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.