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HAS PRESIDENT TRUMP FAILED AMERICA THROUGHOUT THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK?The answer to that question is best summed up in an article written by somebody who really knows what he is talking about, based upon facts and figures.Please take the time to read the article below, which is arguably the most enlightening assessment of Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, COVID-19 Pandemic thus far.Statement…None of the following article is written by myself, with no wish to give the impression of using somebody else’s work as my own. But the coronavirus situation is of such importance, that I believe this article by David Frum, forCommentator David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He is credited with inspiring the phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.David Frum - WikipediaThis needs to be read by the American people.It directly criticizes Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and his attitude towards it.This criticism is in no way driven by political motivation, but by a clear belief that when it comes down to handling this national and world health crisis, the man in the White House is simply not up to the job.Before dismissing the article as politically biased, please read it, to gain insight into just what is happening here, to protect the American people from this pandemic, or rather…What is not being done!As for Quora moderation, I can only hope that they will view the article as it is intended…For the purpose of information, and not for the purpose of plagiarism.ARTICLE…This Is Trump’s Fault…Written for The Atlantic, By David Frum.© MANDEL NGAN / AFP / GETTY“I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.“Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.”“The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.”“That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the pre-crisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.”“The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.”“For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.”Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.“The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 and March 21.”“Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.”© AP The US was late ordering medical supplies.“Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.”“Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer”.“This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country.”“It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond. Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.”© Reuters Donald Trump addresses the daily coronavirus taskforce briefing at the White House.“At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”“Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:”Chris murphy.Chris Murphy ✔ @ChrisMurphyCT“Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough”.“Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.”“Trump and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an excuse.”“But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason. The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran. Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over Tehran on January 8.”© Getty Donald Trump insisted at Davos in Switzerland in January coronavirus would be 'fine'.“The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18, Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping, The Washington Post reported.”“Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed in Washington State.”“Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the coronavirus as something external to the United States. He tweeted on January 22: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”“Impeachment somehow failed to distract Trump from traveling to Davos, where in a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he promised: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”“Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”“If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.”“Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.”“On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again, you know … that I closed the borders very early.”“Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.”“The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on January 30, but recommended against travel restrictions. On January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February 2, the Italian ban applied immediately. Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump.”“And Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.”“At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”“That same afternoon, Trump’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to combatting the virus, but to the demands of his own ego.”“The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally Roger Stone. On March 2, Trump withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller; McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. As the epigrammist Windsor Mann tweeted that same night: “Trump’s impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”“Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.”“BEST USA ECONOMY IN HISTORY!” Trump tweeted on February 11. On February 15, Trump shared a video from a Senate GOP account, tweeting: “Our booming economy is drawing Americans off the sidelines and BACK TO WORK at the highest rate in 30 years!”“became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program February 24. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”“We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.”“On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.”:“The reason you’re ... seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours ... This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.”“That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”“Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery. During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.”“If we were doing a bad job, we should also be criticized. But we have done an incredible job,” Trump said on February 27. “We’re doing a great job with it,” he told Republican senators on March 10. “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning,” he tweeted on March 18″.