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Each day, I swear to myself, today I will not spend inordinate amounts of time writing about trump, and, each day, I hear of another outrageous thing he has done, is planning to do or has tweeted about.

Last Friday, my peaceful morning was upended when I heard of trump’s directing OSHA to cease requiring employers to notify the government of suspected cases of coronavirus among their employees. Doubtless his ‘intuition’ had something to do with that bit of genius planning since it flies in the face of common sense and, of course, ‘science.’

Yesterday it was an article saying trump doesn’t want to save the postal service from bankruptcy, ostensibly because of his feud with Amazon. Destroying the postal service might be a swell idea, particularly if you have friends you could position to profit from its privatization in exchange for funding to help float your re-election efforts.

This morning was a double whammy—after discovering trump’s tweeted indications he might fire Dr. Fauci, I then learned disturbing details concerning things the president said at last Friday’s edition of his dreadful daily ‘briefing’ when he revealed his continued ignorance of the nature of viruses. I’ve largely stopped watching these unbecoming displays of presidential pomposity and pitiful self-promotion as a matter of personal protection. Wouldn’t it be nice, I’ve lately found myself thinking, if he’d just take a break and go play golf for a while?

But no! Never one to miss a chance to blow his own horn, no matter how inappropriately, at Friday’s gathering of reporters regretting their career choices, trump revealed his unfamiliarity with the way viruses work, as reported in the British online news outlet, the Independent, when he said, during his daily virus briefing turned campaign rally, “Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.”

Upon hearing this saddening bit of trivia’s opposite, Walter Shaub, former director of the government’s Office of Ethics, wrote “Trump says that this ‘germ’, meaning the virus, is especially ‘brilliant’ because it can’t be stopped by antibiotics, which work only on bacteria and not viruses. Now might be a good time to tell the people close to you that you love them.”

In the same briefing, when asked what metrics he would use to decide when the country can be re-opened, trump said, while pointing to his head, “the metrics are right here.”

Also, in that Friday briefing the president more than once described the virus as “a genius:”

A genius doing battle with a genius! How comforting!

trump said the virus is genius in “the way it’s attacked so many countries at so many different angles.” Come to think of it, that’s much the way he himself has proceeded in his attacks on our governmental institutions.

As the pressure continues to build among trump’s most vocal business leaders to open the country back up for business, the likelihood of his doing so prematurely grows greater. If he does this, without provisions having first been made for mass testing and contact tracing to determine the true spread of the virus, which is almost certainly greater than that known today, a resurgence of the pathogen is near guaranteed to occur. Additionally, given the length of time it would take to implement those safeguards, and considering the difficulties that would likely accompany efforts to secure the needed funding, this late in the game, such a resurgence would result in more needless deaths, thwart efforts to resume business and serve to prolong the length of time we all would have to hunker down in order to ‘re-flatten the curve.’

No longer content to remain simply the “emperor with no clothes,’ trump has now set his sights on emulating the Roman emperor, Nero, as he figuratively ‘fiddles’ while the country ‘burns’ around him. While not vexed by the demons that plagued Caligula, he surely has his own equally imaginary ones—the Deep State, the media, the Democratic party and Nancy Pelosi. He obsesses about these self-conjured misgivings despite a complete lack of evidence of their existence and has even gone so far as to incorporate this fantasy into his perennial re-election campaign, as he fans the fires of his fans’ fantasies with fearsome fakery.

One is compelled to wonder just how many coronavirus deaths it’s going to take for trump’s supporters to realize their boy is the cause of the problem and not its solution?

Tim Konrad

2020.04.13