4/11/20: The facts are brutal. Thursday, we learned that another 6.6
million Americans filed for unemployment.
That brings the three-week total to 16.8 million.
The number will rise once unemployment offices, swamped by applications,
catch up with paperwork.
Closing down the country to stop a killer virus has wiped out all
the jobs added to the U.S. economy since 2013.
____________________
If it’s not clear to you that Trump is afflicted with the
Narcissistic Personality Disorder you need to look up the symptoms yourself.
____________________
Still, if you had any doubts about what kind of person the
president is, you should have learned a cold, hard truth this week. The man who
previously loved to boast about creating “jobs, jobs, jobs,” will be lucky (and
we, as a nation, will be lucky) if he doesn’t go down in history known as “Depression
Don.” Yet, in the bitter end, the only job Donald J. Trump cares about is his
own.
That’s why you could find him tweeting angrily Thursday, the same day
the nation learned that all those millions of men and women were out of work, about
the great ratings he was piling up with his daily press conferences. After the Wall
Street Journal criticized him for appearing on TV too often, rambling on too
long, doubling back and repeating himself, getting facts wrong, and contradicting
health experts, Trump fired off this narcissistic gem:
Only Trump.
Only such a man would be talking about “Monday Night Football” and
“Bachelor Finale” numbers at a time like this, when the only numbers that should
matter are 16.8 million men and women suddenly out of work.
Only someone like Trump could be bragging about “ratings” at such
a moment in history.
In large part due to Trump’s failure to take the threat
of a pandemic seriously, the U.S. “rates” #1 in total confirmed cases of
COVID-19 (532,879), and #1 in deaths (20,577), as of Saturday evening.
But this is who Trump is. If it’s not clear to you that the man is
afflicted with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) you need to look up the symptoms yourself. Why be
surprised that he’s capable of talking about great ratings at a time of
national despair? He cheated on his first wife. He didn’t learn a lesson, even
when his children were hurt. He cheated on his second wife. He still didn’t
learn a lesson, save for the lesson a person with NPD might be expected to
learn. That he was rich and if he hurt others his wealth would protect him from
pain.
He moved on and remarried. Then he cheated on his third wife, too,
and not just once.
This is who Donald J. Trump really is.
One of the symptoms of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder is “a
lack of empathy,” and when you ignore the pain of 16.8 million newly
unemployed, and the loss of more than 20,000 lives, that’s lack of empathy writ
large.
LACK OF EMPATHY
Nor could Trump let the Wall Street Journal criticism go. He couldn’t because he is who he is and that’s a warped man.
So, he repeated his tone-deaf boast Friday, in another disgusting tweet:
Because the T.V. Ratings for the
White House News Conference’s are the highest, the Opposition Party (Lamestream
Media), the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats &, of course, the few
remaining RINO’S, are doing everything in their power to disparage & end
them. The People’s Voice!
*
TO FOCUS our point, let’s consider a handful of jobs lost and
gained this past week. One who found himself out of work was Captain Brett
Crozier, commander of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. Crozier
had made the mistake of making Trump look bad.
With the coronavirus spreading, he fired off a letter to top leaders of the U.S. Navy (and by implication to the president himself) demanding action to protect the 5,000 men and women aboard. By the time the letter leaked to the press, dozens had taken sick. Given the cramped living conditions on the warship, Crozier warned the situation could only get worse.
There were press reports immediately, that Trump wanted the captain fired. He let Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly do the dirty deed and then backed Modly up when he canned Crozier.
“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter,” the president said of the captain just last week.
“I mean, this isn’t a class
on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that’s nuclear powered. And
he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.” Trump said he agreed with the decision to fire
him, “100 percent.”
Modly claimed he fired Crozier because he broke chain of command. Then
Modly visited Guam, where the Theodore Roosevelt was anchored,
and tried to explain his decision in a talk over the ship intercom. All he
really did was anger most of the men and women who heard him speak.
Meanwhile, Crozier’s warning proved true. First, he fell ill with
COVID-19. Then the virus spread, even as the Navy began evacuating the ship. By
Thursday, there were 416 confirmed cases among the officers,
sailors and Marines.
“His motives were pure. He was looking out for his crew.”
By Friday, the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Bill Merz, was talking to CNN and admitting that the crew was in a bad
place. “There was lots of anxiety about the virus,” Merz told Barbara Starr,
the respected Pentagon reporter. “As you can imagine the morale covers the
spectrum, considering what they have been through.” Starr noted that Merz
repeatedly described the crew as “capable and performing well,” which could be
read as validation of Crozier’s leadership before he was axed. The men and
women of the Theodore Roosevelt were justifiably concerned.
