So here we are, at the crossroads of a turning point in American history that will shape who we are and how we operate for years to come.
We now know from leaked White House memos that the death toll for the coronavirus could reach as much as 3,000 people a day. The rate of cases keeps rising and the rate of hospitalizations has hit a plateau, but isn’t falling. People are dying, the people who are alive are in desperate need of aid, and basically, everything is terrible.
And to answer this crisis, there is a man who is miserably ill-equipped to run a Payless, much less a country. A feckless, thoughtless, sociopathic numbskull who can not feel the immense weight of 68,000 lives (and counting) being lost in an instant. A man who desperately, desperately doesn’t want to be President, but who likes people hearing him talk, so he’s trying to get re-elected anyway.
And so the White House, in their infinite lack of wisdom, has decided to hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner over the coronavirus whilst we all suffer, while exerting pressuring on state governments to re-open. Trump has been wanting to turn the page on the coronavirus news cycle since the pandemic began to flare up in the country, and rather than realizing and accepting that he can’t simply turn the page of death, he’s decided to stick his fingers in his ears.
I don’t even know how much more ink can be spilled about why all this is a terrible idea. Trump’s hope seems to be that people can regard the massive loss of life in the same way we look at mass shootings; a tragedy that happens so regularly that we hardly even think of it as such.
There is a core of selfishness that runs through the Republican party that can’t be properly quantified. In their thirst for power at all costs, they don’t even seem to realize that massive loss of life *hurts their prospects of remaining in power*.
If politics is a game, the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s only way to win is to cheat. They can’t win on policy, they can’t win on values, and a party who’s views are rooted in some Utopian past that never existed can’t project a viable view of the future.
And so they cheat. They gerrymander. They enact voter ID laws. They purge voting rolls. The Republicans entire strategy is simple; skim just enough votes away from the Democrats and retain power by any means necessary. If that means American bodies piling up in morgues because families literally can not bury their dead loved ones, so be it. As long as two Democrats die for every Republican that dies, they don’t give a shit.
I mean, at this point, Donald Trump isn’t even trying to hide how partisan he’s being. Trump is outright saying that he doesn’t want to send aid to cash strapped states because it would be “unfair” to the GOP because those states are run by Democrats. Former governor Chris Christie was on TV musing on the amount of deaths that are acceptable to get the economy going.
They’re telling us what matters to them, and it’s power. Power at any expense. Power at the expense of American lives. It is the most direct form of anti-Patriotism ever. It stands in the direct face of buckets and buckets and gobs and gobs of data that the COVID-19 pandemic is not getting better. They do so in light of there being overwhelming evidence that doing so will be a political liability. They are brazen in their attempts to keep a grip on power they know can not be maintained through any means by skewing the numbers.
I think everyone has, is having, or will have a moment where they break down at the prospect of what’s going on. I had mine a few months ago. My mother had hers a couple weeks ago. My wife is just beginning hers. It is part of the shared human experience, I think, that we really are all in this together, that the pain and suffering is touching us all in different but still similar ways.
It should scared the fuck out of you that Donald Trump is sleeping soundly without a care in the fucking world. It scares me enough that I’ll probably have another break down.
You explained what I feel but haven’t stopped to put into words in my own head. This especially: “There is a core of selfishness that runs through the Republican party that can’t be properly quantified.” That line really is the lens through which we can view Republican activity. Thank you for this post.
Excellent post!
He also needs to win to help keep him out of prison.
Please. Donnie will never see the inside of a court room, much less a jail cell. Welcome to America.
That won’t stop him from being paranoid about it! Remember – he’s constantly living in a state of perpetual victimhood and fear.
…there is undoubtedly a part of me that can’t entirely credit that he’ll never go to prison…that there must surely be some set of circumstances in which you just can’t not put him in there
…but right or wrong the idea that even an ex-president of the US serve actual hard time in a for-real penitentiary…seems far fetched
…but maybe not so much the kind of bullshit not-really-the-same-thing kind of deal Cohen or Flynn seem to have had…or I guess Assange for that matter…
…the degree of scrutiny that a serving president is under is extreme even by the standards of the pics-or-it-didn’t-happen generation & the sheer weight of evidence of his wrongdoings long ago passed the point of being a wealth vastly in excess of anything he might lay claim to in a financial sense
…at some point you have to begin to wonder…if you’re not going to put this out & out publicly & flagrantly criminal piece of shit with no redeeming features in prison then why the fuck even have prisons in the first place?
