April 25, 2020: "Disinfectant Donald" Has Brilliant New Plan to Defeat COVID!

 

4/25/20: At some point in the Trump presidency, I expect my jaw to drop so far, so suddenly, it dislocates, and I end up in the hospital for a week. 

Once again, “Disinfectant Don” has been revealed for what he is: an egocentric, ill-informed liar.

 

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You’d never know anyone was suffering except him.

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First, however, a look at Sunday’s stark numbers. A check, a little before one p.m., shows that the U.S. has 943,865 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. A total of 54,480 Americans is dead.

 

 

Given these brutal figures, you might assume it would be easy for President Trump to go before the American people in his daily press conferences and offer up comfort and compassion. If you have been watching, you know he can’t. He might read a few formulaic sentences off a sheet provided by aides. There’s never a glimmer of genuine empathy. The president reads in a monotone, citing cold, hard statistics to show how much help his administration is passing on to states, his voice rising only when he turns defensive. He never mentions individual suffering. He never talks about painful loss. If you watched all of Trump’s press conference, all the way through, you’d never know anyone was suffering except him. 

Trump’s troubles exploded again on Thursday when he suggested people with COVID-19 could be cured by injecting them with disinfectant. That comment sounded so stupid that I had a hard time believing the president made it. Anyone who follows my blog knows I don’t like Trump. I can hardly bear to listen to him talk and had not seen the press conference. That meant I needed to see what he said in context.

 

I had to know. Could a U.S. president really say something so profoundly clueless and dumb? It turns out he did. 

Even worse, when it was revealed how clueless and dumb Trump sounded, he tried to lie about what he meant. He said he wasn’t seriously suggesting injecting disinfectant. He was being “sarcastic.” He was directing his comments toward reporters, who we all know he hates. 

By the way, if you’re keeping track, that makes Trump: a) clueless; b) dumb; c) a liar; and d) a threat to the free press. 

 

Still a loyal member of the Windmill Party. 

If you’re still a loyal member of the Windmill Party (that is: you believe everything the Orange Moron says), you can see the president’s comments in context, if you watch the briefing, start to end. You can watch it through a fixed White House camera, which focuses on the person at the podium. Since you doubtless have better ways to spend your time, such as picking lint from between your toes, start around the 25:00 minute mark. The pertinent comments last about two minutes. 

When Trump turns to pose his question to some person or persons off camera, you can’t see who it might be. It could be a reporter or reporters – as Trump will later claim. It could be the First Lady, stopping by to listen to her main squeeze. For all we know, from this angle, it could be a porn queen. 

For proper perspective, you have to view Trump’s comments from another angle, which C-Span2 provides. At the 6:37 mark of their tape, the president suggests that we “hit the body” of a patient suffering from the coronavirus with a powerful dose of ultra-violet light. Maybe internally! He has a hunch this might knock out the virus. He turns to his right and clearly directs his words to Dr. Deborah Birx, seated in a chair along the briefing room wall. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it,” he says. He’s obviously directing his comments to her. “And then I see the disinfectant, which knocks it out, in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” He even waves his hand in a circular motion, as if cleaning an Oval Office window. 

“Because you see it gets in the lungs, and does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So that you’re going to have to use medical doctors. But it sounds interesting to me [emphasis added].” 

Trump ends with a shrug.

 

If that’s sarcasm directed at reporters, I’m the Princess of York. You can see where Trump is looking (screenshot at 7:02). It’s clear to Dr. Birx who he’s talking to, as well, because she answers his questions.  

If you still have your doubts about the veracity of this blogger, you can go to a third tape and watch Dr. Birx respond. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: I mentioned the president’s lack of empathy at the start of today’s post. To my knowledge, I have never heard him use the word in any speech, although I have trouble listening to him for long. 

I do know, if you check the archive for his Twitter feed, that you can search by word. You have, for starters, nearly 48,000 tweets. Punch in “losers” and you find Trump has called his foes “losers” hundreds of times. He has called those he doesn’t like “psychos” and “sick” and “lowlifes” too. 

I had never searched to see how often the word “empathy” is used. It turned up in two tweets. That included Trump retweeting Dan Bongino, of Fox News, who had this to say: “I don’t feel an ounce of empathy for all of the imbeciles who bought into the Russian collusion hoax now that it’s been entirely debunked.” 

The second time the word appeared it had nothing to do with Trump thinking about others. All he really did was quote a White House Proclamation on Doctors Day, and provide a link. 

So: I would argue that the word “empathy” has never been a part of Trump’s vocabulary. Nor does he display this quality in daily life.

September 9, 2020: Bob Woodward Visits "Crazytown"

9/9/20: Team Trump, to use a sports metaphor, finds itself trailing after an errant pass from quarterback D. J. “Bone Spurs” Trump is intercepted by journalist Bob Woodward, and run back 105 yards for a pick-six.

 

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“We’re in crazytown.”

 

White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly

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Or to put in political terms, for some inexplicable reason, President Trump decided to begin talking to Woodward, the man who helped bring Nixon down, sitting with or talking by phone – on the record – a total of eighteen times. Considering Woodward’s first book on the Trump years was titled Fear, and the next, out Tuesday will bear the title Rage, you wonder what Trump was thinking.

 

Ego and narcissism likely blinded the fool.

 

So, far, what we’re hearing is even worse than what we read in Fear, if we were the reading type.

Also known as: "Crazytown."

 

For today, let’s stick to revisiting some of the quotes Woodward provided in Fear:

 

On page 47, Steve Bannon described Trump, after his surprise election victory: “This is a guy totally unprepared….Trump hasn’t spent a second [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] getting ready for this moment.”

 

Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief White House economic advisor, told Woodward what he was most proud about having done before he resigned: “It’s not what we did for this country,” he explained. “It’s what we saved [Trump] from doing.” (xix)

 

Cohn eventually came to see Trump in a stark light. “He’s a professional liar,” he told people. (209; 338)

 

Former White House aide Rob Porter seconded Cohn in his thinking: “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” (xix)

 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously described the president this way: “He’s a fucking moron.” (On page 225, Woodward explained why.)

 

Trump’s first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered a clear-eyed view of his former boss. “The president,” he said, “has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.” (235)

 

Nor was Priebus impressed with Trump’s management style. When “you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls,” he said, “things start getting nasty and bloody.” (237)

 

Gen. John Kelly, who replaced Priebus, was no more a fan. “The president’s unhinged,”  he warned at one point. “He’s an idiot,” he told other top aides after one more disastrous meeting. “It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.” (263; 286)

 

John Dowd, the lawyer charged with building a defense during the Mueller investigation, despaired at times. During a prep session, in case Trump had to testify under oath, he realized that if Trump didn’t know an answer, “He just made something up. That’s his nature.” Eventually, Dowd reached a startling conclusion. “Don’t testify,” he told the president. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.” (353; 354)

 

In fact, I think we can assume the president was too lazy to read the book, before deciding to give Woodward access this time.

 

Fear ends on page 357, with this:

 

But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”