Coronavirus is Trump's Stool Pigeon

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

By now, it's become obvious in 60 point bold in flashing neon red that Donald Trump is not only unfit for the presidency and that he will lose it, but that he's also every bit the narcissistic psychopath tens of millions of us saw him as five and a half years ago and perhaps even worse.

    We knew that, being a Republican and a greedy corporatist, Trump would bring about economic ruin, heralded, as with Reagan before him, a nearly immediate tax cut benefiting people like him. We knew there would be trouble on the southern border when Trump, minutes off the escalator, began inveighing against Mexicans by calling them "rapists" and "criminals" (Ironic projection, considering how Trump has treated women and underaged girls and with whom he pals around).

     What even the most perspicacious of us did not see was a pandemic claiming the lives of 220,000 of our fellow Americans in eight short months. Because the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak has not just been a plague on both houses Democratic and Republican, it has been the stool pigeon of the Trump administration and the entire Republican Party.

     It revealed the venality, sadism, sociopathy, avarice and corruption of the GOP, starting with Trump. It betrayed, first and foremost, how hide-bound by party primacy and party tribalism the Republicans are by enabling and supporting, often viciously, a psychopath who'd cynically duct-taped a capital "R" after his name and discarded, dismissed and insulted whatever few Republicans who stood in his way. The rest he uses as the useful idiots they are. And they use him as such.

     Over nearly four years, Trump is an ongoing object lesson as to why America should be a nation of laws and not men, especially one man who is completely, irreparably insane. Nobody in the GOP occupies the Oval Office and wields the power that office contains except for one. Because of that one and his self-centered right wing cruelty, greed and narcissism, our nation has been steadily morphing into what was once an outlier: Nazi Germany of 1933-1945. 

     Because of the will of one man, we have turned our nation into one of concentration camps for migrants who'd had their children kidnapped from them, an economic crater rivaling that of the Great Depression and a massive leper colony of 330,000,000 that is shunned and barred from virtually every country on earth. Yes, Trump had a small army of enablers, but they're cynically using him as their useful idiot for their own agendas whether is be Christian Dominionism, tax breaks or whatever else they're after. But only one man can bring about what he has: the "president" currently squatting in the Oval Office in absentia as he vows to take to the campaign trail every day between now and Nov. 3rd to vainly convince us as to why he should ever be allowed back in that hallowed office.

A War President at War With His Own People

During a coronavirus briefing/campaign whistle stop months ago, Trump had likened himself to a war president. Taken in that context against the backdrop of his failed war against the coronavirus, Trump looks not like Woodrow Wilson or FDR but more like the Lenin that walked away from WWI and ceded much of the Soviet Union's land to Imperial Germany. This was proven by the White House's all-but-announced intention to simply let the coronavirus run rampant across the country so while a small percentage of us (just a measly few million more) would die of it, the rest of us would develop the "herd immunity". In other words, after the election, win, lose or draw, Trump will announce his intentions to abandon all pretense of fighting the virus and then he'll go back to Trump Tower and rage tweet about Biden in between court appearances for his countless lawsuits and blame the whole thing on the Democrat.

     Who cares that there's no valid scientific study proving the herd immunity is a viable strategy and that it's a right wing fallacy? Who cares that it would burden hospitals, clinics and funeral homes beyond the breaking point? Certainly not elitist Republican scum who are as sociopathic as Trump.

    And this is just one but one major way that the COVID-19 epidemic in America has ratted out Donald Trump- It has proved that he never gave a damn about the American people, not even his own voters that (according to ex-coronavirus task force member Olivia Troye) Trump privately called "disgusting." He always intended on violating the nation's trust and the trust of those in it except in the extremely unlikely event that that trust and his interests ever aligned.

     The pandemic had proved that, just a couple of short months after the virus wafted in from China, Wall Street's strategy was, as we discovered during the 2008 financial crisis, very vulnerable to serious challenge and was completely predicated on massive short-term gain and no long-term economic stewardship whatsoever. This was proved when countless CEOs and corporations waddled up to the trough with their cloven hooves pointed to Washington and demanded another bailout. Meanwhile, the American people got a onetime $1200 check to shut them up before Republicans closed the spigot in an election year.

     In short, the pandemic proved how vulnerable we are to any serious challenge to our way of life, our very economic infrastructure and this current government's reluctance to even hand out paper masks and give us the correct guidance as to how to stay alive, at how cowed are our medical experts who could and should provide that guidance.

     And lastly, through over 550 documented examples of how Trump has deliberately hobbled our government's response to the pandemic, the disease has damnably proven in stark, unambiguous terms of Trump's sociopathy, in treating the virus as a parochial PR crisis impacting only him and his re-election instead of what it truly is- A global health crisis.

But What about Antifa and the Radical Left?

Trump essentially continued digging his own political grave at last night's Town Hall that was a gleaming, squeaking clusterfuck hours before air time. Trump's dueling Town Halls on a night in which he should have been debating Vice President Joe Biden before he chickened out revealed Trump for what he truly is- a bloated, scared, wounded animal lashing out from a dark corner at anyone, starting with moderator Savannah Guthrie, simply for asking him tough questions.

     NBC would be rewarded for its lickspittle subservience to Trump by him denigrating the network and the entire Town Hall hours before air time, yelling at Guthrie during the hour he was on and, in typical Trump cowardice, leaving the stage a half hour early (Biden lasted the entire 90 minute time slot and long after as he took questions from attendees). He was on his back foot the entire time and, instead of taking advantage of perhaps the final opportunity to disavow QAnon and white supremacists, he chose, instead, to insult Guthrie and by constantly pivoting and diverting to antifa.

     As I'd predicted, NBC got slammed in the ratings war as Trump drew 1,000,000 fewer viewers than Biden and ABC had. For a ratings-obsessed megalomaniacal narcissist, that must be a bitter pill to swallow. Trump's obsession with the organizationally-nonexistent antifa is what Hitler's would've been like had there been an antifa movement in Nazi Germany. Of course a fascist would be hostile to anything even remotely resembling organized and well-funded opposition, which, again, Antifa is not.

    Last night, as with the debate nearly three weeks ago, Trump came across as loud, sour, nasty, brutish and interrupted Guthrie often before she could even finish. Trump left the Town Hall stage and the undecided voters on it 30 minutes early because he thought it was an affront to his dignity to be asked hard questions which would've actually helped his campaign if he'd answered them even disingenuously out of political expediency.

     But he couldn't do that. He wouldn't do that. And he couldn't and wouldn't do that because Guthrie pinpointed perhaps two of the biggest wings of his shrinking base- White supremacists and QAnon. The Town Hall revealed that Trump is plainly no more interested in healing and uniting the country than the neofascist and white supremacist elements that had planned to kidnap and behead Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Trump may be completely insane but he still has just enough political instincts to know which side butters his German rye bread.

     Nearly 250,000 of us, a quarter of a million of us, could very well be dead by election day. Donald Trump would have you believe that's a great victory and that only he should take that victory lap in one super spreader event after another. He will tell you that this is the greatest economy ever even though we'd lost a third of our GDP in 2Q and that over 40,000,000 Americans are out of work. Take it as an article of faith that when Donald Trump opens his mouth and says something, believe the exact opposite.

     Then listen to COVID-19 as it clears its throat and holds up its index finger.