The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump
From the Atlantic:
The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump
The president created a leadership vacuum. China intends to fill it.
It looks, at first, like one of a zillion unfunny video clips that now circulate on the internet: “Once Upon a Virus” features cheap animation, cheesy music, and sarcastic dialogue between China—represented by a Lego terra-cotta warrior with a low, masculine voice—and the United States, represented by a Lego Statue of Liberty with a high, squeaky voice. They “speak” in short sentences:
“We discovered a new virus,” says the warrior. “So what?” says the Statue of Liberty.
“It’s dangerous,” says the warrior. “It’s only a flu,” says the Statue of Liberty.
“Wear a mask,” says the warrior. “Don’t wear a mask,” says the Statue of Liberty.
“Stay at home,” says the warrior. “It’s violating human rights,” says the Statue of Liberty
The dialogue goes on like that—“It will go away in April,” the Statue of Liberty says at one point—until it ends, finally, with the statue on an intravenous drip making wild and contradictory statements while the warrior jeers at her. ........(more)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/time-americans-are-doing-nothing/611056/
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And the one from the Irish Times how America no longer is looked at with respect. We are a laughingstock country.
You can read the full article on snopes that have been reported on three party sites.
Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
