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.
