President Donald Trump doesn’t care about ventilators or saving lives. He cares about deals and he cares about winning, and to Trump winning is all about threatening his opponent, decimating his opponent, then using that to make himself feel strong.
GM teamed up with a ventilator manufacturer and announced they could produce 40,000 ventilators, at a cost of $18,000 each, according the The New York Times.
This should have happened months ago, in January, when scientists and medical experts were sounding the alarm that the coronavirus would hit the U.S. and hard.
The Trump administration not only ignored the warnings but ignored the 69-page pandemic playbook, while the president worked overtime to downplay the impending crisis.
Now FEMA is balking at the projected cost, and taking some time to think about it, as every hour more Americans get infected, and every hour more Americans die, some literally gasping for air.
The Times reports officials at FEMA now “are examining at least a dozen other proposals,” and “needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive.”
Barely more than 12 hours ago President trump told Sean Hannity, “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”
“You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”
Minutes ago, Trump – for whatever reason – decided to an about face. A full 180. A flip flop.
It’s about time.
He’s found his latest target: GM, the company that agreed to make the ventilators.
“As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out. They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, ‘very quickly,'” Trump tweeted, falsely. It was 20,000.
“Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar,” he said, looking to pressure them into making a deal.
“Always a mess with Mary B,” he added, referring to GM’s CEO Mary Barra, who happens to be the first woman CEO of a major auto company.
“Invoke ‘P,'” he added, in an odd reference to the Defense Production Act.
That, of course, is a threat.
But companies know he won’t invoke the Defense Production Act, despite pleas from governors across the nation.
Trump then went further:
Bottom line: America needed the ventilators months ago. It’s time for Trump to stop making deals, stop looking for a bargain and a victim and get this done now.
Because people are dying.