It's Bad and Getting Worse
It’s been about 3 weeks since I last wrote about COVID-19. At the time, I was focused on how we never stopped the first wave and how we barely even slowed it down. I also focused on the incredible failure of leadership at the federal level on curbing the spread. For all of Trump’s shocking incompetence, graft, corruption, and callousness, his mishandling of COVID will be the thing I think history holds him most accountable for. Who knows — there’s so much to choose from!
He hasn’t been to a task force meeting in five months. FIVE MONTHS! And while you can certainly learn about information secondhand, it’s not like he’s doing anything better. For a guy who claims to be working all the time, he sure knows a lot about what’s on TV and how good his short game is getting. In other words, Trump is happy to golf and chill out while thousands of Americans die. In fact, he has spent 22% of his time in office at one of his own courses. These visits cost taxpayers a lot of money. And where does most of that money go to? Himself.
His own advisers admit that they’ve surrendered to the virus and are now just waiting for the vaccines to come. They are still months away from making an impact.
This is the same group of people who have had TWO MORE OUTBREAKS within the White House since I last mentioned it! That’s crazy! They lie about it, mislead the public, and when they do test positive, they’re so craven that they don’t even tell their cohorts in the Democratic party. Cool people!
Deaths trail cases and hospitalizations by about 3-4 weeks. With the numbers we’ve been having the past week or so, we can expect to average 3,000 deaths a day by Christmas. Imagine that for a moment. 3,000 of our fellow citizens dead at the worst time of year for families to experience it. Yesterday we saw more than 1,700 deaths, a number we haven’t seen in six months. And what has been this administration’s response?
And that’s on a good day we don’t hear from them. Most of the time they are encouraging people to rail against whatever local precautions have been put in place as some sort of misguided coup against the tyranny of not being to sit in a restaurant or get a haircut. Damn the people who might die! I need wings!
Consider if the virus were a terrorist organization like ISIS. How long would we allow them to kill thousands of us each day until we did something and held the people responsible accountable for their failure? GOP conspiracy theorists STILL carry on about BENGHAZI! and that was only four people. That’s what we’re losing to COVID in about 3 minutes. By the time you finish reading this post, we’ll have lost more people. I would love for any of the goobers who whined incessantly about BENGHAZI! to give half a crap about the thousands dying preventable deaths right now. And yet…
They don’t really care about the people. They care about you as far as your money and vote will take them. That’s why they encourage you to gather in large crowds, without masks, and get each other sick. That’s why they’ve refused to even consider any kind of COVID relief since MARCH. They know that MAGA folks are full of nonsense and fear, motivated not by what’s best for them and our nation but by what they’re a-scared of most this week. Is it ANTIFA!? Is it AOC AND THE SQUAD? Is it CARAVANS OF IMMIGRANTS? CHINA? MEDICARE FOR ALL? THE BOOGEYMAN?
But in none of that rhetoric lies a plan. There hasn’t been a plan for improving education. There hasn’t been a plan for improving infrastructure. There hasn’t been a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. There isn’t a plan to quell racial injustice. There isn’t a single plan out there that is aimed at helping Americans. Only themselves. They don’t have a plan because they don’t need one. As long as people keep supporting them, no matter what, why would they bother? If you could keep your job by golfing 22% of the time and tweeting about what’s on TV, wouldn’t you?
And now that the lamest of presidents is a lame duck, it’s only getting worse. He doesn’t appear in public or take reporters questions. He doesn’t meet with his advisers unless it’s about how to undermine democracy and overturn a free and fair election. Heck, he didn’t even bother to stop or speak at his little #MillionMAGAMarch last weekend. Instead, he drove by them.
Where was he going that he couldn’t stop to speak to them, even for a moment? He had a tee time, of course! Lots of work being done from the passenger seat of a golf cart. LOL. Here he is America, here is the big wet loser that so many of you love:
I don’t know the depths that he will sink to in order to try and hold office. Half of the time I think he’ll just go to MARALARGO and never come back, leaving the country as rudderless as it’s been for the past four years. Sometimes I think he’ll hunker down in the West Wing and hope all his gun-loving liberal-hating supporters do the rest. Whatever he does, it won’t be leading this country or helping us recover from COVID-19. He’s had a year to do something and he’s failed at basically every step.
It is bad right now. I don’t think I’ll be seeing anyone for another two months. No friends, no family, nothing. Partially because I have a higher risk than most people my age but also because I don’t want to spread it around to others. I would encourage you to do the same. It sucks to spend the holidays alone or with limited contact. But there’s Zoom and FaceTime. You can call and mail presents. You can order in. No, it won’t be the holidays we remember.
Hopefully, it’ll be the one we survive.