with the Trumps either, not after he landed in Walter Reed.

He wasn't lying. It's too monstrous, which is not in itself a reason for dismissing possibility of a lie by Donald Trump, of course, but there are also just too many people involved.

The truth of a feigned illness would emerge too quickly... and if you think about it would provide more than ample reason for him to be impeached again, and to be removed, for the Senate would not tolerate that even on his side of the aisle. Their constituencies all have some empty chairs now at the kitchen table thanks to covid-19 and Trump's incompetence in how he handled info he had and withheld about the pandemic. Even sparsely populated Wyoming has over 50 dead, and red states like South Carolina and Indiana each have over 3500 dead... link

Who in the Senate would tolerate a president having lied about getting sick from covid-19? I think there is a limit, even in that crew on the right in the current Senate.

The only question that then remains is to uncover the nature of the lie, to ask what kind of a lie, this is: Whether it is an egregious one, a sly one, a sneaky one, an automatic one, an obvious one, or an absolute whopper.

Yes, I don't doubt there's some lying going on and will be more about assorted timeframes and circumstances and protocol observations and lack thereof... but not about whether Trump and the First Lady were even infected. It's too clear that Rose Garden event alone was problematic, even if that's not where they met a viral payload that got to them, and there's plenty documentation from reporters' experiences that the protocols for safety in the White House and grounds were not consistently observed.

 

[Renzatic]

Trump posted a video message from Walter Reed a little while ago.

You can tell some of the wind's been taken out of his sails, but he's far from being on death's door. Also, he doesn't have his orange warpaint on, which actually makes him look normal. Weirdly enough, this does more than anything to make it seem as if he's doing well.

 

[Eric]

Trump posted a video message from Walter Reed a little while ago.

You can tell some of the wind's been taken out of his sails, but he's far from being on death's door. Also, he doesn't have his orange warpaint on, which actually makes him look normal. Weirdly enough, this does more than anything to make it seem as if he's doing well.

Yeah, I didn't figure he would be close to deaths door myself, it just seems too early for that. The next few days will be telling but it seems more likely than not that he'll probably recover just fine. Okay by me, I'm ready to see him healthy and voted out, maybe at worst miss a debate.

 

[Renzatic]

Yeah, I didn't figure he would be close to deaths door myself, it just seems too early for that. The next few days will be telling but it seems more likely than not that he'll probably recover just fine. Okay by me, I'm ready to see him healthy and voted out, maybe at worst miss a debate.

He'll probably miss out on both debates, so if anything, he's one of the only people in the entire world who could be considered fortunate for catching COVID.

And no, I don't think he's faking it. Even for Trump, that would be an incredibly reckless thing to do, and far too likely to be exposed if he were to try.

 

[Huntn]

Damn! They are going down like dominoes!

Careless is as careless does.