Donald Trump will always find the worst possible course of action. It’s not a superpower, nor part of any grand strategy. It’s just a natural outcome from his insatiable need to feed his ego by grabbing headlines anyway possible, married with his need to find someone, anyone, anything at all to blame for his outrageous, incompetent, un-American, illegal, or traitorous behavior.
That’s why he makes up shit like he has “Total Authority” to open the states before some poor bastard has to remind him that he is not a dictator, despite his best wishes and efforts, and the Constitution is still in effect. And they may have informed him, that before it became inconvenient for Dear Leader, most Republicans champion the 10th Amendment. And then the same poor bastard probably had to tell him what the 10th Amendment is. And Trump probably got bored with it after the words “can’t” and “Constitution”, since he stopped reading long ago after he concluded that Article II gave him “the right to do whatever I want as President.” But then, Trump was informed that everyone would ignore him and he would look weak. So he graciously retreated from his new and inventive anti-American banana-republic power grab by simply pretending that he has power over them. “The governors are responsible. They have to take charge. If we disagree with it, we’re not going to let it open.” Got it both ways. Neat trick.
Still chafing against the Constitution, now Donald Trump’s grand plan is to call on his followers to “LIBERATE” themselves against the government isolation efforts that each one of our states has put in place to protect their citizens. Trump wants states to open their economies “very quickly”, and yesterday he boldly proclaimed that “America wants to be open.”
No shit that America wants to be open. This is hard. Nobody wants this virus and nobody wants to see an economy on-hold. Nobody wants the unemployment numbers at the Great Depression levels and nobody wants to have to wear a mask and live in fear if they go to the grocery store.
Today there are 2,240,000 people infected with COVID-19 and cases in the United States just topped 700,000. That’s a quarter million people since my post 2 days ago. 34,180 Americans are dead, and yesterday posted the largest single-day death count of 4,591 Americans.
For reference, terrorists killed 2,977 Americans on 9/11/2001.
What Trump doesn’t get is that he cannot change reality through his sheer force of will. He can’t just demand that the virus goes away. This virus is vying for the leading cause of all American deaths. Americans, by-and-large, do not want to die. He could, however, coordinate a national testing program that governors of all parties have been begging him for, but his government continues to fail to develop a national testing plan. It’s fucking malpractice.
So what will happen if we re-open too early without data and without testing and without control? We are sheltering in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. So if you reverse that, there’s an obvious, non-partisan answer. Brian Kemp gets it. “We’re going to have new cases pop up.”
Trump wants to kill Americans so that he has a sliver of a chance of improving the economy before November. He does not have direct authority to do it, so he’s trying to get it anyway by directing his followers to mount an insurrection against their state governments.
Fucking traitor.