The most important thing President Trump needs to understand right now is that it’s not too late.
Though the truth isn’t going to get any less ugly or momentous, he can still face it. He just needs to summon up all his considerable strength and admit how badly he’s been played.
He’s not alone. A lot of us do.
The projections about COVID-19 used to defile America’s founding commitment to individual liberty and drive her people to the brink of economic and spiritual ruin have turned out to be just as much garbage as those worthless reports of Iraqi WMDs from a couple of decades back. We’ve also witnessed a similar harebrained willingness to plunge on ahead inflicting damage without any clear idea of what an exit strategy would even look like.
But, say what you will about Bush’s debacle, at least the country he crushed to impose a mind-numbingly stupid and unworkable benevolent scheme was someone else’s, not our own.
Something unspeakable just occurred. An historically unprecedented, sick and vicious assault on the American people en masse. More and more of us are waking up to the horror of it every day. Most of the patriotic folk standing by the President throughout the relentless barrage of media hoaxes manufactured to destroy him these past four years have faced the ugly truth already.
It’s time for Trump to join them. He needs to finally repudiate the treacherous advisors who’ve rained more unmitigated ruin down on the heads of the American people than even our most bitter foreign foes could ever dream of inflicting,
For some unaccountable reason, he’s hitched his wagon to Anthony Fauci; a man so swept off his feet by Hillary Clinton’s congressional testimony on Benghazi he was moved to write her a love note.
It’s hard to understand how a streetwise New Yorker with an otherwise impeccable nose for BS wound up so taken in by people whom it hardly takes a genius – stable or otherwise – to see are playing for the other team.
But there’s no question that Trump has been taken in or that he’s got to wise up fast.
Consider those painfully wrong-headed remarks he made about Sweden.
The President only makes himself look foolish by slamming Sweden for not going into a lockdown because “2462 people have died there, a much higher number than the neighboring countries of Norway (207), Finland (206), or Denmark (443).”
Set aside that Sweden has around twice the population of any of its neighbors.
Also ignore that the numbers in all four nations are so low that there’s likely little statistical difference given the lack of any fixed criteria across or even within countries for citing COVID-19 on death certificates.
It still makes no sense to compare a bunch of places that were trying to slow down the rate at which the virus spread to one that chose to let it quickly run its natural course while it’s still active in the former. It would be like declaring the winner of a marathon halfway through even though you know some of the contenders have been saving their strength for the end.
In fact, Trump’s remark indicates that he’s been woefully misinformed about what this lockdown is even supposed to accomplish. One of the most sickening things about all of this is that most of us were. Despite any impression you may have formed to the contrary, the wave of draconian edicts imposed on us in the name of public health was never intended to decrease the number of COVID-19 infections by even one.
“Social distancing” wasn’t supposed to stop anyone from contracting the virus. Though few Americans would have consented to this lockdown if they’d clearly understood, it was never about prevention. The point has always only been delay.