…so personally I’d settle for crippling him financially at every turn & having a never ending cavalcade of lawsuits brought by the states individually & the federal government as a whole to claw back the money he & his family have embezzled from the public purse for the better part of three generations until their legal fees chew up whatever illicit wealth they’ve successfully hidden & the fines & punitive costs of case after case strips the visible cupboard bare & ev n his lawyers won’t take his calls any more & he goes down in history as the Icarus of corporate grift & his name becomes short hand for the inevitable demise of arrogance wedded to incompetence
…so, you know…nothing drastic?
“if you’re not going to put this out & out publicly & flagrantly criminal piece of shit with no redeeming features in prison then why the fuck even have prisons in the first place?”
Because we have to put the poors someplace.
Probably no jail cell, and I’m not sure I want him to. His maniacal followers don’t need a martyr to rally around.
What I am sure will happen is that Trump will be slapped with so many subpoenas and indictments that he’ll spend the rest of his life, and whatever money he has left, defending himself from them. With no figurehead to lead them, his toothless gaggle of camo-clad worshippers will start crawling back under the rocks where they prefer to hide. For someone so thirsty for adulation, that will be a pretty horrible fate.
I hope this is a wake up call for at least a few people. Your rugged individualism doesn’t mean jack. Your worship of Papa Trump gets you no more than his actual children get. It’s your loved ones they’re sacrificing while they telecommute or hole up in their house.
I don’t know if this will be a great awakening. The 70k dead isn’t a real experience for most Americans. The people who are dying are in NY (not real America!) or they’re old (so sad! but inevitable!) or otherwise they are people on the margins of society who don’t seek medical care (sucks to be them!). It will take many, many more people dying in the suburbs, in small towns, important people, or maybe even tons of children for the middle class and the poor sycophants to really get it. Or maybe it will take more people being humbled by having to use a food pantry for the first time since the Recession. I can’t say if even those things would effect people.
I fear that the GOP won the culture war a long time ago and that’s why we can sit here, with the media happily chirping about re-opening right after giving us the death count. It’s why idiots have equated staying at home to socialism. Everything has been warped by both sideism and capitalist greed I don’t know how or if this country can ever be “great” “again.”
The problem is: it will never be enough for a significant portion–almost half–of this country to ever pull the lever for a Democrat. They would rather burn everything down than give those dirty commies a chance to tax all those Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires into a Socialist Hell Hole.
They didn’t wake up after the Republicans destroyed the economy in 2008. In fact, they did the opposite and blamed the Black Guy who wasn’t even President when it all went to hell.
I think you are right about the culture war, but you can’t speak too soon about them being complacent because of WHO is dying. This shit will ravage red suburbs and it won’t be a picnic in rural areas without healthcare resources either, even if it takes longer to spread there. It could very well be their wakeup call. But I don’t think the most deluded supporters will ever see the light. Maybe just the ambivalents or the “well the economy is great so I’ll vote for him, don’t pay attention to anything else” types. For the diehards, if they are losing everything, they’re not going to give him up too.
I think you bring up a good point about the numbers – I mean, I am guilty of this as well – 70k people isn’t a number I can easily grasp. It is, however, the number of people who swung the EC to Trump….
2008 destroyed the reds and the blues alike. None of those ignorant fucks gave a damn come voting time–particularly in the midterms. The problem, as ever, is that they are fed a steady diet of bullshit which tells them that all their problems are due to those fucking poors (which they are), browns, immigrants and Godless Democrats. They’re too ignorant, and too stuffed to the gills with propaganda, to actually see what’s happening and who is to blame.
Of course the assorted die hards and, Qs, and assorted degenrates won’t wake up….but I wish they would stop being mentally ill for five minutes and do the right thing. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait and see how they react once there’s start dying.