“For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.”“Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.”“Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus as “their new hoax.” That line was so shocking, it has crowded out awareness of everything else Trump said that day. Yet those other statements are, if possible, even more relevant to understanding the trouble he brought upon the country.”“Trump does not speak clearly. His patterns of speech betray a man with guilty secrets to hide, and a beclouded mind. Yet we can discern, through the mental fog, that Trump had absorbed some crucial facts. By February 28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length”:“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.”“One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”“But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement.”“So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA. It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to 100,000 people a year die.”“And so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”“On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”“By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first cases and halt their further spread—that opportunity had already been lost. It was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in sufficient time.”“But on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.”“So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.”“On February 28, Eric Trump urged Americans to go “all in” on the weakening stock market.”“Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.”“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of Coronavirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”“But the facade of denial was already cracking”.“Through early March, financial markets declined and then crashed. Schools closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.”“The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.”“The White House had dissolved the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics? Not me, Trump said on March 13. Maybe somebody else in the administration did it, but “I didn’t do it ... I don’t know anything about it. You say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”“Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call”.“Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.”“On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”“Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29”.“Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009.”“At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own separate stockpile. “They have to work that out. What they should do is they should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never happen.”“Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’”“Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.”“As his medical advisers sought to dissuade Trump from proceeding with his musing about reopening the country by Easter, April 12, Deborah Birx—the White House’s coronavirus-response coordinator—appeared on the evangelical CBN network to deliver this abject flattery: “[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit.”“Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for”.“The weeks of Trump-administration denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government”.“In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French officials accuse the Trump administration of diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven facilities for 70 years”.“Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead. Perhaps the only political leader in Canada ever to say a good word about Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, expressed disgust at an April 3 press conference. “I just can’t stress how disappointed I am at President Trump ... I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime minister or president from any country ever again.” Ford argued for a future of Canadian self-sufficiency. Trump’s nationalist selfishness is proving almost as contagious as the virus itself—and could ultimately prove as dangerous, too.”“As the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.”“He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining. Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. An Arkansas pastor told The Washington Post of congregants “ready to lick the floor” to support the president’s claim that there is nothing to worry about. On March 15, the Trump-loyal governor of Oklahoma tweeted a since-deleted photo of himself and his children at a crowded restaurant buffet. “Eating with my kids and all my fellow Oklahomans at the @Collective OKC. It’s packed tonight!” Those who took their cues from Trump and the media who propagandized for him, and all Americans, will suffer for “.“Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents”.“Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first”.“Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.”“Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head”.About the writer…Commentator David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He is credited with inspiring the phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.David Frum - WikipediaEXTRA INFORMATION…About this answer.There is no plagiarism involved with this answer, It is stated crystal clear at the beginning of the answer, exactly who was the author of this article, being Mr David Frum, a major speech writer for George Bush, and where the article was gained from. The article by Mr Frum has already gained over 20 thousand views, with over 200 upvotes, proving how popular it is with the readers. There is also information at the end of the article regarding the Author David Frum. So to consider it to be plagiarized is not plausible.To collapse or delete the answer, removes information which should be shared by the American people about the Coronavirus, Covid-19 Pandemic. Also about the American governments handling of it.ABOUT THE ANSWER BEING COLLAPSED…This article by David Frum is one of the most important