To keep numbers low, Trump wanted to dump early pandemic patients at Guantanamo Bay

I’ve also thought that Pandemic was never designed with an agent provocateur in mind. Given how hard it is to win the game even with everyone cooperating, it’s easy to see how one small intentional misstep would cause every game to be lost. Waste even one turn at the beginning and you won’t be stopping anything.

It might be interesting to play a COVID-19 variant, where you have pharmaceutical companies trying to compete for business with incompatible vaccines; different countries pushing different agendas and prioritizing themselves above hotspots; resource shortages; and yes, an anti-vax role that saps resources and success.

Or that just might be the most depressing game ever.

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I’m certain they don’t see those as being incompatible: forcibly quarantine someone else who’s not them (yet), so they don’t have to wear a mask to a restaurant, which stays open.

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I realize that El Presidente is not what you’d call a rational actor in the conventional sense; but I’m still baffled as to how this seemed like a realistic idea:

If you want to transport by sea you need to deal with the logistics of collecting people in one or more coastal locations; then deal with the fact that as-the-crow-flies it’s a trifle over 500 miles from Miami to Guantanamo(realistically longer than that because it’s on the opposite side of the island); and large ships tend not to move all that fast (assuming fairly efficient loading and unloading you’d probably be looking at ~24 hours each way at cruise ship speed; and ships built for speed tend to sacrifice passenger space). For actual transport the current largest cruise ships in the world apparently come in under 8,000 passengers at maximum(no special medical provisions, obviously) (and I’m not sure how close those could get to shore, and so how long it would take to unload them).

If you want to go by air Leeward Point Field offers a single 8,000ft runway; should allow most airliners unless particularly heavily laden(which they probably wouldn’t need to be, since the trip is short enough to not require terribly heavy fueling); but that’s not exactly bustling international airport throughput.

Was this idea just steeped in profound innumeracy and/or complete lack of intuitive sense of scale; or was it the plan floated back when the party line was that the domestic caseload was a pittance, and definitely didn’t have any community spread, so could be kept that way so long as the diseased foreigners were held in check?

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Stephen Miller always played the virus.

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If this cruise ship had been on the other coast, they might have had a really shitty “three hour cruise”.

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That sums it up, really. All he did care about was getting re-elected and if he could do that in part by winnowing the number of people who could vote in places that were heavily democratic (large cities, bigger states that host lots of international travel)… :woman_shrugging:

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I’m sure this is just the tip of the orangeberg. They need to open up the books in all departments. Don’t wait for FOIA requests. They must have inspectors general going crazy to finding out all the damage the vandals have done. Turn over every rock.

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Hopefully they’ve replaced the ones that Trump removed.

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Christ, what an asshole.

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He’s the nuke the hurricane guy. Evidence suggests he is intellectually lazy and dumb, and likes to choose options that upset the apple cart, even if that makes the situation worse. He’s not a big picture guy, or a first, do no harm, sort of guy. ETA: If someone had said “we can contain this by bombing China”, he would have liked the idea, but wars are a lot of work and long hours, so we may have dodged a bullet.

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Yeah, but even the things he seems to care about (controlling the early case numbers), for his own selfish reasons, even those he quickly gives up on. Presumably it’s a combination of his short attention span, his lack of understanding of the situation, withdrawing his interest/attention from the situation when his own insane idea gets shot down, and, from what I’ve read, a fixation with some idea that he sticks with, even after the moment has passed and/or the idea’s been shot down multiple times.

Once covid got established, then he switched over to “it’s in the areas that don’t like me, so let them die” mode and not caring about the numbers.

Yeah, and with a short attention span, lack of understanding and curiosity how anything works and his narcissism throwing some extra spanners in his cognitive functioning.

I keep thinking of a story I read about Trump, I think when he was building his casinos. The building was fairly advanced in its construction and Trump walks in, looks at the ceiling, decides it’s too low and demands that the ceilings be raised. Everyone around him explains that was something that had to be decided in the planning stage and they simply can’t raise the ceilings. Trump finally accepts it. Another visit to the site and Trump makes the same demand all over again. They explain to him, all over again. This happens multiple times. Trump’s clearly had a lot of cognitive decline since then, but it’s clear he was always someone who had few thoughts, and when he has one, he can’t get past it.

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so instead, with half the players pursuing the alternate goal of “herd immunity” …

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There’s a bio-terrorist role in On the Brink

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I’m sure no one is surprised that Turmp made horrible inhumane suggestions 24/7, but that’s not why he sucked at dealing with the pandemic. Ruthlessness might even be an asset in a situation like that, if it were combined with competence (lol).

But Turmp could only understand plague the way he understands everything else, as an Us vs. Them conflict. So it’s about keeping out Chinese people, or making infected people into foreigners, or just defining it as un-American to have covid. The correct approach is to treat it as an Us problem, and that’s in direct conflict with Turmp’s mental cave-painting of the world.

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Yes. Also, some of the foot dragging may also have been that he was hoping it would stay a “Blue State” problem. From the Vanity Fair article on Kushner being in charge of testing and PPE:

According to another attendee, it seemed “very clear” Kushner was less interested in finding a solution because, at the time, the virus was primarily ravaging cities in blue states: “We were flabbergasted. I basically had an out-of-body experience: Where am I, and what happened to America?”

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