Ninety-one-year-old former MIT linguistics professor, father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky lashed out a President Donald Trump over his handling of the coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19 crisis. Chomsky relished during his career at MIT stepping out of lane to opine on left wing causes, railing against capitalism, unpopular wars, the military industrial complex, Wall Street greed, failed health care, drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and, more recently, global warming. Chomsky takes up any cause as long as it pits himself against conservatives and Republicans. Now an emeritus professor at University of Arizona in Tuscon, Chomsky rarely turns away interviews, especially if it gives him relevance in his old age. “There’s no coherent leadership. It’s chaotic,” referring to 73-year-old President Donald Trump approach to the coronavirus crisis.
Chomsky wouldn’t care if Trump spent every waking minute on the SARS CoV-2 espidiemic, holding daily press conferences with his Coronavirus Task Force isn’t enough for Chomsky. “The presidency, the Whites House, is in the hands of a sociopathic megalomaniac who’s interested in nothing but his own power, electoral prospects—doesn’t care what happen the country, the world,” Chomsky told Agence France Press [AFP], sheltered in place in Tuscon. Chomsky’s vitriol is well known to conservatives, dating back to the Vietnam War, where he often went off his liquistics’ script to weigh in against President’s Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. But his level of hatred of Trump breaks new ground in Chomsky’s disinhibited state, now that he’s out of the mainstream, retired without much audience. Like 85-year-old Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader, Chompsky finds himself sidelined.
What makes his recent attacks so egregious is the name-calling, much like the anti-Trump psychiatric community, throwing around fake diagnoses for Trump because they don’t like his brand of conservative politics. Calling Trump a “sociopathic megalomanic” tells Chomsky’s state-of-mind, sitting on the sidelines without much audience. “The president himself has said that the it’s none of his business. He’s said that the federal government can’t do anything,” Chomsky insisted, grossly misrepresenting Trump’s response, mobilizing the 1960 Defense Production Act [DPA] to command various industries to build more Persona Protection Gear [PPG], ventilators, pushing the FDA to fast track off labels medications, paying millions of federal dollars to develop a vaccine at the earliest possible time. No, to Chomsky the federal government under Trump has done nothing.
Without his MIT pension and book royalties, Chomsky wouldn’t sit on his high horse condemning everything Trump. “As soon as Trump came in, his first move was to dismantle the entire pandemic prevention machinery. At the start, defunding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would deal with this,” Chomsky said, confusing the Homeland Security’s Pandemic Prevention Unit set up by former President Barack Obama. Trump had no say or control in funding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, something Chomsky knows little about. Yet to Chomsky, Trump slashed the CDC’s budget, something that never happened. To a reporter from the foreign AFP, they know little of American government, how it works and the way in which it’s funded by Congress. “There’s 90,000 deaths [actually 99,300] and there will be a lot more . . .” likely to top 100,000 by Memorial Day.
Chomsky told the AFP that Trump cancelled programs working with Chinese scientists dealing with the coronavirus global pandemic. “And canceling programs that were working with Chinese scientists to identify potential viruses. So, the US was singularly unprepared,” Chomsky charged. Yet Chomsky doesn’t know that the Chinese refused to cooperate with America and European Union [EU], preventing inspections teams from going to Wuhan, China to see how the virus started, jumping borders to a global pandemic. Chomsky says nothing about the World Health Organization [WHO] keeping China’s dirty secret of China’s spiraling SARS-like epidemic in Nov. and Dec. 2019, preventing the world from taking action to stop the spread of the coronavirus to other countries. No, China, not the U.S., kept its dirty secret, letting millions of infected Chinses tourists travel to the U.S. and Europe over the holidays.
Chomsky’s the perfect person to report back to Europe what’s happening with the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. Trump isn’t too liked in Europe for canceling U.S. involvement in the Nov. 4, 2016 Paris Climate Accords, a largely symbolic agreement trying to get gross polluters like China and India to produce less carbon emissions. Since Chomsky first stepped out of lane during the Vietnam War, he’s been bashing U.S. foreign policy, pushing a European-style socialist state on the United States. What’s sad listening to Chomsky’s criticism is how utterly misinformed about how China unleashed plague on the world with WHO complicity. He sees Trump as a composite of all his past capitalistic enemies that brought him his cushy retirement from his linguistic career at MIT. With no understanding infections disease—or the U.S. economy—it’s easier for Chomsky to blame Trump.
