Donald Trump has given us additional evidence that the Swedish MD/PhDs were correct when they said, back in March, that nearly everyone in western countries would eventually be exposed to coronavirus and that shutdowns and hiding in bunkers merely delay the inevitable.
Unlike Jair Bolsonaro, however, Trump did not say “I gave the finger to the virus back in March so now I’m just going to recover at home.” Instead, by going to Walter Reed he is apparently hoping to prove that coronavirus is a mild disease from which anyone who has a helicopter, 50 physicians, and four experimental drugs with limited availability can easily recover.
The handful of Republicans with whom I communicate are generally sanguine about the prospect of Donald Trump living only four years beyond his Biblical allotment of 70. They don’t wish Trump any harm, certainly, nor do they hope that he will die, but they recognize that whether a virus decides to kill a human is typically beyond humanity’s control.
Democrats, on the other hand, seem to think of nothing else. Exhibit A: “Get Well, Mr. President,” from the Editorial Board of the New York Times. After four years of cautioning readers that Trump was the new Hitler, the NYT wants Hitler v2.0 to be in the best of health.
Democrat friends on Facebook have been posting obsessively. They are careful to point out that they don’t want Trump dead. They want him to live so that they can then concentrate on prosecuting and imprisoning him for his crimes in a multi-year process that will begin in January 2021. These folks say that every day Trump is in office, Americans die by the thousands because of his poor decisions and bad example to idiots in Red states whom they’ve never met. But they also want him to stay in office at least until January 2021 and then to live for decades beyond.
I wonder if hating Trump has given many Americans a purpose in life for the past four years. Perhaps their lives would be empty and meaningless without Trump and that’s why they are so concerned about his recovery. Yes, they hate Mitch McConnell too, but the guy apparently does not have sufficient personality for hatred against him to give shape and meaning to anyone’s life.
From a neighbor’s house, 2 out of 5 signs on the same theme:
Related:
I’ve wondered many times throughout the past four years how the Democrats would react if Trump had taken Alec Baldwin’s advice and moderated his tone, cut back on the Twitter rants (you know, kicking people like Mika Brezinski, who is way below his pay grade, and digging up the bones of Joe Scarborough’s dead assistant over the objections of her family), and muted his combative personality somewhat – without changing any of his policy initiatives. If he had engendered less chaos among his staff, his close aides, his advisors and worked to manage the White House and the Administration along more conventionally-acceptable norms. If he didn’t have people in his own Party on Capitol Hill waking up every morning and trying to explain the latest nonsense that he ranted out at 1:30 AM on Twitter.
Baldwin thought he would have had a solid two-thirds of the country behind him.
“What I would say to him is: “In my opinion, you needed to make only the most modest adjustments and you might have had another third of the American population eating out of your hand. One third of the people in this country love you, one third of the people in this country detest you, and one third can’t quite figure it out. Because as you keep reminding everybody, things seem to be going pretty well with the economy.”
And I think that’s pretty accurate, alas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eJKCvWsX4I
Far be it from me to stand up and agree every day with uber-Liberal New Yorker and Trump Mocker/Impersonator Extraordinaire Alec Baldwin, but I think in this instance he was being straight, and there was some merit to what he said in 2018. It wouldn’t have stopped the people who hate Trump in ideological sense, the deeply wounded and the True Believers, but I think he had a point.
Whether that change in tone and emphasis would have cost him support among his most ardent supporters is a different question. I don’t think Trump could have done it even if he tried. His personality is very rigid. He doesn’t make adjustments and that continues right up to the present moment.
And again, I think Trump’s biggest problems are inside the Administration, and radiate out from there. I think John Bolton was right on the money, and I know that a lot of people tried very hard to get through to Trump on these matters with nothing but frustration to show for it. You can’t alienate, demoralize and denigrate the best people you have and expect your Administration to work.
“”And it may seem kind of amusing at first but it doesn’t take long before you realize if he is denigrating Mr. X or Ms. Y to you, you can count on it that he’s denigrating you to them. So when people look at the culture within the Administration…the war of “all against all” that we were constantly involved in, I think it’s the President’s own attitude that is a very substantial contributor to that. There’s no feeling that you’re all on the same team. … I think if Dwight Eisenhower came back to life and walked into the Trump White House he would throw up his hands in dismay and go back to Heaven or wherever he is at the moment and say “This place is hopeless.”
You can call all that the vengeful musings of a disgruntled former insider, but I don’t think so, and I think we see that playing out to this day, even as I write this.
@Alex – great insights and thoughts. One of the main reasons I subscribe to Phil’s blog is to read your comments and perspectives, I usually either laugh, learn something new which causes me to stop and think, or both. Thanks!
@Paul B: I don’t know anything and I’m grateful to Philip for letting me continue to expound on stuff I don’t know anything about, but I do try. Thank you. I care about America very deeply and I want to see this country continue to succeed.
Concur with paul.
I find Phil’s style of questioning the narrative lot more insightful. Also, the comments here are far more engaging in general.
It seems to me that PhilG ( & Alex also?) are part of the ‘elites’ – but somehow just doesnt toe the popular narratives.
@disevad: I’ve had some experience working for someone trying to lead an organization of smart, contentious (to put it mildly) and strongly opinionated people where the consequences of failure can damage a large and respected organization. The real problem is that Trump’s fault lines are relatively well-exposed at this point, so in one sense this is pretty easy to do, but what happens next for this country is a much more difficult set of puzzles.
Your view into the left’s mind set on Trump’s health may be skewed by social media banning posts encouraging the virus to finish Trump off.
Unfortunately you cant put up a Trump sign or the unhinged Democrats will burn your house down.
Enjoy four more years of your psychosis.
How’s Xi Jinping doing? Is he in the hospital at risk of dying after giving his entire country bad advice and killing 200,000 Chinese people with coronavirus (or 800,000 adjusted for population)?
Who could’ve predicted a year ago that the president would end up in the hospital with a potentially deadly infectious disease because he didn’t have access to the level of healthcare provided in China? I think that’s one for the history books.