First of all, those maskless South Lawn cultists who soaked up Donald Trump’s serial lies with a dearth of social distancing should be required to wear badges identifying themselves as MAGA Super-Spreaders. That way, innocents on the street can flee their presence with all deliberate speed.
There’s no better way to distill Trump’s deadly feral narcissistic essence than to assess last night’s desecration of what, until now, was known as the people’s house. We taxpayers were forced to underwrite the literally toxic spectacle, staged for the sole purpose of coaxing the average American sap into believing that normalcy reigns supreme and that COVID-19 is in the throes of surrender.
Which those of you with a scintilla of cognitive intelligence well know is as demonstrably fake as his credentials to lead.
I won’t waste your time fact-checking his endless string of lies – I threw up my hands after he declared (for the umpteenth time) that he’d “passed” a reform law to help military vets,, a law that was actually signed by President Obama in 2014 – because it’s more than sufficient to parse his pandemic propaganda, which casts him in the role of savior.
This is the most important issue in the 2020 election, because it touches every man, woman, and home-schooled child. One national poll, released earlier this week, says that only 31 percent of Americans favor his (mis)handling of the pandemic. Trump is presumably aware that he needs to hike that number northward, even if it means lying anew and trying to rewrite reality. Fortunately for him, the maskless cultists were on hand to cheer every disassembling syllable.
I’ll give you the gist:
When the China Virus hit, we launched the largest national mobilization since World War II…I took bold action to issue a travel ban on China…We developed, from scratch, the largest and most advanced testing system in the world. America has tested more than every country in Europe put together, and more than every nation in the Western Hemisphere combined. We have conducted 40 million more tests than the next closest nation…The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates of any major country in the world.
The truth, of course, is that long after the virus was on the march, Trump dipped into his bag of tricks to assure us that U.S. cases were declining to zero; that it was “under control”; that it would magically “disappear”; that testing should be reduced because more confirmed cases made us look bad; that states should reopen even as they were failing to meet the health guidelines put forth by his White House task force; that he was supposedly a better spokesman than Dr. Fauci; that perhaps Americans would benefit if they gulped hydroxychloroquine or injected a disinfectant; that masks are not essential – indeed, until very recently, he basically dog-whistled his cultists that masks were an unmanly Democratic plot.
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the blood of 180,000 dead Americans is on his hands. But the ballots of low-information voters count just as much as ours. That’s where the serially bankrupt casino owner has placed his bets.
That’s why he keeps peddling the con about his “bold action” shutting down travel from China. In truth (if that still has value), his ban had all kinds of exemptions that still permitted 40,000 people to enter America from China. And the first confirmed virus cases in America came from Europe, not China.
He’s also betting that enough voters will buy his phony boast about how we’ve supposedly built the biggest and best testing program. In truth, when we look at tests per capita (per million people), America lags behind many other countries, including Russia. And the time lag between testing and results is longer in America than in many other countries.
And his boast about America’s supposedly low “fatality rate” – the percentage of virus victims who die – is yet another con. The medical experts at Johns Hopkins University reports that of the 20 nations most afflicted by the virus, America ranks 11th. And if we measure deaths per 100,000 people, America is one of the worst. It ranks 4th highest.
But the bottom line, of course – which Trump failed to mention last night ignored – is that America, with only four percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of all confirmed cases. Indeed, between opening night and closing night of the Republican convention, more Americans died from the virus than died on 9/11.
Do the math: Since the dawn of Trump’s pandemic, we’ve had the body count equivalent of 6000 9/11s. If we recall how Republicans went ballistic when a grand total of 2 people died from Ebola during Obama’s tenure, just imagine how they’d be reacting now if Hillary Clinton – or Joe Biden – had racked up 180,000 dead. They wouldn’t be buying the lies that fouled the South Lawn.
Speaking of Joe Biden, here’s something he said: “We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.” Biden tweeted that on Oct. 25, 2019.
Nevertheless, will a pivotal share of voters guzzle Trump’s Kool-Aid a second time? I’m loath to predict, given what happened the first time. I just wish people would look up Trump’s ’16 acceptance speech and parse this particular passage:
The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.
Case closed.