Donald Trump has always been the guy who knew more than anyone else. He knew the economy better than all the economists. The military better than all the generals. Science better than all the scientists. And, of course, how to handle health care better than all the doctors. And you can tell that Trump was right … because here we are at the end of four long years, in a nation that’s in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, isolated from all our allies, beset by fires and hurricanes, and with more people dead of COVID-19 than any other nation on Earth. That’s how smart Trump is.
Trump has many outstanding, exceptional qualities … in the sense that very little about him could be considered “normal.” But his hubris may be the greatest of them all. He’s not just the guy who explains the Titanic is both the most luxurious ship ever launched and definitely unsinkable; Trump would do it while the waves were closing over the deck.
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So it should come as no surprise, as America passes 225,000 dead, that Trump not only continues to claim his worst in the world performance is great, he insists that it’s infinitely better than anyone else could have done. Which has brought him to where his illogical excess always delivers him in the end: Not just ignoring the experts, but actively attacking and belittling them. Just as Trump declared “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies” because they somehow valued keeping the nation safe above making trade deals, Trump has now decided that every healthcare expert is a threat for placing human lives over the stock market. There’s just no one left to stop him. We’re at that stage of the play where every effort to correct his actions only makes things worse.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Donald Trump’s reaction was clear. He wanted to do nothing. Actually, to be fair, he wanted to do less than nothing, because his primary tactic was to belittle the threat, dismiss the possibility that it would have any impact on the nation, and make regular promises that it would “magically” go away. Of all the world’s leaders, only Boris Johnson and Donald Trump seriously considered a plan involving simply allowing the disease to run its course as a “response.” Only Trump was willing to keep pretending that nothing was happening while the bodies piled up.
It took weeks, a chart showing millions of deaths, and a concerted effort on all fronts, to convince Trump that telling Americans that all was well even as the hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries overflowed would be a bad thing. But, just as with his generals, Trump was never really convinced. Especially when it came to listening to medical experts. After all, those fucking pussies are only interested in keeping people alive. They don’t understand what’s important.
As CNN reports, there is no one left in the White House who can check Trump on COVID-19. He’s turned both the CDC and FDA into examples of his “deep state” conspiracy, with claims that they are purposely holding back treatments and vaccines until after the election. He’s claimed Robert Redfield, who he appointed to head the CDC specifically because Redfield had demonstrated his willingness to put conservative ideology over public health, is a part of the conspiracy. He’s sidelined Deborah Birx, even though she reliably defended his failures and gave the mildest possible advice.
And of course Trump has not just demonstrated his disdain for the nation’s greatest infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, he’s turned Fauci into an emblem of hate for his followers. As Fauci walks tirelessly on, attempting to save American lives, he does so with a security detail—to protect him from a stream of death threats from Trump supporters.
With two weeks to go before the election, Trump has made it absolutely clear that he’s not about to let people dying get in the way of anything important. "People are tired of COVID,” Trump said on a phone call Monday. “I have the biggest rallies I've ever had, and we have COVID. People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They're tired of it."
In the closing days of the campaign, Trump isn’t just ignoring the spread of COVID-19, he’s encouraging it. He’s preaching an anti-mask, anti-doctor, anti-life gospel—with Mark Meadows, Scott Atlas, and every Fox News pundit in the choir. Trump is engaged in a a series of campaign stops where disdain for the virus isn’t an accident, it’s a theme.