By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
"Hunter" of Daily Kos isn't sure why the soon-to-be former president nixed a plan for top White House staffers to get the coronavirus vaccine pronto.
"So either the White House...realized that the optics of redirecting vaccine shipments to Team Donald Trump looked particularly crappy even for them, or Donald and/or a Donald devotee got wind of the plan and got personally outraged because a scurry to vaccinate White House staff very much does not square with the White House's policy of pretending that the pandemic is of no particular danger to anyone," he speculated.
Optics is the essence of the grifter-in-chief.
Trump's just another millionaire elitist who was born rich and grew up on Easy Street. But he pulled off the biggest con in American history by scamming a slew of blue-collar working stiffs into voting for him.
Trump's notion that only rich prople count hearkens to the Robber Barons. But while he tried to gull the toiling masses into thinking that he was their guy, most of the old plutocrats openly worshipped at the altar of social Darwinism,. That was a gospel of greed which held that if you were poor, it was your fault, that unions made workers lazy and that workplace safety laws were unnecessary because they only preserved lives and limbs of the unworthy.
Trump strove mightily to hide his social Darwinist side. He welcomed miners and factory and construction workers to his rallies, but as props to stretch the scam.
He promised he'd "bring back coal," rebuild our infrastructure and make shuttered factories hum anew.
Coal didn't come back, nor did a slew of good-paying factory jobs, even before the coronavirus pandemic. Most jobs created on his watch have been lower-paying, non-industrial jobs.
Meanwhile, Trump and toadying congressional Republicans, notably sycophant majority leader Mitch McConnell, teamed up to cut taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations.
Trump's hustle included elevating the all-American baseball cap as his campaign symbol in 2016 and again this year. "Make America Great Again" was stitched in white letters on the red headwear.
The MAGA cap was the perfect metaphor for his fleecing the working class. Many, if not most, of the caps were Chinese-made.
The same label was on the Donald J. Trump Collection, his line of menswear.
While he stumped the country, especially in high unemployment communities with shuttered factories, he vowed to staunch the flood of US jobs to China and other cheap labor countries overseas, he was making a bundle off Chinese-made duds.
Trump's populism was as phony as his hair hue. The whole thing was a schtick, carefully calculated to mask what he really is: a liar and a cheap hustler of the I've-got-mine-screw-you persuasion.
Trump counted on working stiffs not to read the MAGA hat labels. More importantly, he figured they--especially those who pack union cards--wouldn't take a gander at the platform he won on.
Here are some planks they might have found interesting:
"We will restore the rule of law to labor law by blocking ‘card check,’ enacting the Secret Ballot Protection Act, enforcing the Hobbs Act against labor violence and passing the Raise Act to allow all workers to receive well-earned raises without the approval of their union representative. We demand an end to the Project Labor Agreements; and we call for repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act, which costs the taxpayers billions of dollars annually in artificially high wages on government projects. We support the right of States to enact Right-to-Work laws and encourage them to do so to promote greater economic liberty. Ultimately, we support the enactment of a National Right-to-Work law to promote worker freedom and to promote greater economic liberty. We will aggressively enforce the recent decision by the Supreme Court barring the use of union dues for political purposes without the consent of the worker.
"We salute the Republican Governors and State legislators who have saved their States from fiscal disaster by reforming their laws governing public employee unions. We urge elected officials across the country to follow their lead in order to avoid State and local defaults on their obligations and the collapse of services to the public. To safeguard the free choice of public employees, no government at any level should act as the dues collector for unions. A Republican President will protect the rights of conscience of public employees by proposing legislation to bar mandatory dues for political purposes without the consent of the worker."
On the campaign trail, Trump said he preferred "right to work" states to non-right to work states. His running mate, Mike Pence, is also gung-ho for RTW.
A House flip to the Democrats in 2018 kept Trump from getting any chance to sign a national RTW law and ink bills to axe PLAs and Davis-Bacon.
But his administration sided with the victorious plaintiff in the union-busting Janus case that put all public employees in a RTW framework.
At the same time, Trump also stacked the NLRB with union despisers. Too, he turned the Labor Department into the anti-labor department. Labor secretaries and their lackeys slashed OSHA enforcement and fines.
Here's more from Hunter:
"In any event, an irony here is that there are very good reasons to vaccinate top government officials with particular speed now that the vaccines are finally being distributed....
"On the other hand, there is something undeniably sketchy about redirecting initial vaccine doses to a crowd that continues to willfully expose itself to the virus being vaccinated for, which has shown absolute contempt for safety measures, which has encouraged their followers to rebuff the same, and does all of this solely because the delusional man-child they call their leader becomes irate if he sees an underling undermining his own message that Americans need not worry about the pandemic raging around them.
"Shouldn't the first doses of the vaccine at least go to people who have been trying to avoid the virus?"
Shouldn't they indeed?