At a recent White House event, as small business owners poured out their anguish about the economic devastation of the coronavirus shutdown, President Donald Trump made his boredom plain. He scrolled through his phone and posted on Twitter about an unrelated controversy. Yet this was just a particularly obvious display of Trump’s lack of concern for the travails of his constituents. The president has shown almost no compassion for — or interest in — the over 125,000 American’s who have died from COVID-19 or the 21 million newly unemployed.
[I didn’t know about that! Lol Trumpie.]
This extreme lack of empathy — combined with his fumbling and erratic response to a cascading series of crises — has made it easy for Joe Biden to tag Trump with the label that Franklin Roosevelt, running in a similar moment of economic disaster, so deftly applied to Herbert Hoover: “The Man Who Doesn’t Care.”
...
Roosevelt’s campaign was able to paint the president as heartless, aloof from the misery all around him, and unequal to the task of rescuing the nation from the Great Depression. Hoover himself opened the door to this charge. He acted callously, sending the Army to violently disperse Great War veterans camping out in Washington and demanding their bonus payments. He was paranoid, railing about conspiracy theories and pushing the Senate to investigate Wall Street firms for intentionally driving down the stock market in an effort to hurt him politically. And he was willfully blind, refusing to believe his own experts about the scale of the economic devastation.
As historian William Leuchtenberg has noted, by the summer of 1932, this was all coming to a head. Acting erratically and offering policies that were woefully insufficient, “the country was convinced that Hoover … was a cold-hearted man, indifferent to suffering.”
In the summer of 2020, that should sound hauntingly familiar. Our current president is callous, using force to remove peaceful protesters outside the White House to clear the way for a bizarre photo-op outside a church.
He is paranoid, spewing nonsense about plots hatched against him by former President Obama, Twitter, and, apparently, anyone who mails in their election ballot. And he is out of touch with reality, insisting — against all evidence — that his administration had “met the moment and prevailed,” that the COVID-19 death rates are inflated, that miracle cures exist, and that a vaccine is around the corner.
Most of all, Trump is the man who doesn’t care. He doesn’t feel your pain. He doesn’t mourn the dead, comfort the grieving, or support the struggling. He doesn’t consider his words or worry that they could have consequences. He doesn’t listen to experts or ponder his options.
He takes “no responsibility at all.”
... this election — like its 1932 predecessor — will be a referendum on the president.
There are two sides to that coin. Voters will make an intellectual decision, weighing actions and policy. Did Trump move against the virus quickly enough? Was his response big enough? Has he handled the police violence protests appropriately?
But they also will make an emotional decision. They know that whoever they choose will impact their psyches for four years...voters should be reminded to weigh whether they believe that Trump has any real investment in them...
[That is sooo true. Intellectual AND emotional. (Hate is an emotion.😂)]
In 1932, FDR was able to convince voters that Herbert Hoover, a famed humanitarian, simply didn’t care about the ravages of the Depression on ordinary Americans.
Surely in 2020, Biden can make such a charge stick to Donald Trump, a man who proves every day that he cares only about himself.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/28/trump-and-hoover-both-labeled-the-man-who-doesnt-care-column/3236951001/
[I didn’t know about that! Lol Trumpie.]
This extreme lack of empathy — combined with his fumbling and erratic response to a cascading series of crises — has made it easy for Joe Biden to tag Trump with the label that Franklin Roosevelt, running in a similar moment of economic disaster, so deftly applied to Herbert Hoover: “The Man Who Doesn’t Care.”
...
Roosevelt’s campaign was able to paint the president as heartless, aloof from the misery all around him, and unequal to the task of rescuing the nation from the Great Depression. Hoover himself opened the door to this charge. He acted callously, sending the Army to violently disperse Great War veterans camping out in Washington and demanding their bonus payments. He was paranoid, railing about conspiracy theories and pushing the Senate to investigate Wall Street firms for intentionally driving down the stock market in an effort to hurt him politically. And he was willfully blind, refusing to believe his own experts about the scale of the economic devastation.
As historian William Leuchtenberg has noted, by the summer of 1932, this was all coming to a head. Acting erratically and offering policies that were woefully insufficient, “the country was convinced that Hoover … was a cold-hearted man, indifferent to suffering.”
In the summer of 2020, that should sound hauntingly familiar. Our current president is callous, using force to remove peaceful protesters outside the White House to clear the way for a bizarre photo-op outside a church.
He is paranoid, spewing nonsense about plots hatched against him by former President Obama, Twitter, and, apparently, anyone who mails in their election ballot. And he is out of touch with reality, insisting — against all evidence — that his administration had “met the moment and prevailed,” that the COVID-19 death rates are inflated, that miracle cures exist, and that a vaccine is around the corner.
Most of all, Trump is the man who doesn’t care. He doesn’t feel your pain. He doesn’t mourn the dead, comfort the grieving, or support the struggling. He doesn’t consider his words or worry that they could have consequences. He doesn’t listen to experts or ponder his options.
He takes “no responsibility at all.”
... this election — like its 1932 predecessor — will be a referendum on the president.
There are two sides to that coin. Voters will make an intellectual decision, weighing actions and policy. Did Trump move against the virus quickly enough? Was his response big enough? Has he handled the police violence protests appropriately?
But they also will make an emotional decision. They know that whoever they choose will impact their psyches for four years...voters should be reminded to weigh whether they believe that Trump has any real investment in them...
[That is sooo true. Intellectual AND emotional. (Hate is an emotion.😂)]
In 1932, FDR was able to convince voters that Herbert Hoover, a famed humanitarian, simply didn’t care about the ravages of the Depression on ordinary Americans.
Surely in 2020, Biden can make such a charge stick to Donald Trump, a man who proves every day that he cares only about himself.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/28/trump-and-hoover-both-labeled-the-man-who-doesnt-care-column/3236951001/
