It seems as if a plague comes around every time Donald Trump is elected to office. Or perhaps most accurately, it’s that Donald Trump’s incompetence as a leader of a government is seen very clearly when a plague comes calling.
So now comes mentions of the Black Death.
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Yes, the suspected plague case linked to a lab worker's death in Russia is caused by the same bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that caused the historical Black Death, a deadly plague pandemic that swept through Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353, killing up to 60% of Europe's population.
It seems fitting for Donald Trump’s second term, which has been giving off End Times vibes in various ways as he plunders our coffers and destroys public land while taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing and destroying the Kennedy Center because it’s not legal for him to put his toxic brand name on a memorial building for an assassinated president.
So yeah, it seems we might have a maybe plague, except given the lockdown on Russian news and the hold the government has on it resulting in propaganda churned out, sort of like Trump is trying to do here, it’s hard to know if there’s a plague or not.
Trump’s Word or Putin’s? How about Neither
But never fear! Donald J Trump is here. And he, who has shown himself to be a dedicated Putin lapdog of the highest order while pretending to be a strong alpha male, is going to “speak” to Russian President Putin about this plague/not plague.
"So far we are in very deep discussions," Trump said according to the BBC, saying he would report on his talks with Putin "probably" on Thursday.
However, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said no phone call had been scheduled.”
“The US, however, has issued a formal diplomatic message to Russia requesting additional information. Peskov told reporters he was not aware of such a request,” the BBC added.
So, Trump said he was in “deep talks”, implying the talks were already happening, but the Kremlin says there aren’t even any talks scheduled.
A Trump apologist will claim that Trump was referencing setting up talks, but that’s exactly the problem with Trump’s always unclear and contradictory speech and the some of the media’s willing stenography of it.
And who is responsible for Trump’s speech that leaves it open to interpretation? I’d argue that at 80 years old, the president can be held accountable.
If I were to follow current U.S. journalist protocol, I’d take Trump’s word for this and report both sides with no context, but that’s not what we do here, because it allows for easy manipulation and exploitation.
The context is that Russia can’t be trusted, but neither can the Trump administration, which not only has been busted lying in court to smear peaceful protesters and Olympians, but already showed us in his first term — during which, by the way, he had some competent people unlike 2.0 — that he won’t properly manage a pandemic because he’s too selfish to put American lives ahead of short term pain in the stock market.
The facts thus far are that on October 2, a 28-year-old laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia died after being hospitalized with severe pneumonia, following reports of an alleged accidental lab exposure.
International concern and a formal U.S. diplomatic inquiry were triggered after The New York Times reported on this death.
On Tuesday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency “has asked Russian authorities to clarify what caused the severe case of pneumonia that killed the 28-year-old worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute last week.”
It’s being reported that Donald Trump said he will speak to Putin about this incident, but his own words suggest he’s already in deep talks.
Either way, though, we can hardly trust Donald Trump to put even the slightest pressure on Putin to be honest about a potential plague incident, and even if Putin changed everything about his leadership style and was honest with Trump, we can hardly expect Trump to be honest with the public.
