Let me first apologize to my dozen or so regular readers for my extended absence. It may continue as I think I am going to be drafted back into employment very soon whether I’m ready or not, but we’ll see.
If the consequences weren’t so unbearably tragic, these recent days would be comical. Satirists would know they were on dangerous ground, at risk of being so ridiculous the point would be lost and their readers would dismiss them as hopelessly partisan and unfair.
None of the reaction to the President’s madness is partisan, save for those that continue to try to defend him. None of the facts have been manufactured, none of the quotes have been fabricated. All is well documented and most can be pulled up on YouTube for the visual learner.
We are being led by a madman. Well, not we. But his base is being led by a madman, and they love it.
Highlights? Well, a meeting of denying simpletons took place in Tulsa, OK. A crowd of 6-7000 mask-less cheering sycophants nearly wet themselves at the site of their Lord and Savior, Donald Trump. They all got great seats, though. The venue holds 19000 souls, give or take, so finding your perfect line of sight was rapturously simple. Social distancing was also easy, but that went unnoticed and unutilized. Packed together in what looked like a slovenly Unification Church wedding, they hung on every word of the Reverend Trump.
The week leading up to the first public indoor gathering in the United States in three months was electric with anticipation. The President assured the country that Tulsa would be gigantic, so much so that they set up a secondary location for overflow that Trump would personally address as well. Orange Julius told us that there had been nearly a million requests for tickets for the event, the built up passion and excitement of his silent majority spilling out for all the world to see, at last putting to rest the fake news of his precipitous descent in the polls. The campaign has begun, and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
The requests had actually come in, he was right about that. His expectations weren’t without justification. But the poor dunce had been punked. Young people from the Tik Tok and K Pop communities had sent in request after request for a place at the party with no intention of being within a states length of the event itself. He came to the stage in a state of rage and that led him off cliff after cliff of inanity, bigotry and other Trumpian characteristics, all to the delight of the meager but malleable crowd. He said that our Covid-19 testing efforts were too much, that the more testing that was done the more cases there were. He told the crowd he had told his people to slow down the testing. This was unassailable logic to the assembled minitued. Of course! Why hadn’t they thought of that!
Now they will. He said the virus had so many names that he didn’t know what to call it. He started by listing the familiar names provided by science, punching the words sarcastically as if they were a conspiracy of myths and lies, but when that wasn’t good enough he enlisted the audience to name the ones they had heard. One volunteered Kung Flu, and Trump repeated it into the microphone, nodding his head at the volunteer as if to say “Well done, good and noble servant.”
The President would pivot to the unrest in the streets, intent on characterizing these people as trouble makers and extremists. Protesters would be dealt harshly by the “Law and Order” president, and it wouldn’t be the joyride in Tulsa that it had been in Minneapolis or New York. The crowd went wild, ready to help meet out the new “justice” that has been invented by the Administration. “They’re thugs!” he assured the crowdlet, who long ago had come to that conclusion. They knew what the word meant, and they were ready.
Meanwhile, outside the echoing convention center, deconstruction was underway. The overflow venue had become a monument to the disaster that Tulsa had become, and this monument HAD to come down. It happened quickly as no crowds delayed or lamented its disappearance. There was a peaceful protest that went on, a few hundred people futilely trying to make those inside wake up, but it passed without incident until the indoor droning ended and the sea of red hats was released to the streets. Then it became tense. Trump had blamed the low turnout on the media (of course) and on the protesters outside who had blocked the entrances and forbidden access to the overwhelmed supportive crowd.
Nothing of the kind had occurred, and those inside had known that as they had been outside not long ago and managed to enter the half empty hall, but had been hypnotized into believing something other than their lying eyes and came out whipped up to punish these criminals. There were some dust ups, but for the most part the police presence managed to keep the warring tribes apart.
Trump left the event and boarded Air Force 1 and headed home, landing at Andrews and grabbing his chopper back to the White House. His arrival was met with a blanket of media coverage. As he appeared from the helicopter, he looked like he had just been turned down at a bar by every woman in it. Hunched over, clearly a beaten man, tie untied dangling nearly to his thighs, he gave a half-hearted salute to the marine at the bottom of the stairs and then stared at the ground as he shuffled painfully across the lawn, making sure he made no eye contact with anyone. His humiliation was too complete, too all encompassing, too public.
Too bad.
So that was Tulsa. Then came Arizona.
