The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped Donald Trump of his cover. Maureen Dowd writes in The New York Times:
Until now, Trump has mostly succeeded in covering up things that could damage him — from taxes to payoffs to paramours during the campaign to blocking evidence and witnesses in his impeachment to his conversation with Vladimir Putin where the interpreter’s notes disappeared.
But a global pandemic is different.
He can’t cover up his lack of empathy, his instinct to mislead, his refusal to do his homework and his blame-shifting. And the idea that Trump could soothe a nation went out the window a long time ago.
He can’t cover up the fact that he is not interested in public policy fixes or ending his juvenile sniping across the aisle. After he woodenly said in his national address Wednesday that “we must put politics aside, stop the partisanship and unify together as one nation and one family,” he jumped back on Twitter to trash Barack Obama and Joe Biden, this time criticizing their response to the swine flu virus.
But, of course, none of this has changed Trump's behaviour:
Even when the president stopped being so blithe about the virus, even after his error-ridden national address and his press conference Friday declaring a national emergency — “two very big words” — his attempt at maturity was crystallized in one sound bite. “No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said, when asked about the egregious lag in testing.
When Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked him about the valuable time lost because of that inexplicable decision [to disband the White House Pandemic Office] Trump bristled at the sound of a voice that dared pierce his cocoon of sycophancy.
“I just think it’s a nasty question,” he snapped back. “When you say me, I didn’t do it. We have a group of people. I could ask perhaps my administration” because “I don’t know anything about it.”
Trump is naked. And his ugliness is completely exposed.
Image: POLITICO Europe
6 comments:
Welcome to the world where you can't just say it all away. It was a good thing for the guys who served that Cadet Bonespurs' dad had enough money to get some doctor to say his kid's way out of the army should his number have been drawn.
I don't like this shit. It's all just too real. Isn't there another channel where we can go back to pretending everything's tremendous.
Serious shit!!
I admit to seriously underestimating the issue.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
TB
It would be nice to change the channel, John. Unfortunately, he's on every channel -- 24/7.
Thanks for the PDF, TD. The "most serious threat since the Spanish Flu." That says a lot.
We have been living in a medically remarkable and unusual period since the end of WWII. It doesn't take much reading of history to see this. We should be fighting like crazy to keep this medical freedom from infection going. It is a wonderful gift.
Idiots who refuse vaccination and despise science seem to be more at home in the Middle Ages or even earlier. But the rest of us who like modern life need to support science and the life of the intellect more passionately. I am weary of people who find reading anything "boring". All that means usually is that they are incapable of reading at an adult level with any ease or enjoyment and are kind of proud of it.
People don't believe it but there are lots of semi-literates around with no reading endurance, lousy vocabularies, extremely slow reading speed, lousy memories so they have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time they grind their way laboriously to the end. And I don't mean old people.
There are lots of people who can barely read and who know nothing about science, ffd. That kind of ignorance makes fighting a pandemic very difficult.
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