@jorj The President has powers to execute the laws that Congress creates, i.e. Congress gives the President powers in order to execute the laws, which are strictly speaking above and beyond anything stated in the Constitution.

Part of those executive powers had to do with the national stockpile of emergency medical supplies. Another is invoking the National Defense Production act. These are powers already vested by Congress to the President. These are just two examples about which Trump has failed. It is not propaganda.

@bingst

Jorj's comments on these matters are in my view far enough removed from reality that they signal that there isn't going to be much productive discussion with him on these matters, though I appreciate that you and @shockwaverider did at least try to straighten some of it out. Normally I would not make a comment like this, but more than a hundred thousand Americans are dead, and that is attributable in large part to the malfeasance of our would-be dictator, and so we are arguably in the midst of a dire crisis, and so I think it becomes more important to be very clear and to the point.

I do think it's useful and good to make the effort to consult and define and review the meaning of these words. At the same time I think it's wrong to fail to state things for what they are because we may get bogged down to the nth degree in parsing and dissecting words.

For this poll, I did want to make some effort to present an array of choices, but I don't have background in the law. I did what I could to do quick research on wikipedia, such as here.

[en.wikipedia.org]
and here:
[en.wikipedia.org]

Sometimes polls don't come out exactly as we want, and my experience has been not to try to edit them here once they're up and running, but on this one, so far it seemed to come out ok. I thought making it "check all the ones you think apply" kind of reduced some of the tension around getting the exact right legal definition, particularly where we are in a culture where, here and there, there is a person who will try to use that desire against us not to really understand what has happened with the President, but (essentially) to bog down the conversation.

The other day I read something about proposed stimulus funds, and once again there was some resistance to funding testing (if I read the story correctly). We are six months into the crisis that carries a risk of another great economic depression and the possible ending of our Democracy as we know it, not to mention the possible loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives (if not more) and possible gross harm brought to even more people, and the legislators and executive branch can't get straight the multiple basic measures that would actually allow US citizens to fight back and win and carry on. We are in a society plagued by deep levels of intellectual bankruptcy among dozens and hundreds of millions of people.

Another thing that makes this all much worse is to watch the same malfeasant legislators and head of state preening and falsely claiming to be worried about the economy. They have brought enormous harm to the economy with their gross incompetence, on top of the harm brought by the necessary response to the Pandemic. We are about to reap the economic rewards of all of that posturing and incompetence.

I agree. He's a compulsive grifter constantly working on his next scam.
Other folks aren't people. They're just targets to be victimized.

And even worse, he's part of that group (especially in America) that has a twisted definition of competition -- 'it's not enough to win, the other side must lose'.

@RichCC

and yet, we (many citizens and our representatives) did an enormous amount of work to get to a point where we could commit the painful-but-necessary act of removing him from the job we hired him for, and a group of 52-53 cowards (and the millions of cowardly citizens supporting their votes) in the Senate voted to keep him in office. Another untold number of representatives, their supporters and others have acted to prevent a more robust removal effort (such as bringing multiple additional charges on various other grounds. So, some of this (those portions that can be attributed to a collective) is on a lot of us, to one degree or another. However, this does not remove the rogue murderous employee's responsibility for his own behavior.

@kmaz
Three words come to mind -- tribalism, selfishness and ignorance.
People vote for their side to beat the other side -- no matter what the consequences.

another thought here:

Yes, there is a strong argument that Trump doesn't care, and that what he is interested in is determined by whatever bauble is in front of his face 5 minutes from now. However, I do think it is possible that in some ways he does care to kill people.

He "joked" recently about possibly withholding testing from some, as a political matter. This doesn't really prove my point, but I think does help open the door to a more mature discussion of how far he is willing to go to sacrifice lives, on purpose.

Another thing that fits with what he likes is that the virus is harming some non-white groups much worse than it is harming white groups.

Another thing I've noticed is that the virus disproportionately impacts poor people who have no choice but to continue their group manual labor (which puts them at greater risk). The deaths of many manual laborers might, I theorize, be ok with him and how he sees the economy.

All-in-all, particularly since I first heard the nauseatingly bad/incompetent (? accidentally on purpose?" ) pandemic response coming out of his mouth in January-February, I can't help but speculate that he may at times see the virus as an opportunity to preside over the taking of far more lives than needed without historians being able to pin the label on him of being a garden-variety mass-murdering dictator. I don't actually think this is really the best way to see where he is coming from, but I thought it would be a good exercise to try to spell out the argument.