Just days later he was out of the White House again, flying to the southwest to inspect and promote the fictitious Wall. He had secured the Dream City Church in Phoenix, a mega MAGA church that was filled to the brim with nary a mask in sight. One good ol’ cowboy never removed his ten-gallon during the event in God’s own home. The President assailed them with the usual.
The story here was that Arizona is seeing their biggest spike of the coronavirus that they have had, cases doubling in the state in little over a week. It is one of the nations major danger zones right now along with Texas and Florida and others. On the day I write this the nation had its worst single day of new cases since this all began, eclipsing the previous record held in April. It is so out of control and so dismissed by this Administration that the European Union is probably going to shut down travel into Europe from Americans. It’s just too dangerous to let us mingle with them. While their mitigation efforts have largely been successful, ours have been tepid at best and led to the disaster that such lack of effort would predictably result in.
This is the environment that the President was rushing off to, a big room filled with the type of believers that define what is left of his base, ironically unable to believe they could be endangering themselves and those they love. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, says The Word. Knowledge is the response to the evidence of things seen, not hoped for. Sometimes it reveals what we don’t hope for in the least, but that doesn’t make it deniable. Faith was about to duel knowledge in a super-spreader event. Monkey Trial Redux. But faith had a secret weapon.
In March the criminally inspired Jim Bakker was sued for promoting a miracle cure for coronavirus. It was called the Silver Solution and its promoter assured the faithful that the government knew it had been successful in killing SARS and HIV. Four 4-ounce bottles should do the trick. $80. Though not punished, the efforts to sell whatever was in that bottle stopped, but others across the country had tried pushing colloidal silver, teas and other absurd attempts to become wealthy on the backs of desperation and gullibility and had also been shut down.
But Trump’s church allies would try again, and if you haven’t seen the video it is worth a watch. The pastor Luke Barnett and CFO (itself a self-parodizing title) Brendon Zastrow had installed the cure in their house of worship that had been developed by one of their parishioners. The air in the church would be ionized which the two announced kills 99.9% of coronavirus within ten minutes. The venue would be a safe zone, so come on down! One of the highlights of the announcement was watching the men try to pronounce “ionization”. It was a struggle.
Apparently the boondoggle succeeded, and there was not an empty seat to be found at the event.
Then they all went home to their friends and family, parents and grandparents, amidst one of the biggest outbreaks of the virus anywhere on planet earth.
So that was Arizona.
And then there was Washington.
Congressional testimony was heard today in hearings regarding Department of Justice oversight. What was being discussed was the politicization of the Department under the leadership of Attorney General Barr, and the witnesses had a lot to say, and there were some that didn’t like it.
The witnesses all had firsthand knowledge of what the AG was capable of, and why he was dismantling the rule of law. One of them was former deputy attorney general during two Republican and one Democratic administration, Donald Ayer. His testimony outlined how Barr “desecrates and undermines” the rule of law by protecting Trump cronies and attempting to prosecute his enemies, making the Department an arm of the Trump campaign efforts.
Representative Louie Gohmert, a former judge from the great state of Texas who is in his eighth term for his proud district, found the testimony offensive and simply had to do something about it. He began to bang on his desk repetitively, making the testimony very difficult to hear and harder to understand. Bang bang bang bang bang, ad nauseum, until someone pointed out that the hearing was not in order, and Chairman Adam Schiff agreed and told the congressman to desist. Gohmert responded there is no House rule against making noise. Essentially the “you can’t make me” defense.
There are a little bit north of 30% of the public that think what Gohmert was doing was a crushing act of defiance against the deep state. They applaud his childish reduction of our government into playground antics, and think this is the way to victory in November.
One of those is Donald Trump. While the rest of us watch the polls record the public gradually turning away from his hateful antics, he has doubled down. Apparently he feels his message is simply not getting through. We don’t understand that black people are dangerous and coronavirus is not, so he will remove any semblance of subtlety to make absolutely sure we understand. He hasn’t been clear, the nuances too disguised.
For those of us that see this, that understand the cancer that has taken hold of the Executive Branch and metastasized to the rest of the GOP, it is impossible to understand. This is the moment that he should pivot, find a way to connect to all the souls he has damned, reach out to them and bring them into his camp. That is the norm in politics, the conventional wisdom, and though typically disingenuous and not reliably effective, it is a better strategy than intensifying the offensive behavior.
But Trump isn’t conventional, no sir! He’s a maverick, an outsider, a seismic mover and shaker, the unstoppable force.
He believes this. He is counting on it.
But his walk from the helicopter tells a different story.