Injecting Something Worse Than Bleach Into the Body Politic

     Imagine, if you will, a drug or some substance that, if you inject it into your body, would actually animate and amplify coronavirus already in your body. Something worse than, say, bleach, another disinfectant or hydroxychloroquine (which would actually kill the coronavirus, along with you.).
     This is what Donald Trump is doing to the body politic- He's injecting toxins into the national discourse, or what passes for it, like racism, conspiracy theories, misogyny and various and sundry bigotries.
     Even by his own abysmal standards, Trnump's Twitter feed this past Memorial Day weekend was a master class to psychology and psychiatry students as how it looks in real time when a human mind descends into a self-destructive spiral of madness that makes the final days of the Nixon administration look like a model of mental health.
     He disparaged Stacey Abrams because of her weight.
     He insulted Nancy Pelosi for her looks (I guess mirrors, understandably, are forbidden in the White House's Executive Mansion).
     He resurrected, again, the conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough, one of Trump's most vocal gadflies, murdered his staffer despite being 1000 miles away in DC when she passed away after a cardiac episode.
     He ragged on Barack Obama again for playing golf at Andrews Air Force Base during an ebola outbreak that killed exactly two Americans.
     He whined that he wasn't getting enough credit for his nonexistent or delayed coronavirus response while saying at the same time time he was getting great ratings for it, as if a pandemic that's killed over 100,000 Americans is nothing more than a giant-sized reality TV show.
     The list is endless. His toxic rage and prolificity on Twitter set a new standard for him in between rounds on the links.
     Donald Trump is an object lesson on how far in life a man can get with just a brain stem, a pair of tiny thumbs and a Twitter account. And while it's a given that Trump's bloated following on that platform is at least 50-55% bots, tens of millions of "very fine people" legitimately follow him and get 100% of their news from his Twitter feed, which is sort of like living off the food in a vending machine or getting all your social and dating tips off men's room walls.
     And, as Amanda Marcotte pointed out today in Salon, it's being wildly applauded by those same "very fine people" because Trump is "owning the libs."
     It doesn't matter to them that among that 100,000 death count (which is likely higher, due to the lack of postmortem testing) are their fellow conservatives, which also includes at least 31 ministers who chose to ignore social-distancing guidelines and held services in violation of state law.
     Also on Twitter, Trump claimed he acted "very early" on his Chinese travel ban (March 12th), despite getting warnings from his own government as far back as January third that a pandemic originating from China could hit us. In that same tweet, he suggested we wouldn't surpass 100,000 and that that was the new benchmark for success,
     There's nothing in the numbers coming in from Johns Hopkins to even suggest the curve's been flattened, yet all 50 states are beginning to reopen.
     You can almost see the coronavirus licking its chops and rubbing its hands at the thought of all those beaches, restaurants and bars that have reopened, so round, firm and fully-packed with tens of millions of Trump's "very fine people."
     I used to think that Trump was obsessed about the economy because all he cares about is the nation making money again. But then today, I recalibrated my thinking and realized he doesn't give a shit about the economy, either, except in a secondary sense. Like a typical Republican, Trump knows or thinks his poll and approval numbers are going to be tied directly to those economic numbers.
     But the fact is, countless economists are warning us that we're already sliding into a Great Depression that could dwarf the original one of 1929. The official unemployment numbers state that 38.6 million Americans are out of work, which already puts the unemployment rate at a Depression-level 25%. And the BLS, again, only counts those people who have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance. Include those people and the unemployment rate could easily be 30% or higher.
     And many of those now out of work folks also lost their health insurance and were handed a bad joke known as COBRA because decades ago we decided a person's health coverage should be tied to their jobs.
     Oh, but Obama golfed in 2014! Look at that!
     And his brain-dead supporters are lapping it up because who needs good governance and guidance from the White House when we still have the black guy to kick around?
     It'd be tempting for me to just throw up my hands and welcome the deaths of these right wing lunatics (and I do sincerely, dearly want them all to die, posthaste) when they go to the beach or crowded bars and eateries, wave their 7.62 caliber prosthetic penises at state capitals and threatening the lives of their governors and assaulting people who insist on wearing masks.
     But they come into contact with those well-meaning people who are wearing masks, going out only when necessary and practicing social distancing guidelines. And I don't want to see good, socially-conscious people die because of some ignorant right winger who, whether they know it or like it or not, now belong to Trump's death cult.
     The same Tea Baggers who screamed about Obama's "death panels" when the ACA was being debated a decade ago and hoarsely bellowing (falsely) that abortion providers would get federal funding through the ACA now suddenly aren't so concerned about human life, not even their own, now that one of their own is supposedly in charge.
     And it's no accident that within weeks, sometimes days, of Trump saying or writing something colossally idiotic, we see or hear it repeated by one of his hillbilly followers whether it's an assault on Asian-Americans, flouting CDC guidelines or whatever diseased conspiracy theory or racism drops out of Captain COVID's brain pan and onto Twitter.
     This is the Washington Death Trip and we are all 19th century Black River Falls, Wisconsin.