The carrier crew was “struggling in the wake of losing their CO [commanding
officer] and their perception of the lack of activity regarding fighting the
virus,” Merz said.
Merz suggested that the crew did not appear to have been given a
comprehensive and clear sense of the various steps the Navy was taking to help
the Roosevelt deal with the virus outbreak onboard. That lack of
information may have caused some stress, he suggested, feeding the very visible
anger many crew members displayed when [Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas] Modly
visited the ship and addressed them about Crozier’s dismissal.
“I think we could have told them earlier what we knew” about the
virus Merz said. “The degree of accuracy against the virus at any level is a
little sketchy, but I think we could have at least bought them in earlier and
started having this dialog up front.”
“The specific
questions [Merz fielded] clearly indicated we needed to give them more
information about the true dangers of the virus” and how the Navy was handling [sic]
aboard the ship, he said.
Of Captain Crozier, Merz added, “I certainly
don’t question his motives. I think his motives were pure. He was looking out
for his crew.”
Starr also reported that a sailor who had tested positive had been found unconscious by “his buddies.” He had been rushed to an intensive care unit on Guam.
Suddenly, the Narcissist-in-Chief woke up to the threat. He wasn’t
worried about Captain Crozier. He wasn’t worried about the sailor in intensive
care or the hundreds who had been infected. He was worried about himself, as
any narcissist must be. If the firing made him look bad, if sailors died for no
good reason, and that angered active duty military and their families – he might not keep his job come November.
That meant he had to act. Trump sent out Secretary of Defense Mark
Esper to tell reporters that he, the president, was “open” to reinstating Crozier to command. “We’ve taken nothing off the table,” Esper told CBS
News. “My inclination is always to support the chain of command, and to
take the recommendations seriously.”
So: Crozier was
out because he made Trump look bad.
Then Crozier might
be in again, because bringing him back might make Trump look good.
And now Modly
was out – having resigned – because he had
to take the fall to ease the criticism aimed at his boss.
So, add another
American to the unemployment line.
*
AS THIS BLOGGER readily admits, he does not care for this president
at all. But this blogger is a fan of the facts. So here are a few facts about one
lucky individual who landed a plum job last week.
In case you missed it, the White House has a new press secretary,
the fourth to hold that post under Mr. Trump. Her name is Kayleigh McEnany.
(Fact.) She’s blonde. (Fact.) McEnany must be smart. (Supposition.) She has a
law degree from Harvard. (Fact.) She has insisted that Trump “doesn’t lie.”
(Fact – that she said that. Absurd that she did.)
McEnany said in February that the coronavirus wasn’t coming to America,
and said as late as March 11, that it posed no threat. (Fact and fact – that she said that – not that she was correct.)
Just for fun, imagine you had the choice of hiring anyone
in this country to fill this post. The job of the White House Press Secretary is
(in theory) to stand before reporters and the American people and tell the
truth, or the best version of the truth you can present. Would you, if you were
making this hire, dig deep in a pile of manure and pluck out a woman who made
her name as a “birther,” denying that Barack Obama had a right to serve as our nation’s
top executive?
You would if you were Donald J. Trump. Because you would suffer from
a Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Citizen Trump made the same false claim for years, until finally,
he realized late in the 2016 campaign that his racist-tinged lies were
hurting him in the eyes of moderate, undecided voters. Then, and only then,
did he do what a narcissist does. He did what was best for himself.
He admitted Obama was born in America,
after all.
He did it in the least words possible and never apologized or
admitted he had been wrong. He didn’t recant because he cared about truth. He recanted
in service to the only “greater good” a narcissist ever sees.
He did it for himself.
McEnany, then, is the perfect person to shield the
Narcissist-in-Chief from any harsh truths.
The blogger was curious. Who exactly was this new White House Press Secretary, and what made her tick?
It turned out to be fun to revisit some of her comments from 2015 and 2016, before she sold her soul for a chance to get paid to sneer at reporters. Commenting on then-Candidate Trump, she was spot on when condemning his comments, after coming down the escalator to announce he was running for president. After he called almost all Mexicans “rapists” and “killers,” she was clear. “To me,” she said, “a racist statement is a racist statement. I don’t like what Donald Trump said.”
She said it was “inauthentic” to call him a Republican. In fact, she laid the “RINO” tag on her future boss, describing him as a “Republican in name only.”
“Donald Trump has shown himself to be a showman,” she said during the campaign. “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate. I think it’s a sideshow. It’s not within the mainstream of the candidates.”
Asked recently how she squared her comments then with her work as White House Press Liar now, she said she had been led astray after “listening to CNN.”
Anyway, that’s our humor for today.
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