Ignore Trump

The domestic Dear Leader is resuming coronavirus press conferences. Apparently he thinks it will help his popularity, which has taken a beating recently.

Much as I personally wish otherwise, we can't shut him up. Nor can we keep news outlets (or outlets that propagandize under the guise of delivering news) from covering him.

What we can do, though, is to ignore his gibbering.

It's not just that what he says is frequently unintelligible, or that the little that is intelligible is generally wrong, often catastrophically so. (Using bleach internally, anyone?)

Worse is that gratifying his desperate need for attention simply distracts us from doing the things that can be done in the absence of any coherent federal assistance or coordination. We need to preserve our energies and time to help one another, not to rage, however justifiably, against his latest inflammatory and/or boneheaded remarks.

Between his car crash of an interview with Chris Wallace (for which CNN's Chris Cillizza provides a helpful list of the lowlights) and his autocratic declaration that he will send more unidentified federal law-enforcement personnel to various cities (all of them under Democratic leadership, curiously enough) to quell what he deems unrest, Trump has shown himself to be, if not totally unhinged, less hinged than ever.

What we see, in fact, is a man of limited intellect and even more limited emotional control, flailing and failing to come to terms with multiple crises. These crises — the pandemic, systemic racism, a collapsed economy, and (for him the most important) his endangered reelection — were not entirely of his own making, save, perhaps, for the last. However, he has unquestionably worsened every one of them, by a lot. No sane, emotionally balanced, humane person would make the unforced errors Trump apparently can't stop himself from making.

His resumed coronavirus press conferences promise more of the same misinformation, distraction, and pathetic, empty boasting as before. After all, he is incapable of doing the work that a true leader would be doing at a time like this, so he has no truthful good news to deliver.

But the fact that you will learn nothing useful from him, and indeed, may come away less intelligent than you were before watching him, isn't why you should ignore him. It's not the only reason, anyway.

We all should ignore him simply because it's unkind to gratify the childish attention-seeking of a mentally diminished old man who insists on making a piteous spectacle of himself in public — even if he is the president.

Trump keeps failing the response

When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, he repeatedly claimed that the rest of the world was laughing at the U.S. That was, of course, not true except in his own messed-up head.

At least, it wasn't true in 2016. In 2020, well, that's a different matter.

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-Un have had many reasons to laugh, not just at this country but at the domestic Dear Leader in particular. It's easy to see why: they all have benefited tremendously from the dDL's gullibility, stupidity, and childish fragility.

Much of the rest of the world, especially our allies, isn't laughing. They're watching us with alarm ... and deep pity. And we deserve that pity, those of us who have watched our own country with such horror. Perhaps no modern democratic society has so thoroughly been reshaped in the broken mold of its executive as ours.

Four months ago it was obvious that Trump had failed to marshal the government to fight the novel coronavirus.

Four months ago it was obvious. In early March it was obvious.

Everybody knows what Trump has done since then.

Nothing.

Guess what we're facing now? Shortages of vital personal protective equipment. Again.

Again!

And why? Because our emotionally and intellectually crippled president can't bring himself to face the ugly reality that on his watch, 140,000 people have died. (And counting.)

So he refuses to engage with that reality, preferring instead to gibber about fucking dishwashers and light bulbs.

At least Nero made music on that fiddle while Rome burned. Trump simply makes noise as we die.

Any other sentient human being would have invoked the Defense Production Act starting in February to gear up production of personal protective equipment and testing supplies. (The CNN piece doesn't discuss testing but oh Lord, testing supplies are also inexcusably lacking.) Even if that person had botched the initial response the way the domestic Dear Leader did, that person would have learned from that mistake and ramped things up in March, when much of the country was starting to shut down and shelter at home.

Trump? He couldn't be bothered.

And he still can't.

This administration's response to the pandemic has been criminally negligent. I mean that literally. When we get a new president — and that had better happen this November or we are all fucked big-time — among the many things that new president will have to do will be to pursue criminal charges against Donnie and his Cabinet for gross malfeasance. (If incompetence were also criminal, these amoral vermin would merit life sentences in prison.)

No one knows how many would be sick and how many would have died under a different president. We can, however, safely assume that the numbers of sick and dead wouldn't be anywhere near as grotesquely high as the 3.6 million (and counting) confirmed infected and nearly 140,000 (and counting) dead.

Hurricane Katrina used to be the benchmark for presidential catastrophes. Now, CoViD-19 will stand as the dreadful standard by which all future presidential failures will be judged.

And George W. Bush can rest easy, knowing that he has escaped the judgment of history as the worst president the United States ever had. Bush 43 looks like a paragon of intelligence and competence next to the ongoing colossal failure that is Trump.

The heartless Trump

The mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, frustrated by the federal government's inarguably ineffective recovery efforts to date, hurled a damning accusation: "We are dying and you are killing us with the inefficiency". She didn't name names (that I can see), but it's clear that acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke was one target. Duke claimed that the recovery effort from Hurricane Maria was, in many respects, "a good news story", and she has been taking figurative rotten tomatoes for that spectacularly wrong statement ever since.

Yet an attack on a Cabinet secretary is almost always an attack on the current president, too, and if there's one thing we can count on, it's that the unbelievably thin-skinned Dear Leader is always up for an unnecessary fight. In tweets (of course), he suggested the mayor was a Democratic tool, was showing "poor leadership ability", and that the people of Puerto Rico "are not able to get their workers to help" and "want everything to be done for them".

Oh, fuck off, you sorry, short-fingered son of a bitch.

You have no fucking idea what it's like to recover from a disaster.

You have no fucking idea what it's like to be hungry and thirsty and without a place to sleep.

You have no fucking idea what condition Puerto Rico's in or you wouldn't have fucking dared to shoot your tiny fingers off on Twitter.

You are a pampered, privileged, useless fucking waste of space.

The one thing the U.S. President is supposed to be able to do is to see to the needs of victims of disaster. It doesn't require extensive knowledge (thank God, since you have none about anything). It requires only the common decency to be able to put yourself in the victims' shoes, to imagine what it would be like not to be able to secure the most basic of human needs. Then, as President, you just have to make sure the first responders and support staff who do have specialized and extensive knowledge of how to help people can get in and do their job.

The federal government has people who can do the job. A lot of the supplies have reached Puerto Rico.

What the effort lacks is anybody with the authority or will to make shit happen.

Isn't "making shit happen" supposed to be a lifelong businessman's specialty?

What the fuck are you, our vaunted businessman president, doing? You're sure as shit not making anything happen in Puerto Rico. Only in your delusional dreams is aid reaching the people who need it.

But then, why should that surprise me? Puerto Ricans don't look like you and they don't have any money, so of course their fate doesn't matter to you. The fate of ordinary Texans and Floridians didn't, either, but you know a lot of wealthy folks in those states who are important to your political survival. It was nice to hear all those English-speaking Southerners saying nice things about the administration's relief efforts, and the visuals of them on cable news was not just a political boost but an ego boost as well, so, um, yeah, that all worked out. But it was really the rich donors who were on your mind. Puerto Rico's lack of such donors means the island — very much a part of the country you allegedly lead — just doesn't engage your interest.

Doesn't engage your interest, that is, unless somebody dares to tell you in the most public way that you're not doing your job. That gets your attention.

If you were an adult, you'd be more concerned about how well (or badly) the effort was going than what people were saying about you. But you never grew up. You're still four years old, only capable of understanding the world as it relates to you.

This failure to grow up left you emotionally deficient. You have a hole where your heart should be.

And that deficiency has had and will continue to have tragic consequences for the rest of us.