ever to be written.An article containing the truth, concerning the dangerous Covid-19 Pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of over 100 thousand American people, and over a million World wide.This is also, a highly popular article…Having gained over 70 thousand views with over 704 upvotes, being shared by 82 people, including a mass of comments, within a healthy comments, debating section, gained in a very short period of time, proving how popular it was, and still is. Only a handful of people out of 70 thousand, who took the time to read the answer, complained or disagreed with the writer in the comments section about the article.Being collapsed, deleted, and re-instated, several times…When Quora collapsed this article by David Frum, one of the finest speech writers in history, with a message saying that “It may need improvement” they threw away one of the most important articles ever written, along with 70 thousand views, 704 upvotes, 82 shares and a mass of comments, within a healthy debating session.Thankfully, the answer is now restored, to where it belongs to be…Where the people can read it, and sample the truth, about how this Covid-19 Pandemic, has been handled by the American government, under the leadership of Donald John. Trump.Please enjoy a chance to read the truth…While Quora allow you to.Also…For an informative article informing…TRUMP THREATENS TO SUSPEND THE “WHO” WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION FUNDING…Plus more information on the handling of the coronavirus, COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S.A by Donald Trump and the Republican party, please visit the comments section below.

A mix of human nature, the psychology of conservativism, the nature of American politics, the power of corporate interests and moneyed elites, the “brand” of conservativism, and the very nature of political interaction.Before we proceed, let’s give the standard caveats: Yes, not all conservatives are panic-prone or think Obama literally wants to destroy America; yes, you can disagree with someone, even stridently, without accusing them of being unpatriotic or criminal; yes, there are an array of policies anyone can validly disagree with without hyperbole (I in particular dislike Obama being cozy with corporations, expanding drone strikes, failing to close Guantanamo, failing to truly go after Wall Street criminals and fraudsters, etc.); yes, liberals and leftists are not perfect exemplars of reason and humanity either, and we’re all flawed.In particular, conservativism is actually a combination of a few different things: a respect for tradition, either trying to protect it or go back to a time of tradition (even though going back to something is just as much a change as moving forward); a skepticism about change and a desire to change incrementally and slowly if at all; and specific right-wing ideologies at any given point in time. In America, there’s three right-wing strands of tradition in particular that interconnect at any given moment: a belief in the need for a powerful military and a strong focus on American security and/or power projection; a desire for small government (sometimes including a desire to roll back power to regional and local government); and a Puritanical religious idea that involves government enacting a particular interpretation of the Gospel, restricting behavior viewed as deviant or sinful, and elevating Christian ideologies (and often Christians themselves) over others.In theory, these various aspects of conservativism are distinct, but I think that they’re actually psychologically connected even if they’re logically distinct, which is why they tend to reappear together over time and space. Someone like Noam Chomsky can say that he’s a conservative because he is in favor of iterative and measured social change, but he doesn’t have much love for tradition, he believes in a forward direction of change and that we can improve on what we have, he believes in the improvability (if not the perfectibility) of human nature, etc.I highly recommend you read at least some of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, and his distinction between Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, Hamiltonian and Jacksonian politics. Conservatives in America tend to be primarily Jacksonian, with strong Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian wings, which is why the same party can favor massive policies to empower corporations and subsidize them and at the same time demand smaller government.Once you understand this psychology, it becomes easy to separate out the factors as to why people think Obama is destroying the country.One final proviso: Not every conservative will have each of these motives and influences to the same degree, or even at all, but the total sociological phenomenon to me is pretty clearly caused by these factors.White Male Christian Cis-Gender PrivilegeRemember how people freaked out about a military exercise in Texas, viewing it as a prelude to martial law, even though from 2000 to 2008 no one seemed to much care? Remember how, during the 2008 election, a man who went to Harvard had to honestly defend his educational record even when the other party was running a man who graduated near the bottom of his class?Obama’s election wasn’t the first time that some major aspect of the culture seemed to become more multicultural. But it was the first time that the highest office in the land looked, well, different. In reality, of course, the Obamas were perfectly milquetoast, more closely resembling the idealized Huxtable family than Cornel West (or even the real Cosby family). But they sure as heck didn’t look like the people before them for centuries: something in the complexion was a little different. Oh, and yeah, his middle name was the last name of a famous dictator. Barack Hussein Obama: not one part of that sounds “American” to people who had somehow been able to pretend that it was still the 1950s (or, rather, what they thought the 1950s was like).That was scary. It symbolically, subconsciously and consciously, reinforced for many that their control of the culture was gone. Atheists spoke openly about their beliefs. Muslims were