FREAK OUT FRIDAY – JULY 31, 2020

This is the amazing thing about Donald Trump:  every time he has a bad week, you figure that he’s hit rock bottom.  That it could not possibly get any lower.

And then he has a week like the one just past that sets a new, lower bar for bad news, misjudgment and failure.  

First, it should be noted that, unlike previous presidents, he declined to pay his respects to a late congressman lying in state:  He decided not to visit the late, great John Lewis, probably because Lewis spent his life fighting against, well, people like Donald Trump.  Indeed, he fought on behalf of the voting rights of the very people that Trump and his allies have been aggressively trying to disenfranchise through everything from purging millions of voters from the rolls, to closing up four out of five polling places particularly in lower income or minority neighborhoods, to crippling the post office in order to slow down, hamper or even eliminate mail delivery.  

But not to worry, because three living ex-Presidents showed up for the actual funeral services, including George W. Bush, the man who owes Trump a tremendous debt because Trump’s imbecilities have served to get W. off the hook of being the worst president in recent memory.  Obama then delivered a forty-minute eulogy which is being lauded as a brilliant presentation that reminds us of what it was like to have a real man of intelligence in the White House.  Of course, some criticized him for bringing up political issues like voting rights being challenged at a funeral, but considering it was a subject that the deceased spent his whole life fighting for, it actually made perfect sense. 

In the meantime Trump attempted to counterprogram with a press conference that was largely ignored.  He continued to make no mention of Lewis, but he did mourn the passing of Herman Cain…without bothering to note that Cain likely contracted the Covid-19 that killed him at Trump’s own Tulsa gathering which he specifically attended unmasked at Trump’s urging.  So basically Trump killed his friend, but he failed to acknowledge that.  He also failed to present any actual plan to deal with the Coronavirus, although he continued to insist lives should be endangered by schools opening.  

Meanwhile a report was released that the economic output has tanked worse in the last quarter than anytime in the history of the United States.  Not even the great depression had a downward spiral like this.  Now it is often said that Trump is a master of distracting attention by doing one outrageous thing to draw attention away from something that’s indefensible.  Personally I don’t subscribe to that because I don’t think he’s that smart.  I think he just can’t pay attention to one thing and is already on to something else because he has no follow through and no plan to attend to it.  But I think that in this instance he did do exactly that:  within minutes after the grave economic news was released, he threw the entire news cycle into a tizzy by suggesting that this year’s election be postponed, EXACTLY as Biden claimed he would three months ago.  The timing simply cannot be ignored.

He must have been stunned at the reaction as regular allies such as Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, who traditionally move heaven and earth to find ways to either support him or at least not contradict him, immediately came forward and dismissed the idea.  In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Steven Calabresi, the founder of the conservative Federalist Society, stated that Trump’s suggestion to delay the vote was itself an impeachable offense.  When freaking Moscow Mitch says “no way” and a conservative Northwest University Law professor says you should be thrown out of office,  how far off the reservation must Trump have gone?

And then there’s Trump once again attempting to bring up hydroxychloroquine (hey, that word was in my Spellcheck!  Cool!) as a non-existent cure for Covid by furthering the ramblings of a demented spiritual “doctor” who claims that women’s medical conditions are caused by women having dream sex with a succubus.  That’s the same as a doctor consoling a grieving mother because her infant has died of crib death by saying, “If only you’d sung a lullabye to keep Lilith from coming and taking the child in the night.”

It should be noted that barely a week ago, the gullible news media claimed that Trump was changing his tone.  That he was acknowledging the devastating lethality of Covid, that he was admitting “it will get worse before it gets better.”  That after three and a half years of stupidity he was finally growing into the position.  And as predicted by many, including me, that lasted for a couple of days before he went right back to his idiocy.  I mean, what does it say when we have a president who says something correct and scientifically accurate AND THAT’S CONSIDERED NEWS?!  We’ve become so accustomed to his routine stupidity that his endorsing a woman who believes some people in the government are secretly lizards to be the normal state of things.

We are left wondering when Trump’s supporters are finally going to wake up and join the rest of us in the waking world.  Interestingly, the Lincoln Project appears to be wondering the same thing.  Check out this latest ad from them: