I’m kidding. Of course he will. I can’t imagine how, but he will.
Covid-19 is here. It got away. What they can’t say on TV directly, though CNN came very close last night on their Town Hall on the subject, is that it will not be contained. It’s in the general public, it is contagious before symptoms present and we are looking at millions infected, tens of thousands dead, need for 65k respirators for this alone, which is the entire stock of respirators in the U.S. This was the modest estimate, not the doomsday. If you’re older with underlying medical conditions you are at highest risk for the most dire outcomes. These are data points from the people desperately tryng to keep our government running while Rome burns. The professionals. The non-partisan grinders, day to day experts in their respective fields, all through government serving whatever administration comes their way. Providing the data. Don’t blame them. They aren’t part of anything “deep” within the government. Right now, they are desperately trying to save us.
Trump is burning it all down. Some celebrate this but we will all pay the price on the mishandling of this viral behemoth. It will touch us all with it’s effect on friends or family, and it will be completely indiscriminate. Will he still be a hero to his base when their dad dies, or is out of work so long he will never recover financially? It will get to everyone, and it could have been handled so, so much better.
I wrote about his defundiing key components of our front lines against these threats in a previous post. Now the focus is much more directed at how to protect the markets and his “reputation”. But the CNN presentation was the end of the canard, if you simply listened to the sober reporting of those without an allegiance. It was clear this was serious, it was going to be widespread, and we are seriously unprepared. We wasted months from the time we knew something was brewing in China that could get out of hand. The need for ICU beds will probably reach 200,000, double the number the U.S. currently has. We knew this. China built two hospitals in two weeks. We pretended it can’t happen here.
The bread crumbs lead back to the Administration in the inept response to something that will have such widespread and deep consequences for the country. I will acknowledge Chris Hayes for this, but I had mentioned the same analogy to several colleagues a couple of days ago. If you want to know what kind of a man our leader is in the time of a crisis, he has played his cards before. This is Puerto Rico Redux, only this time he doesn’t get to pick who he fucks over, and that, I hope, is the strategic mistake he has made.
Everyone will be equally abused by his cretinism, his lack of empathy, his narcissism, his incompetence. His role in the abysmal response to a national crisis will be obvious, and those who have lost the most will be least inclined to give him a pass, no matter how they felt about him before.
He can’t hide from this, right? We will all be unified in our horror at our mistake, how our anger made us stupid. We need a grown-up in charge when it gets up against it, don’t we? We don’t want to be lied to, do we?
Steve Wozniak said in a passing comment on CNN just now that “…it’s too late on this one…” and he’s absolutely right. It’s out there, and it WILL affect you in some way.
How will you defend him? He lied about it a week ago. Yesterday, today. He will lie about it tomorrow.
Maybe that cracks it open. If he will lie about that, maybe he lied about…never mind. Any list would leave out a hundred others that are just as egregious, and that’s the point. Maybe CNN wasn’t lying to you. Maybe the media isn’t the problem (not all of it, anyway, different post) and they have been trying to alert you to something that even my conservative countrymen will get screwed by. It won’t matter who you are.
We are in this one together, like it or not.
When the news stations show the maps of which states have reported cases, it isn’t even reasonable to see these maps as containment. It is merely the reportage of the unrelenting spread of the disease, unabated if largely untested for so far. It’s fascinating for that. Where are people mobilizing, interacting, importing, exporting? Where are people keeping to themselves, more isolated and self-contained. Fear not. There are enough go getters to sweep you up in our global contagion. Stay tuned. We’ll find you.
And yet, he will wiggle off. I don’t know how. No prognostications, no clue even. But something will be invented, a narrative crafted however contrived or crippled. A lifeline to the faithful, a preserver in a stormy sea. Somehow it will be enough for the faithful. It’s hard to be wrong. We all know that, if we’re old enough. It’s hard.
But enough will realize that to make a difference. They will see through it. They will see through alot of it, suddenly, knowing the fix is in and we are the mark.
Right?