part of the culture. Men like Mohammed Ali could turn their back on Christianity and white culture and embrace Islam. Gays were gaining the right to get married. What was once a popular culture that was thoroughly white now was thoroughly multicultural: rap, “Gangnam Style”, etc.When your reality is built on exclusion, when your sense of who you are and what you want is based on what others don’t have and the sense of righteousness that you’re the only person who deserves all the rights and all the wealth, any reminder that the opposite is actually the truth can make you feel like the world is ending.It’s tough for me to type this out. I hate to think of my fellow man as having such a shallow identity that it can be threatened merely by coexistence. But it’s the reality. When a conservative throws a tantrum that someone didn’t say “Merry Christmas” to them, didn’t give them a cup with their preferred religious festival prominently featured, and didn’t have a manger scene in a mall, they are saying, “Everyone else has to feature my religion, and it’s trampling on my rights if I’m not being treated special”. It’s a huge part of the Trump phenomenon: People wanting to be able to say “my African-American”, “my [or our] Jews”.As a Buddhist, I’m used to the idea that statues of the Buddha aren’t expected to be out there on Buddhist holidays. Hell, I don’t even know any Buddhist holidays, to no small degree because none are practiced around me. I couldn’t ever get used to the idea that my religion would be on courthouse walls or on coffee cups: I had to accept that everyone else felt and worshiped differently. Christians in this country haven’t had to do that.See, if you believe in an America where your President will always be a white man in a business suit, Obama is going to destroy your America.Obama became a scapegoat for the fact that white Christian straight males didn’t get to dictate the terms of political and economic institutions or the pop culture anymore. And let’s be very fair here. Lots of folks in interviews who say that they want to back to the 1950s can concede that, yeah, the 1950s weren’t great for women or people of color. But what they want is the simplicity, the feeling of safety and of a lack of ambiguity in the world. MovieBob in his review of Superman (the original Richard Donner film) pointed out that, after the civil rights movement, people in the 1970s had come to accept that civilizational growth meant honoring people of color and women and lots of other groups. But it also meant, for many, accepting that chaos and imperfection was part of the world too, and that the world couldn’t be fixed, and that the optimism that it could was similarly part of those old days.Losing that optimism is a big thing. It hurts. (And yes, that loss of optimism is specifically racial: blacks in America are much more likely to be optimistic about the future than whites). And for many, they’d rather toss out the baby with the bathwater and get back the idea that they are central to the universe, powerful, big and deserving by trashing on others. At the very least, if they don’t do that, they can at least feel that the world is falling apart, and Obama caused it.NostalgiaCombine the above sense of prejudice and privilege with the natural human tendency to lionize the “good old days” and it’s easy to see how someone like Obama whose entire message was about progress, hope and newness, and who represented the vanguard of the new (in rhetoric much more than reality), could automatically make the old view him as a threat to their idea of the past.Obama’s Core AppealAnd, as we just discussed, Obama’s entire appeal is fundamentally anti-conservative. His whole message of hope, that “Yes we can!”, and so forth, may have been so empty as to be devoid of meaning (and, by the way, that bothered and scared people too, and rightfully so, since when someone sells you “hope” without specifying how they get there it is very reasonable to run very, very fast). But it was fundamentally an ethos of change: an idea that we can improve things and have the power to do so. When your ideology is based on the notion that you shouldn’t want the power to change things, it’s easy to view the opposite notion as armageddon.When someone presents themselves as a scion of change, it’s an open attack on the forces of tradition. When that person is running from the liberal wing of the liberal party, and when there’s a cult of personality emerging around him, it’s easy to think that that guy isn’t just a slick marketer but is actually quasi-dictatorial. After that, you just need to hear that Obama’s IRS was doing something sketchy, or that Obama is massively expanding the federal government in a new way, or that Obama seems to be telling people to monitor their neighbors, all fears that people expressed, and then you can see a dictator coming for you. Even without the racial aspects of fear, there’s valid reasons to be concerned up front.Standard PartisanshipAt this point we have to address the elephant in the room, the point I made to Tim Wise’s analysis “This Is Your Nation on White Privilege” that got me on national radio: in politics, we all tend to be irrational, tribalist and team-oriented.During the Bush years, plenty of liberals seemed to view Bush as the demise of civilization too. He would usher in a dark age of radical religiosity! He was getting us into disastrous wars that could threaten nuclear war! Patton Oswalt here compares him to Darth Vader, and in another comedy bit he did later he compared Bush to rape demons. Michael Moore certainly beat Bush around a lot.There’s a lot of nesting problems here. When it’s your preferences being undermined, it can easily feel like the end of the world. When you feel people aren’t listening, it’s even easier to exaggerate a little bit. Sure, many liberals in 2005 could admit that America would probably survive till 2008, and many conservatives in 2013 could admit that the world isn’t going to end too, but when you’re trying to get attention, sometimes you gild the lily a little.Moreover, everyone is prone to viewing a situation as a crisis. It’s actually a good thing in a lot of instances. I can concede that, sure, one more