I’ve been trying to get my news from sane sources, which rules out Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media. So while I was aware that Trump ignored his own health and security advisors, who had been warning him about the virus heading to our shores, I had insulated myself from his ridiculous tweets. Trump did nothing in the face of those warnings — except to downplay them — because he didn’t want it to be true. In fact, he claimed it wasn’t true more than once.
There were plenty of warning signs that we now know Trump was informed of early on, but understanding things is not what Trump does best.
For example, Trump is just not equipped to understand that when a virus shows almost no mutation in very separate cases, that means it is really, really contagious. To be fair, I didn’t know how alarming the DNA similarity was until recently, but I am able to learn. Donald Trump is not. He is stupid and pig-headed, and since he has fired almost everyone who would dare contradict Fox News, there is no one left to try to guide him. If a problem can’t be handled conveniently, best to just assert it’s not a problem. That (almost) always works.
But then yesterday I learned that Trump has been tweeting support for the protests against social distancing. Sure, this is easier than providing leadership or doing something to materially help people who are in a very bad way right now.
The protests, incidentally, are funded by Trump’s pals, who care more about their corporate bottom lines than the lives of the people who work for them — and financing protests is way cheaper than supporting their employees directly, with the benefit of making the whole thing look like someone else’s fault.
The tweets left me utterly speechless. The same guy who is saying “this is for the states to handle” any time a state asks for federal help is also undermining the attempts of states to handle things, and people are going to die as a result. Not just a handful of the morons at the rallies, but the people those morons go on to infect, and the people who see the morons protesting and turn into morons themselves.
NOT on the list of people who will die as a consequence of these protests are the wealthy men and women financing the rallies, or the “journalists” who long ago forgot what the word means, who are now praising the morons, because those assholes ALSO don’t care whether the protesters or their families live or die. It will be the poor and the underserved, as always, who bear the brunt of the harm they are doing, and those people aren’t voting for Trump next time anyway.
I’ve sometimes wondered (and wished!) if we could have a reincarnated version of Will Rogers whose biting humor lanced political egos and brought smiles and laughs to ordinary folks during hard times. Will was truly just one of us in those years, with his boyish, infectious smile. People very much needed that.
Late-night American television features biting monologues, sometimes funny, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes intertwined in a brief stand-up routine. But we don’t have a singular focus: our media, like our nation, is fractured, diffused. There are too many stages, too many clowns. If we had a Will Rogers incarnate, he’d be trampled in the crowd.
But now I know something else: it’s no longer funny. After more than three years of late-night jabs, jibes, skits, witty repartee and drawn-out exposé of the ludicrous and shameless theater of the absurd as performed daily by Trump and his sycophants, it’s too grim. It’s too senselessly evil. Now people are dying.
I suppose it’s a grim joke on America that Trump doesn’t play the fiddle and unlike Rome, we’re not burning. We’re imploding, sacrificed on the altar of Trump’s insatiable self.
I’m a child of World War II, born a full year before America entered the war. Making jokes about Trump today would be equally as tasteless as making jokes about Hitler. But then, perhaps not. Hitler was rational. He maintained intense focus on his goals. He was monstrously competent in its execution. But he had that silly little mustache. And that stiff-armed salute. And his cartoon-character persona. We could make fun of that while praying for strength to endure another day of fighting.
Trump is none of that. His insanely jealous narcissism blinds him to any consideration of anything other than to demand slavish loyalty to the only thing in this world that matters to him: himself. So no, he’s not funny. Nothing about his persona is funny. And there’s no humor to be made of what America is suffering under his administration.
I do wish he’d pick up a fiddle and try to play. That might be funny.
I have read this a few times now, because it is awesome. This most recent reading, with perhaps a bit of whiskey in my brain, my eyes saw the phrase “Late-night American television features biting mosquitos…”
I think that is also true.