Current Events > Has Trump handled COVID-19 worse than Reagan handled HIV/AIDS?

(+) Yeah! (+)

What a disaster.

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One is much more communicable than the other so the difference between a bad response and a good response is much more pronounced.

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One called it a hoax while the other one wasn't prepared for it.

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Reagan literally laughed about gay people dying of aids

both of them are completely trash human beings

stop slurping up reagan propaganda

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They're both awful.

There are videos where you can hear Reagan's administration laughing and making "fairy" gay jokes about the people dying of aids.

Most people here aren't familiar with how awful his response was.

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Reagan was worse. That was actual malice fueled by his close relationship with the religious right.

This is more ignorance. Which is still terrible.

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Paper_Okami posted...

Reagan literally laughed about gay people dying of aids

both of them are completely trash human beings

stop slurping up reagan propaganda

I hope I didn't come across like a Reagan stan. Reagan was evil. That's why I made this topic. I've been thinking about the AIDS crisis a lot lately with pride month and the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Reagan ignored it for 4 years. Trump has at least acknowledged corona exists.

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Reagan outright ignored the HIV and crack epidemics, promoted the privatised prison industry, closed state mental hospitals, dealt weapons to insurgent groups, ramped up jingoism.

Dude was an absolute piece of shit of a president and only better than Trump in the sense that he was charming and didn't speak like a complete dumbass.

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Reagan ignored HIV/AIDS when it was killing the "right" people, once it hit the straight whites he got real serious about it real quick.

Trump is ignoring COVD no matter who dies. It is legitimately hard to be worse than Reagan on anything, but somehow Trump managed it and even on one of Reagan's worse aspects to boot.

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Trump has handled it worse. Not only ignored it at first but tried to downplay the severity despite having access to information. Even now he was slow to adopt the simple and kind act of wearing a mask. He attacks school that would go online only during this crisis... Actively destructive.


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They're both bad but Reagan's ineptitude and stupidity were so deeply ingrained in festering homophobia and bigotry that it pushes him worse. Trump's failures are the result of his stupidity and pride, while Reagan's were because he and his administration refused to budge on his homophobia. And even took glee in seeing gay people suffer from it.

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Anteaterking posted...

One is much more communicable than the other so the difference between a bad response and a good response is much more pronounced.

Wetterdew posted...

They're both awful.

There are videos where you can hear Reagan's administration laughing and making "fairy" gay jokes about the people dying of aids.

Most people here aren't familiar with how awful his response was.

Both of those. Trump has done a shit job, but Reagan refused to even mention AIDS publicly for YEARS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAzDn7tE1lU

For context this video is clips of Reagan's administration answering questions about AIDS. They never took it seriously and Reagan didn't even deign to acknowledge HIV/AIDS for literal years. They're just laughing about it and making gay jokes the whole time. You can also hear the press yukking it up. Only one journalist was asking serious questions about it, the rest were just making gay jokes. It shows how messed up American culture was and how even the president of America embraced homophobia to the point of allowing a horribly painful disease to run rampant, the president is supposed to rise above that. He had no regard for their lives. Reagan would absolutely have taken it seriously if it had spread more among straight people. But because it mainly struck a beleaguered population, one that he personally didn't like, he decided to let them die while his administration joked with the press about the dying gays.

Also keep in mind that in the 80s, over 90% of the people who got AIDS died. Painfully. Still, nothing from Reagan, and nothing but jokes from his staff. He knew this was a deadly disease--but because he didn't like gay people, he didn't want to help. And he knew that America was homophobic enough for him to get away with it. And nowadays republicans idolize reagan.

Trump's administration is incompetent and accidentally complicit with but it's not treating victims of COVID with the utter disdain Reagan showed toward AIDS victims.

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Wetterdew posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAzDn7tE1lU

For context this video is clips of Reagan's administration answering questions about AIDS. They never took it seriously and Reagan didn't even deign to acknowledge HIV/AIDS for literal years. They're just laughing about it and making gay jokes the whole time. You can also hear the press yukking it up. Only one journalist was asking serious questions about it, the rest were just making gay jokes. It shows how messed up American culture was and how even the president of America embraced homophobia to the point of allowing a horribly painful disease to run rampant, the president is supposed to rise above that. He had no regard for their lives. Reagan would absolutely have taken it seriously if it had spread more among straight people. But because it mainly struck a beleaguered population, one that he personally didn't like, he decided to let them die while his administration joked with the press about the dying gays.

Trump's administration is incompetent and accidentally complicit with but it's not treating victims of COVID with the utter disdain Reagan showed toward AIDS victims.

Reading about the religious right's reaction to AIDS proves that there's no hate like "Christian love."

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^^Agreed with all of that.

And for those of you too young to remember, HIV/AIDS wasn't taken seriously as something anyone could get until Reagan was finally out of office-- largely due to Ryan White (a teenager who got it through a blood transfusion) and Magic Johnson. Even when Magic's announcement came out, there were all sorts of rumors that him getting HIV was supposedly proof that he was secretly gay or bisexual.