year of dumping carbon at the rate that we are in 2016 rather than some much lower amount may not end human existence. But starting now rather than later will make it easier, and incremental damage can matter. Conservatives think the same way about morality and other issues that I do about the ecology. Maybe gay marriage may not be the last straw that will usher in an age of anarchy and amorality, but why let it get close?So, yeah, “Obama is ruining this country” plays better for the media (who we’ll return to) and gets your base galvanized more than “I don’t think that it’s a responsible spending of money to massively expand federal involvement in our health care and I think it has scary implications for involving government in more intrusive aspects of our lives”. Extreme, hyperbolic positions tend to emerge in political discussions.Christian FearAnd religion has to enter the discussion one more time here. See, when you believe in an evangelical-type worldview, it’s very easy to believe that God will, very quickly and decisively, punish you. This is, after all, one of the most basic aspects of the psychology of religion: we can get control over the chaos by pretending the chaos is some kind of intelligence we can commune with and control.Remember what everyone said would come next if we legalized gay marriage, from God separating this country in two to bestiality and polygamy being legal? Those fears come from this Biblical notion of a God as a kind of disapproving father.And remember: The evangelical political movement in this country has always been associated with trying to protect white privilege. Even though Obama was Christian, the fact that he came from a black church that emphasizes a very different kind of Gospel than whites, the fears that he might be a Muslim, and his liberal and permissive notions of public morality… that seems apocalyptic to those who feel like God is inches away from punishing everyone all of the time.Cognitive dissonance makes us double down on those ideas. Oh, sure, God didn’t punish us this time… which just means it’ll be that much worse next time! Because Christians like this have so much investment in the notion that the universe is ordered and that tragedies must happen for a reason, accepting that maybe things are chaotic and bad things sometimes just happen would be incredibly scary, so they’d rather assume that we can keep the bad things away by good behavior.PsychologyIn this section, remember: I’m not trying to bash on conservatives. Psychology is complicated, the world is yet more so, and there are smart people out there of all sorts of ideological positions. Moreover, the relationship between IQ and partisanship is incredibly complicatedStill, it has been repeatedly established that conservativism tends to come from low-effort thinking. When we are scared, when we have limited cognitive resources to devote to a problem, when we’re rushed or hurried, when we’re misinformed, we tend to default to conservative ways of thinking. It makes sense: conservative ways of thinking tend to fetishize the past, which we know works (even if imperfectly). Similarly, a sense of purpose tends to make us more accepting of diversity.So a lot of conservative people, already predisposed to simplistic “us-them” thinking, are faced with something very different from what they’re used to, and their tolerance for diversity is challenged at the same time… it’s easy to see how this huge emotional surge of feeling under attack can come about. Add in the fact that a lot of people are getting used to the idea that they might be called racists or sexists or homophobes in public, something that is really new historically, and you get a clear defensiveness that can lead people to think that Obama is name-calling and demeaning everyone else. Throw in disingenuous politicizing and the real risks of terror and war that we all face which make it very easy for Monday morning quarterbacks to criticze the sitting President and you can see how easy it is to behave apocalyptically.The Media and the Republican EstablishmentFinally, we have to consider User-10383838478355536397 and others like him who point out, rightly, that the media isn’t a perfectly objective arbiter in all this.It’s no secret that FOX and the right-wing machine, from The Blaze to The Daily Caller on, are famous for incredibly poor research and incredibly dishonest reporting. (Not to say that CNN and MSNBC and the rest don’t pull some of their own shenanigans: more on that later). In that windtunnel, people are incentivized to be the nastiest and to scream the loudest.It gets especially bad when you consider folks like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Matt Drudge and the rest, the professional right-wing conspiracy theorists. Full disclosure: While Alex and I are obviously very different politically, I admire him sometimes, and find it hard to pin him down. But the things he says are routinely objectively insane, completely bereft of any evidence, and totally irresponsible and irrational. And he contributes to a worldview where there’s constant danger. If you’re in that world, the best you can say about Obama is that he must be a deluded clown of the New World Order… proof positive: he doesn’t acknowledge your delusions and he’s not shadow-boxing the phantoms you’re scared of.Big corporations don’t have much incentive to report on issues honestly. They’re massive conglomerates, often owned by very conservative people who are hobnobbing with other powerful individuals. Investigative journalism at that level is hard, expensive, exposes one to legal action and controversy, and doesn’t always pay off. Big corporations do better when they can advertise to and/or directly sell to affluent consumers. For all those reasons, even the more liberal-leaning media tend to have certain assumptions about the world that privilege the needs and interests of the rich and powerful (and, to a lesser degree, straight white males).In such an environment, the fact that every President before Obama, especially Bush, actually were much worse at threatening us to the end of life as we know it because they didn’t deal with the crisis of carbon emissions and pollution isn’t going