I always thought Trump was in over his head. He just acts like a person who is. I held that opinion when he first took office, and it has only gotten worse as time passed.
My view is the schools should open. This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away.
— Donald Trump, August 4, 2020
This is what Trump said yesterday, and there is more here than meets the eye on the literal sense.
Trump has governed – or not governed – for 3.5 years now by obfuscating matters, piling scandals upon scandals, so the public, which can only focus on one thing at a time, forgets about the old stuff.
In that way, the Russian election meddling, which was a huge deal to all of us, which eventually caused him to get impeached, is now distant history. It’s there, it’s severe, but we don’t have the emotional energy to worry about it anymore.
In that way, the Russian bounty scandal, which Obama or any other president would have been impeached for had it happened to him, is already dimming. I am outraged that our commander-in-chief isn’t defending our country and our troops, and isn’t standing up for us, but I don’t have the emotional energy to keep it up, and thus the Russian bounty scandal has indeed “gone away.”
To use Trump’s words: “It went away, like things go away.”
Being sufficiently calloused and corrupt, you can indeed create enough obfuscation to make many things go away.
But this time, possibly the first time in his life, Trump is dealing with a disease. It does not tire. Its emotional energy does not wane. It will keep killing. And since it spreads – I hate to use the trite Internet term – virally, it will keep killing exponentially more people. This is reality for a change that can’t be explained away.
Trump is in over his head, and this time, the fact that the emperor has no clothes is glaringly obvious.
Can you imagine if this had been Ebola rather than the coronavirus? With the inept handling of the crisis by our president, the world would be a plague-stricken wasteland now. In a way we got lucky it’s a virus that can be stopped by simple social distancing.
But unlike the naked emperor, this reality is still killing 1000 Americans a day, relentlessly.
It’s not going to go away, and Trump – as scary as that sounds – does not seem to grasp that.