Yeah, it’s news that America’s Mortician has concocted an executive order that supposedly drops the federal hammer on the social media company that dared to flag a couple of his most recent lies. If you care to ponder whether his grievance-policy is constitutional or workable, feel free to fall down that rabbit hole. That’s exactly where Trump wants you to go.
Why? Because his goal is to keep firing weapons of mass distraction – anything and everything in his idiocy arsenal that can potentially tilt our attention away from the irrefutable fact that he has unleashed mass death and economic destruction on our land. And yet, he seeks to be rehired.
When Twitter flagged his demagogic lies about mail ballots, the social media company hit him where it really hurt. He desperately needs to perpetuate the baseless myth that mail ballots by definition are fraudulent, because he’s rightly terrified (because of his pandemic disaster) that a huge stay-home electorate could doom him in November. And he desperately wants to keep disgorging unfiltered sewage – about mail ballots and everything else – into the public square. At a time when he’s steadily losing support among seniors, white guys, and even evangelicals, at a time when even Rasmussen, his pet polling firm, shows him plummeting (with an overall disapproval rating of 57 percent), he desperately needs to keep distracting us with shiny objects, public feuds, the kitchen sink.
Can he sucker the electorate a second time? Anything is possible, as we’ve learned to our tragic detriment. But even Trump seems to understand, on his feral primal level, that voters outside his cult may find it tough to ignore a six-figure death toll and an eight-figure jobless roll, neither of which can be blamed on Barack Obama. His hackneyed happy talk about how we’re on the cusp of a “transition to greatness” brings to mind Herbert Hoover’s bullish BS, in the midst of the Great Depression, that “prosperity is just around the corner.” And Hoover’s incompetence didn’t kill innocent Americans, at a rate of 900 a day.
Trump can and will continue to fire off his distraction weapons, hoping to hose us down with half-baked conspiracies and recycled lies, but some hard truths have become self-evident:
Between late January (when Trump’s intelligence and briefers and health aides were warning him about the coming pandemic) and early March, he did virtually nothing – except to tell his rally saps (there were eight rallies) that the warnings of a pandemic were merely a “new hoax.” He spent February telling us that the American cases were declining to “zero” and that, like a “miracle,” the virus would “disappear.”
Trump fake-boasted that America was the “most prepared country in the world” to fight a pandemic, despite the fact (which Joe Biden will hopefully highlight) that Trump has long been slashing public health funds, leaving key health jobs unfilled, and filling others with mediocre toadies; that Trump reduced our global health footprint, hampering our ability to get early warnings from abroad; that Trump failed to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal; that Trump has compelled states to fight each other for crucial equipment; that Trump in 2018 fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House team created by President Obama; that Trump has put his lightweight son-in-law in charge of the medical supply chain, with predictably disastrous results; that Trump has agitated for a nationwide reopening despite the dearth of a federal testing plan that would enhance public safety. And so much more, including the fact that our national intelligence agencies repeatedly warned Trump, in 2019 and 2018, about the dangers of a pandemic in their annual “worldwide threat assessment.”
Speaking of Joe Biden…Here’s something he tweeted last October – five months before Trump’s deadly ineptitude caused the virus to hit us full force: “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.”
This election will be referendum on the mortal and economic wreckage Trump has strewn in his wake. No shiny objects du jour can possibly compete.