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Heather Cox Richardson, in her latest installment in her excellent online series “Letters from an American,” recounted the president’s experiment in social Darwinism in Tulsa yesterday, writing ”he told the audience falsely that the recent spikes in infections are because there has been more testing: ‘When you do more testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases. I said to my people, Slow the testing down, please.’”

In what moronic universe would logic like that find traction? One far different from that most of us inhabit, I reckon, and one, judging by the diminutive size of the turnout, far less populated, a rare sign of hope in a largely hopeless time.

When confronted with information like this, it becomes clearer why the president’s popularity continues to remain higher among the less educated, because anyone with signs of brain activity ought to be able to comprehend the abandonment of reasoning, the absence of logic necessary to draw such a mind-numbing conclusion. Only a three-year old could find assurance in such a word construct; any reflection would immediately shatter the illusion. And that is precisely what defines this man and is the sum and substance of not only his being, but his every doing.  

To say the president is clueless fails entirely to adequately describe the chasm of ignorance from which he proffers his poisonous propaganda, basing his entreaties on nothing more than the rabid rumblings of a man who senses his impending downfall but views doubling down on his failed messaging as his only path to redemption. As the deer-in-the-headlights stage of his decompensation draws nearer, as his already loosely hinged presentation loosens further, a picture comes slowly into focus of a nation whose government has been hijacked by an unreality star, a vision of what it looks like to have a truly crazy person, a bona fide lunatic, in charge of the fort. And, with a nutcase in charge, and one too distracted by his shifting fates to pay attention to what his underlings are up to, what mischief may occur in the gaping shadows thus created?

As difficult as the trump presidency has been up to this point, the next six months will likely pose challenges to our democracy the likes of which we’ve only dreamed of up ‘til now. The rule of law under our corrupted attorney general is experiencing a most pernicious assault at a time when we are engaged in a fundamental re-thinking of the role of authority in redressing rampant racial injustice. Common sense health advice is under assault by a president so obsessed with his lagging poll numbers he can’t manage to do much besides tweet incendiary comments that further fuel the growing fires of social unrest set alight by years of unchecked police brutality. The virus rages unchecked thanks largely to the anti-science stance trumpeted so ineloquently by the unmasked bandit in chief whose blustering buffoonery at the Tulsa Covid-Fest bore greater resemblance to the yipping of an aroused terrier than it did the commanding bark of a big dog.  And meanwhile, the movement to slow global warming languishes.

As the pace of revelations quickens with each successive news drop, the president’s sickness is made more manifest, made all the more alarming by the revelation that we—all of us—are not the unwilling observers we fancy ourselves to be; we are, by virtue of our membership in the social zeitgeist in which we find ourselves, a part of it, a part of the problem, a part of the reason this man was able to attain his position. His sickness is, in a real sense, our sickness, and the way out of our dilemma depends not on external forces aligning themselves to influence the outcome; it depends on each and every one of us and what we do, not just between now and election day, and not just on how we vote when that day arrives, but on each and every day for the rest of our lives.

Our lives are shaped not by external events, monumental or otherwise, but by the little moments in which we continually redefine ourselves, by the choices we make, throughout each day. The pessimist in me says, “we get what we deserve,” while my eternal optimist says “our fate is in our hands.”

Meanwhile, reason dictates, “choose wisely.”

Tim Konrad

2020.06.21