A WILD FINISH

 In early August of this year (which feels like ten months ago!) I wrote that I was feeling cautiously optimistic about the upcoming presidential election.  And now, with only around two weeks to go before before that big day, I'm feeling a little less cautious.

The funny thing is that, with everything that has happened in the last two months, the polls have hardly budged.  Joe Biden has consistently been running a lead of around ten points nationally over President Trump, and Biden also leads in most of the important swing states.  Amazingly, this is basically the same lead that he had way back in the Democratic primaries!  Biden has even out performed the president in campaign donations, a rarity for a presidential challenger.

The televised debate between Trump and Biden back in September was a chance for Trump to dig himself out of the hole he's in, and not only did he not win, he may have dug himself in deeper.  Instead of looking presidential, Trump displayed his true character as a bragging, insulting, dishonest bully.  Only Trump himself and his loyal base thought that he did well.

And when Trump revealed that he  had tested  positive for Covid 19, he received no sympathy bounce.  If anything, his own infection seemed to personify his failure to slow down the pandemic.  And that is what has been hurting him politically more than anything else; the president may have survived  his bout with Covid 19, but it could still drag down his presidency. 

The problem for Trump is obvious: the pandemic was a serious problem that required a sober, consistent, well thought out response from him based on information from scientific researchers and other experts.  In other words, the complete opposite of the chaotic style of governance that Trump had brought to the White House from the very beginning.  The fact that he dismissed the dangers of the outbreak, and then often ridiculed masks while often contradicting the advice of his own scientific advisors shows just what a mess he has made of this crisis.

And it appears that Trump's flailing attempts to dig up some kind of October surprise (from pressuring his Attorney General William Barr to arrest Joe Biden and Barack Obama for some vague and absurd crime to his refusal to disavow Qanon)  are failing because it's hard to distract the American public when they know that the pandemic is still raging, with almost two hundred and twenty thousand Americans dead as of this writing.  It looks like, for the first time in his life, Trump has been confronted with a problem that he can't sue, ignore or insult away.  And while I'm sure that he will attempt to deny the results of the election if he loses, Biden's lead seems strong enough to dispel that denial.  Like I said before, I'm cautiously optimistic about the election, and hopefully in  few months America will have a decent and admirable leader again.

NOTHING LEARNED

 

A brush with death can change a person.  A brush with death caused by something that you've actively ignored can really change a person.  Except, that is, for our president.  Donald Trump's reaction to his recent covid scare has been a return to displaying all the negative behaviors that he had before he fell ill, all of which helped  put the country at the top of the list world wide for the highest number of covid cases and deaths.

Even before he left the hospital, Trump was downplaying his condition.  In one of the oddest moments in presidential history, he got into his official presidential vehicle and waved to supporters outside the hospital he was in.  While this was a typical display of  macho toughness from him, it also showed a complete disregard for his driver and the security agent in the vehicle with him, who were forced to be in close quarters with a known contagious person just so he could get his silly little photo op.

And the foolish behavior from the president didn't end there; one of the first things he did after being discharged from the hospital was to dramatically walk up the steps of the capitol dome and tear off his mask, acting like a septuagenarian Superman. And his tweets were absurd: "Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life." He said, ignoring the fact that over two hundred thousand Americans had died from the virus.  He also added that "We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge."  Not only is this yet another absurd boast from him, but it downplays the reality of  the nature of his medical care.  As president, Trump is, of course, given the best possible medical treatment from an army of doctors.  The vast majority of Americans could never get the same kind of treatment that he received.  For him to hold himself up as some sort of macho, coronavirus beating tough guy is an insult to those who have died, implying that they were just too weak to survive.  As always, Trump has zero compassion for anyone but himself in everything he does, even when recovering from an illness.

This all gets even more appalling when one considers that it isn't just the president himself that has been infected, but also many of the people around him: so far fourteen people, including First Lady Melania Trump,  Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, and Aide to the President Hope Hicks, along with three Republican Senators.  And yet he still steams ahead with downplaying the virus, like a pandemic hitting the White House and Congress is somehow nothing to worry about.  (And really, is there any greater indicator of what a psychopath our president is than the fact that his own wife's infection seems to have stirred no sense of compassion in him?).  Yes, sadly, Trump will always be Trump, never admitting to any mistake or course correcting in any way.  From day one he has downplayed the danger of this pandemic, and months later, with millions of Americans infected and hundreds of thousands dead, he still chooses to do so.  All we can do as a country is vote him out in such large numbers that he and his party won't be able to steal the election.  Expecting him to ever do the right thing regarding this pandemic is fruitless.

THE PRESIDENT TESTS POSITIVE

“the end of the pandemic is in sight....”

The above words are a direct quote from Donald Trump from remarks he gave on Thursday October First.  He said them even after his close advisor Hope Hicks was showing signs of the virus herself.  And then he and his wife Melania tested positive themselves.

Although the irony of a president who has bungled the pandemic response so thoroughly getting the virus himself is not lost on me, I take no pleasure is his condition.  Sure, I've used words like "fascist", "bigot" and "psychopath" to describe him,  but I'm also a progressive who has argued against the death penalty.  I truly hope that Trump recovers, loses the election next month, and eventually winds up in the jail cell I think he deserves to be in.

But I can't feel any real sympathy for his sickness.  I just can't.  My reaction is much like how I felt when Rush Limbaugh recently came down with lung cancer after years of  publicly denying the risks of tobacco usage on his show and constantly smoking cigars.  He should have seen it coming.

A list of all the times that Trump downplayed the coronavirus threat could fill an encyclopedia: from the beginning he said it was nothing to worry about, that it would disappear when the weather got warmer, that the country needed to reopen, that masks were unnecessary.  He often has contradicted his own administration's advice, and insulted  his own advisors when they disagreed with him.  And perhaps worst of all, he has held indoor rallies without mandatory mask wearing.  Even after one of his supporters, Herman Cain, attended one of those rallies and died from the virus shortly afterwards, he didn't stop.  Given all of this, I can't say that I feel sorry for our president.

If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it's that it may push his supporters into realizing just how serious this pandemic is.  Hopefully, people will start wearing masks without complaint and listen to scientists instead of getting caught up in the crazy conspiracy theories running around the virus.   And who knows how this will affect the already unreal upcoming election.  Assuming Trump recovers, will this prove to voters just how disastrous his pandemic response has been?  Or will it garner him a sympathy vote?  How much will Mike Pence have to step in, and will that help or hurt Trump's campaign?  The only thing we know for sure is that twenty twenty is continuing to be the craziest year in  modern history, and the results of that craziness can't be seen right now.