to make it into the discussion a lot of the time. But letting on some crazy to talk about ranching rights? Sure, that’s fun! It’ll appease the cowboys!All of these factors are cyclical. When we tune into a political discussion, we sometimes really want to hear the other side get shredded. That’s a huge part of Trump’s success: he couldn’t debate the issues worth a damn, but he could name call like no one’s business. So ratings go up when you have yelling and shouting. Yelling and shouting happens to serve the agenda of those who own the cable networks. People come to accept politics is like that, so they vote accordingly. Crazies reacting to crazy news reporting take the craziness seriously, which means that absurd conspiracy theories that shouldn’t have lasted beyond a single news cycle keep on reappearing. We seriously spent years demonstrating that Obama was, in fact, born where everyone knew he was born in, and yet people still don’t believe it. Arms makers and military contractors love perpetual war, so Congressional Republicans tend to love taking donations from arms makers and military contractors (and love bringing jobs to their districts while being able to say that they support the troops), so those Republicans and their surrogates can come on FOX (which loves running ads for outfits that benefit from military spending) and say that Obama’s foreign policy isn’t sufficiently muscular against terrorists, so the audience can get angry and view this elitist black Muslim intellectual as being a danger to them.A Perfect StormPut all of these factors together, in the context of the biggest recession since 2008, where people were facing very real (if local) apocalypses like their home being foreclosed on or their job being lost and not being able to get a new one for months, and you get a real sense of malaise and anger. To me, that explains so clearly why people voted in Obama, then soured on him in 2010, then voted him back in for 2012, only to again see Republicans do well in 2014. It’s not just the fact that midterms tend to favor Republicans due to turnout: it’s the fact that, in a recovery as slow as this, people are just voting for any kind of change at all. I keep on referencing Trump because he is in every respect the anti-Obama, the mirror image, and again, a large portion of people are voting for him and voted for Sanders because they wanted any change at all. Obama looked like change. I bet in 2018 we’ll be at it again, because either candidate (Hillary or Trump) are not going to be the change people want to see, if they’ll be change at all.We do live in a scary world. We are really always at a very slight risk that most of humanity won’t make it till tomorrow, if our nuclear armaments’ safeguards fail. We are facing limited resources and a complex world. We’re facing a world where a few guys the world over can enact a plot and end up hurting Americans with bombs or planes or guns very quickly as a result. All of our aircraft carriers don’t keep us safe. And it’s a world both liberals and conservatives can get scared in. But we have to not let that ape brain of ours tell us that everything is about to fall apart, because when we act that way and react to everything like it’s an apocalyptic and imminent threat, we actually make such threats come into being.

I graduated from college and my family completely ruined the moment I’d worked so so hard for.After my grandmother’s death, my great aunt (her sister) tried to fill in for her. My grandfather too tried to take care of me as she would have. My mother worked constantly and my father was never around other to wake me in the morning.Fast forward to high school, I’ve never been closer to my grandfather and my great aunt and uncle. They were my surrogate parents. I started talking about colleges. I wanted to stay in my home state because I was madly in love with my high school sweetheart but my great aunt told me I simply HAD to go out of state for college. Not because the education was inadaquit in Oklahoma but because that act of taking that first step out of the nest would make me fearless in moving for jobs and striking out on my own. For those that remember your first time being a long way from your family and friends, it’s scary. But I did it.It not only resulted in the end of my 6-year relationship with my high school sweetheart - it started a war within my family. My father, who never paid child support after my parents split, swore he’d help me pay my rent with $300 a month. With my part time job and $30,000 in college savings, I assumed I’d be ok on paying my school and paying for my books and expenses. My father sent me maybe two or three checks to “help.” But my grandpa covered for him, so I never knew who was putting money in my account. It was just there.My first year went great. I was joining campus groups, made friends and found a better job on campus that was closer to my major field instead of working retail. It paid about $5 more an hour too. So I thought I could afford a better apartment in a safer area of town that wasn’t as noisey. I signed a lease and moved.That’s when I found out my grandpa was giving me cash and not my father. My grandpa was basically semi-retired and living on social security. I was furious. I voiced my anger to my great aunt and sudddenly was scared I wasn’t going to make it through school.My aunt told me (and I’ll never forget this) that I had to “expect money to be there.” I don’t know if it was the “Power of Positive Thinking” or what but I never understood that idea or what that even meant. I’m still not sure I do. I worked hard through high school, made money and saved. My mom put money in my savings for birthdays and Christmas. The three or so child support checks she did get also went in the account. When I was born my grandparents bought me mutual funds. That money was all I had and I thought it would be enough. That seemed like an absurd amount of money at the time.My aunt told me I had to call my father and lay it all out for him. He HAD to help. He promised. It was only $300 - not $3,000 for classes. But I was scared. I’d never “laid down the law” to anyone in my life. I was 19. Conflict seemed impolite. I’d been away from home