70k, 100k, these are just numbers and stats. Until they (the media) starts quantifying it like, “the equivalent of this population in this town” or “this many people to fill a graveyard” then these are just numbers until each of us personally knows someone who dies. In the meantime, this admin, I feel, might be relying on that vagueness to justify the deaths.
the right-wing propaganda machines will just take a pivot and stop pretending it doesn’t exist, and start blaming it on the degenerate liberals or whatever, and these idiots will eat it right up. These people are thoroughly immune to facts and evidence.
Yes. Honestly, it’s just another itteration of what we’ve already seen plenty of evidence of. I mean, their goal is to leave as many people without access to health care as possible. That’s been their goal for years now, long before C19. What does that mean? It means they want us to die. At best they don’t care if we die. That’s AT BEST. If I think about it at all I start to disintigrate. It’s the worst thing about isolation, is getting lost in thinking about how this country, our country, has come to this. How is it possible? I know we’ve always been less that we thought we were (as well as more), but to suddently become this. No national response? No world leadership? No help for others less fortunate? Just agribussiness meat packing plants built on the suffering of those who can not speak? Now we’re all those who can not speak. How is it possible that so many people still think this is fine. I mean, yes, I know Fox news and all, but really. How is this possible? I have to stop.
I’ve never been to group therapy, but this seems very akin to it.
It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one out there with these exact same thoughts. Even in the blue state of NJ, I feel surrounded and outnumbered by these morons.
All of this – so maddening. My mother and I got into a fight last week because she didn’t believe Republicans are literally saying to let people die (she is a Republican who hates Trump but also makes a point to pretend everything is fine and not pay attention to the news). We don’t argue about politics but we do fight when she frequently asks me why I’m mad, I tell her, and she tells me that it’s not true while simultaneously admitting she is blocking out the news.
Well, it seems she is seeing it for herself somehow now.
I talked to her this morning and she told me she can’t take it anymore and she’s voting for Biden. Her previous stance was she was going to stay home. I guess this was her sudden realization, that you speak of. She’s not in a swing state but I hope she represents a larger trend.
One thing that is so maddening is the refusal to acknowledge there are no good choices, and the administration never admitted that we just need to take our fucking medicine and put our heads down and get through. They are discouraging it by refusing is the resources to survive this. They are telling us not to take the proverbial medicine. Not to make the hard decisions now to make it easier in the long run. If they bothered to keep competent people around – or if they even knew what competence looked like – they’d know that a bunch of people dying and the rest afraid for their lives will NOT improve economic numbers. They now seem to be banking on the idea that they can force it through the population and that, what, it will mean we AREN’T in an economic down turn and collectively traumatized by the election? You have to understand how regular, non-sociopaths think to know that they will react to people they know suffering and dying and they won’t get over it quickly. But those people can’t grasp it and it shows that they think someone can lose their parent or wife and not come out of it angry and upset for a long time.
They are sure risking a lot of votes on the idea that they can make it all up in cheating. Trump won on the margins and they have suffered electorally ever since. That’s a whole lot of eggs in that cheating basket.
I just hope she remembers this feeling in November. I mean, I really hope she does, and all the other ones like her. I used to listen to some Never Trumper republican podcasts back before I stopped listening to the news, because I needed news 24/7 at that point and also because I was curiouse about what they thought, and they were all about Biden, so I hope that they’ll do their part in November.
I hasten to add that it’s not because I’m over the moon about Biden…but if Biden is who we’re running, then we need to fucking get behind him and push. He’ll bring some people with him that at least have a few brain cells between them, or at least aren’t as mean as what’s infesting the WH now.
I am not sure the willingness to show up for Biden will hang on but she’s been sure she won’t vote for Trump again since like 2 days after he took office so I think that will stick.
Even though they irritate me, I follow a lot of never Trumpers because I want to understand them and I also see it as a way to try to keep people like my mom in my life and if it is any consolation to you, they seem to be still going for Biden hard. On Twitter they are all going to bat for him against the Tara Reade allegations and stuff (excuse me while I go hide my head in the sand and try to forget about that fucking thing).
That’s where I am with Joe. I am not thrilled at the prospect of him being President, but fuck me, at least he’ll hire people who know what the fuck they’re doing, and he’ll listen to them most of the time.
3,000 deaths a day is a little more than the World Trade Center towers going down on 9/11. BUT EVERY FUCKING DAY. Just some context.