Ask A Genius 536 – Is Trump Trying?
March 25, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If the President of the United States was trying, would he still be in over his head?
Rick Rosner: Yes, he is bad at learning things. The best thing he could do is throw up his hands and say, “Look, I am not going to have anything to with this thing anymore. Even that is not doable, because he doesn’t have a bunch of competent people around him,” Fauci is competent.
If he said to Fauci, “I am appointing you as czar of all this shit. You have authority over anybody else in the nation when it comes to this stuff.” Then, maybe. But that’s not what is happening.
Jacobsen: Do you think America has the resolve to build something like a Manhattan Project for bacteria and viruses that are currently known lethal to human beings like Covid-19 or potentially on 2,000 years of recorded history and medical history done?
Rosner: Not now, not with the current leadership, I think with this disease and its killing and its affect on the stock market and economy. If all of that means Trump doesn’t get re-elected and the Republicans don’t control the Senate, I think there’ll be some national resolve to do something to make sure something like this won’t happen again.
How long that resolve lasts and if it is enough to overcome Republican obstruction? I don’t know. Because if you look at 2009 with Obama coming in with a mandate to fix the country in the middle of a recession, even then, there was only a short period of time where democrats had enough control to get anything done.
Where democrats for a lot of stuff in the Senate, you need a supermajority to get stuff passed. It took nearly a year to get Al Franken seated because there were counts and recounts with the vote so close.
It was only from when Franken was seated until the elections two years later that democrats had an effective supermajority. They spent most of that time on getting healthcare passed. We won’t get a supermajority in the Senate this time. The numbers aren’t good. We will be lucky to get a majority in the Senate, and the presidency.
Then there will be a will to do a Manhattan Project type thing to get things moving on it. I was reading an article on how the CDC used to have 47 people working in China to monitor what was happening there to be helpful if shit happens because a lot of stuff happens with diseases because of their wet market.
Trump fired 70% of those people bringing the CDC down from 47 to 14. China tried to sit on it for a few weeks. Had we had more people in China, we may have found out about it and done something about it sooner if we had willing politicians.
All of that personnel and staff infrastructure will have to be reconstituted after Trump if we’re lucky enough to have 2021 to be after Trump. Plus, by the time the next presidential administration begins, we may not be done with it.
We were not done with Swine Flu. Even though, it wasn’t very killy, for a year and a half.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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Rick Rosner 