for a little over a year and my girlfriend left me 3 months before. Without knowing, I also developed polycystic ovary syndrome and gained not a Freshman 15 but a Freshman 50. My clothes didn’t fit. My pants split in class one day. It was so humiliating. I was wearing sweatpants and elastic waist stuff I scored at Goodwill because I felt so big.I called my dad and asked if we could talk. He was at work and said he’d call that next morning after - which was usually 7am. I got up at 6 to shower and get ready for school and waited for his call. It never came. My first class was at 9, so at 8:30 I dashed off an email to him explaining the situation.I basically told him, my grandpa told me he weren’t helping anymore but I need him. “You promised. You’ve got to help. If anything I just need some new pants.” Etc etc. I tried to lay down the law in the only way I knew how. I tried to be light. Tried to make a joke. Explained I wasn’t partying or out drinking.While in class, apparently a storm of insanity was breaking. My father had gotten the email and decided I was obviously an out of control, bratty teen making irrational demands. I came home to 10 messages from family on my machine. I called my grandfather first. “If you had said those things to me… I don’t know what I would have done.” I was confused — I didn’t say anything bad. I read him the email and he told me it wasn’t what my father said that I had sent him. My father had a different story. I was confused. I called my aunt, who told me she was on a deadline and couldn’t talk to me but would call that night.When she did, I was told how horrified and disappointed she was. I told her I was just trying to do what she told me to do. “You told me to lay down the law and expect money to be there.” She told me, and I’ll never forget it, “I never said that! Goodbye.” hung up the phone and we never spoke again. Other than my grandfather, I lost my family that day. God only knows what he told them I said or did. 10 or so years later, a distant relative told me my father was tellingmpeople I was “Conning” everyone and that he, my mother, grandfather and aunt and uncle were all sending me money. I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion, but it wasn’t true. But whatever it was, I became an enemy.I made it through school taking out $40,000 in loans, working 3 jobs, taking night classes and doing my general ed requirements at a community college that considered me an “in-state resident.” I got scholarships to pay for internships and got to connect with the governor and her campaign advisors who became mentors. I quit for a semester to do a paid fundraising job on a Congressional campaign. And my final semester my mom wanted me to graduate so badly she paid my rent so I could take my last 24 credit hours all in one semester and graduate in 5 years. I made all A’s and C (damn foreign language.)I designed my own invitations to graduation with the school seal, state seal, and Congressional seal on the front to signify I was going into government and politics to save the world and help others. I sent invitations to the family that had disowned me as a way of saying, “see… I did it.” I wasn’t searching for gifts or money but some sent them. My great great aunt who died the next year crocheted me this amazing blanket I cherish with rainbow yarn.I assumed my father, aunt and uncle wouldn’t come. They did. As I walked across the football field hugging professors and mentors who lined up beside the graduates, missing my grandma, who would have been so proud of me, my cell phone rang. It was my aunt saying she and my father were there. I started sobbing. It turned the happiest moment of my life where I felt so much pride in myself and thankful for those who stuck by me and helped get me there, all back into the absurd family drama. Worse, I was naive. I wanted to believe they were there because they loved me and wanted me back in the family. Later I found it was more that my father wanted us all to go to counseling so I could “fix” what I’d broken. It was still “my fault.” And I needed to accept that if I wanted to be loved and brought back in.It’s been 10 years - we still don’t speak. I’ve been lucky to create my own family with friends and in my mother’s second husband’s large family, which welcomed me with open arms. But I carry this heartbreak I can’t shake — even a decade later. I’m slow to trust. It’s made having relationships difficult because I always assume I’m not really loved and I’ll eventually be abandoned. I isolate myself sometimes out of fear that I’m not perfect and thus shouldn’t talk to anyone that day because it might end a relationship I value. I’ve obviously done a lot of therapy, but she’s among a very few that know this story I can’t seem to navigate. Very few know how debilitating the fear is that I’ll lose those I love. I watch on Facebook as my cousin, who was like my sister, had a beautiful little girl that I’ve never held, much less met. When my grandfather’s health declined, I hoped the family would rush to visit him as he was forced to stop driving and stop working at 83. Nothing. He chose my side, and they disowned him too.I’ve tried to turn anger and sadness into pity for a man who I understand now was obviously troubled. I did try to reestsblish the relationship with my father a few years after graduation when I was working a job that had a long commute. I’d call on the way there. He would hardly say a word. Like he didn’t even want to talk to me. Once he said he’d only accept me if I made things right with my aunt. She said she’d only accept me if I made things right with him. I felt manipulated, like it was all a cruel joke. So I finally gave up. That was another accomplishment - but a heartbreaking one. I accepted my family didn’t love me anymore and no matter how hard I tried, my father would never want me. That too was a miserable psychological accomplishment. But it was freeing in a way.Accept the things you can’t change - the things you can - and the wisdom to know the difference.Hug your family this holiday season and every time after. There are so many who don’t have families and face heartbreaking isolation. I’m lucky I’m not alone anymore — others still are.