{"id":42723,"date":"2020-05-15T14:51:49","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T14:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=42723"},"modified":"2020-05-15T14:51:49","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T14:51:49","slug":"i-dont-know-who-he-is-ive-never-met-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=42723","title":{"rendered":"‘I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Donald J. Trump’s response to the scathing testimony from a fellow he demoted in the midst of an infectious disease pandemic speaks volumes to me.<\/p>\n

Dr. Richard Bright is now a whistleblower who is reporting to Congress about what he believes are serious shortcomings in Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Bright once led the administration’s effort to search for a vaccine to fight the virus, but then questioned whether Trump was correct to push a drug with little known affect on the COVID-19 virus.<\/p>\n

Trump got angry and pushed Bright aside, sent him to a midlevel post in the National Institutes of Health.<\/p>\n

OK, so Trump responded Thursday to a question about Bright’s testimony. He said he doesn’t “know him; I’ve never met him.” He said he doesn’t “want to meet him” and that Bright sounds like a “disgruntled employee.”<\/p>\n

Let’s ponder that response for just a moment.<\/p>\n

If Donald Trump is telling the truth — and that is a highly dubious presumption — then he has just revealed to the world precisely why his pandemic response has been such a hideous failure to date. The man chosen to lead the vaccine research effort is unknown to the commander in chief who wants to be known as a “wartime president”?<\/p>\n

Suppose, too, that Trump is lying, that he really has met Dr. Bright; that tells me plenty as well about Trump’s reliability, his leadership and his command of the situation.<\/p>\n

Bright said the fight against the pandemic lacks a coordinated national effort. Gosh, who do you suppose should be providing that national coordination? Hey, I’ll take a stab at it: The responsibility belongs to the president of the United States.<\/p>\n

He has failed!<\/p>\n

As Bright told the congressional committee: “We\u2019re in deep s**t.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n

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Donald J. Trump’s response to the scathing testimony from a fellow he demoted in the midst of an infectious disease pandemic speaks volumes to me. Dr. Richard Bright is now a whistleblower who is reporting to Congress about what he believes are serious shortcomings in Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Bright once led the … Continue reading ‘I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him’<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8386],"tags":[9236,1424,3312,9261,9359],"class_list":["post-42723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medical-news","category-science-news","tag-coronavirus","tag-donald-trump","tag-nih","tag-pandemic","tag-richard-bright"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42723"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42725,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42723\/revisions\/42725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}