What Do You Have To Lose?

If journalism is the rough draft of history, this is a hell of a rough draft. What distinguishes the Post from the Times is their editorial decision to call out the bullshit in close proximity to its being flung.  Take these sentences:

Injecting or ingesting disinfectants is dangerous and can be deadly. Trump would later claim he was being sarcastic, but there was no trace of sarcasm in the president’s comments.

That is how you do it in Trumpistan. There was a quote from Jared in there about how "History will laud Trump's response."  I feel pretty confident giving that a big nope. History will be incredibly damning of how - at a moment of extraordinary crisis in the life of this country - the President refused to do his job.  That's the overwhelming thread in the Post's narrative.

In a time of a global pandemic, Trump refused to do his goddamned job.  He refused to coordinate supplies; he refused to mobilize the national government's tools to manufacture supplies; he refused to offer a moral voice to those who were suffering.  I was hopeful that George W. Bush would be the worst president in my lifetime. His foreign policy debacles, strip mining the government of expertise and voodoo economics were a combined catastrophe.  Yet, even Dubya knows what the job of a president is and released this video. As bad as Bush was - and he was awful - he was not the absolute raging dumpster fire of a human being that Donald Trump is.

The other overarching thread through the Post's piece is that Trump cares about one thing only: the economy.  He cares about the economy, because he knows that a terrible economy will sink his re-election chances.  Trump does not give a shit about small business owners - he's routinely stiffed them throughout his business career. All he cares about is himself and a depression means he won't get to play president on TV anymore.

The fact that Trump is being advised by some of the wrongest people in history (Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore) makes all of this even more tragically infuriating.  Trump is desperate to re-open the economy, but three things are true:

1. People are not going to risk their lives to go to Applebees. 
2. The pro-Trump, armed protestors at state capitals represent a tiny percentage of the American population, but a significant part of Trump's Fox/OANN base.
3. Premature opening will lead to more cases, which will create a second wave and destroy any economic recovery.

However, as more and more people are seen on TV violating good public health advice, that will encourage the poorly informed to assume things are great.  The collapse of social distancing will happen as soon as a critical mass of people decide it should stop, because of what they see on the TV. So, please, stop sharing on social media the pictures of large crowds of idiots congregating in large numbers.  That is absolutely not helpful. There is little actual evidence that we have this under control.

Trump's successful pitch to 46% of American voters in 2016 was "What do you have to lose?" Why not give a "successful" businessman a chance to run this country and make "great deals" and "win."  Well, we've got our answer to that question.  We have a great deal to lose.

Trump's Covid-19 policy has basically become "your money or your life."