Trump's treatment of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer

I hope Dopers have not missed Trump’s infantile, misogynistic treatment of Gretchen Whitmer, who he can’t seem to muster enough respect for to call her by name.

Here are some quotes:

So, when he *does *invoke her name, he refers to her as “Half-Whitmer”.

And the “blaming everyone for her own ineptitude”…man does that sound an accurate description of, I dunno, someone else.

This man is the leader of the United States???
mmm

Mitch Albom covers this nicely today in today’s Detroit Free Press. I hope my father, a man who loves Mitch as much as he loves Trump, reads the whole column.

I thinks he’s about to ruthlessly punish the states that hate him, using government response funding, and delays etc.
Very ‘Quid pro quo’ almost.

Quid pro corona?

From the Clusterfuck thread:

The (ill-behaved, bratty) Toddler-in-Chief.

Isn’t that pretty much how he behaved to Puerto Rico after the hurricanes?

So… pretty much par for the course

How does anyone not yet understand that Trump will leverage this pandemic crisis in every possible way to “win” his reelection?

He will use his 500 billion dollar slush fund to shower money on favored constituents/organizations/states and extract assurances that they will reinvest those funds in his reelection campaign through super PACs.

He will withhold aid to his perceived enemies, force governors to compete for scarce resources, grant privileged status to those who suck his ass and deny necessities to those who govern according to sanity as a way of punishing them.

He is cruel, vindictive, immoral, unethical, petty, small, uneducated, IQ-challenged with the attention span of a soiled diaper – and let me say cruel again, to give this characteristic the priority it deserves. He will kill whomever he perceives as an enemy if he can, if he can get away with it: Immigrants, refugees, prison inmates, the poor, the homeless, liberals and Democrats. He won’t mind if some conservatives and Republicans die along with them, so long as it mostly kills the people he wants dead. His Republican cohorts will protect him and let him get away with it in the hope they will avoid discovery and prosecution for their own criminal conduct.

This is who is in charge now.

Hm let’s see, there are 200,000 projected deaths on tap from a deadly virus which Trump did not take seriously, but tried to downplay instead, for the optics. Governors look around, see the national defense failure and get critical.

The response is “half-Witmer”. Uh, ever heard the one about glass houses, buddy?

The only way that dungheap reaches par is by cheating. In his entire life, he has never followed accepted rules of behavior.

Agree with all of this. But… why Michigan? Its a pretty critical swing state and he only just barely won it in 2016. Yes, he’s vindictive and cruel and only gives a shit about himself. So to that end he should be shitting on California or another solidly blue state and not some state that has a very real chance of contributing to his electoral loss. I thought the standard MO, even for him, was to pander to swing states.

Maybe it’s as simple as stupidity.

My guess is he figures Michigan’s gonna be hit pretty hard by covid, so instead of risking any blame falling on him, he’s already setting up whitmer as incompetent and the only one at fault for the massive amount of sickness, deaths and job loss there.

I think it’s down to two things. First, the easy one: He can’t stand strong women who stand up to him. Governor Whitmer embodies that. He just can’t help belittling her.

Second, he’s a world class bigot. Blacks live in Michigan. They are going to turn out in 2020 in far greater numbers than they did in 2016. He’s lost Michigan if they do and I suspect his internal polling already shows that. So now, like Happy Lendervedder says, his strategy is to try and make Governor Whitmer look like she is failing her state, and hope it damps down black turnout and increases rural white turnout.

If I believed in such things, I’d swear that it’s the beginning of the Apocalypse. It’s the perfect alignment of an amoral, narcissistic egomaniac and a pandemic. Until someone has the balls to remove this fucker from office, or the Pubs decide that they really can’t stomach any more of his behavior, we can look forward to things getting much, much worse as he laughs while America burns.

Agreed, Chefguy. At first, he did what he always does, which is to try to minimize and/or deny reality. That was to the great detriment of our country, affecting our ability to blunt the spread of the virus. But then others instructed him in how he can use this crisis to his advantage. We are in a much more a perilous place now.

It’s the thing I think most people consistently underestimate in him: The pure malevolence of his being. I am not religious, but I know quintessential evil when I see it. He gets his kicks from watching people suffer and squirm. People are either useful to him or they are not. He views them through no other lens. If you are not useful to him, he has fun humiliating or debasing you. He doesn’t mind if you die, either. His inherent vindictiveness guides every move he makes.

Whitmer has been critical of Trump since early on in this crisis. That’s all it takes for him to blindly attack and belittle like a 10-year-old who has not yet reached any level of maturity.

Also, she is a woman.
mmm

Even now, Republicans are seriously touting the idea that it would be OK to let a bunch of Americans die, as long as Republicans get to stay in power.

This is who they are. They will never remove Trump. They are all in on the Authoritarian dictatorship train. It’s not that they “don’t have the balls”. It’s that they approve of the insults, the childishness, the cruelty and the incompetence. It’s actually their platform.

Senator Brown disagrees.

Why isn’t the press constantly banging on the drum that the nation’s special ‘infectious disease preparedness’ crew, specialists just for such things as a pandemic, was one of the first departments he closed and defunded?

Shouldn’t that be repeated in EVERY news broadcast of grim death numbers?

This cartoonist sees it with more of an Old Testament feel.

I fear you are absolutley correct.