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Ambush at the ABC Corral

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A rough week got even rougher for the Donald when the CDC threw a wet blanket on his plans to roll out a vaccine next month just in time for the general election.  Dr. Redfield doesn't see a coronavirus vaccine being made widely available until the middle of next year, which of course led our SCROTUS to lash out at him on twitter.  What's worse for the Donald is that the leading pharmaceutical companies who are in a race to produce a vaccine say they will follow the CDC guidelines when it comes to testing their products to determine their efficacy.  So, unless Dr. Hydroxychloroquine has a magic serum up his sleeve or Trump can get the FDA to approve Putin's Sputnik V, the Donald's October Surprise is effectively scotched.

According to our SCROTUS it doesn't matter anyway, as we will all have "herd mentality" by the end of the year and we won't need a vaccine, or masks either.  This was one of the many jaw-dropping moments from his Town Hall debacle where he was forced to field questions from the public for the first time in his administration.  Laura Ingraham proclaimed it an ambush when voters asked him very basic questions that he was woefully unprepared to answer.  COVID Barbie tried to undo some of the damage the next day by saying that "herd mentality" is a medical term, but Fox news reporter Sandra Smith was having none of it. 

The problem is that Dr. Donald thinks he can fake his way through anything.  He refuses to read his briefings, which Bob Woodward and many others have noted in their books, relying on the manufactured opinions of Fox and other conservative news outlets for his information.  He refuses to accept that global warming is resulting in increased wildfires on the West Coast and hurricanes on the East Coast.  He doesn't even know that the jurisdiction of national forest lands falls to the federal government not states like California, Oregon and Washington, where many of these fires have sprung up.  Even as state agencies fought these fires on federal land, the Trump administration refused to cover the costs, repeatedly blaming bad state management instead.

This led Joe Biden to make an impromptu appearance on national television calling the president a "climate arsonist," because of his inability to grasp the root cause of these fires and hurricanes or do anything meaningful about them.  Biden went on to lay out a comprehensive strategy to fight climate change, which has resulted in the endorsements of several major science agencies and periodicals, including Scientific American, which had never before endorsed a presidential candidate.

No bother, Trump and his staff want you to believe that all the scientists and doctors are plotting against the President, as part of a worldwide conspiracy to unseat Trump.  This after it was discovered that Michael Caputo, the communications director at Health and Human Services, was altering reports from the CDC to make them more favorable of the dubious theories the president has been promoting.  

Judging from the ABC Town Hall on Tuesday, voters are fed up with Trump's misleading views and lack of action on coronavirus and everything else.  One diabetic man who said he voted for Trump in 2016 was particularly brusque on the president, catching the Donald totally off guard.  

Joe Biden will have his chance tonight to once again cast himself as the diametrical opposite to Trump, as he did in his Delaware speech on Monday.  This time he will be subject to the scrutiny of voters.  Let's see if he survives the "ambush."

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