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Graceless, classless, heartless

Where’s Tim Conway when you really need him? Donald Trump’s presidency resembles one of his “Carol Burnett Show” sketches more every day. Conway shot himself in the leg with novocaine and riffed about Siamese elephants joined at the trunk to make cast members break character. If only Trump had any.

Comedy may be tragedy plus time, but a lot of Americans’ time is running out. People are going to die. Trump’s ice-cold response is the coronavirus is no worse than the flu. Except it is. Ten times more lethal.

The acting president’s rare Oval Office address Wednesday night was leadership failure broadcast live, his response to the spreading pandemic (declared Wednesday by the World Health Organization) a slow-motion train wreck of national and global proportions. At every turn, Trump takes the wrong and most destructive one.

The president who counted on a healthy stock market to propel him to reelection banned travel from Europe for 30 days — but not from the United Kingdom where Boris Johnson is an ally — employing the same foreign-menace fear mongering that helped get him elected. Blindsided, the European Union issued an exasperated statement in response:

“The Coronavirus is a global crisis, not limited to any continent and it requires cooperation rather than unilateral action,” the statement read, co-signed by E.U. Commission President Urusla von der Leyen and E.U. Council President Charles Michel.

Financial markets, already reeling, sank in Europe to their lowest point in four years. Dow Jones futures fell another 5 percent Thursday morning, triggering a “limit down” circuit breaker. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures were also down 5 percent.

Trying to navigate a minefield, Trump steps on every one.

Almost simultaneously with Trump’s address, the National Basketball Association suspended its season and celebrities Tom Hanks and wife Rita Wilson announced they had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. They are in Australia to shoot a movie. Testing unavailable here is readily available there.

David Frum comments at The Atlantic on Trump’s disaster of an address . (The White House immediately had to amend it, Trump so badly flubbed the speech likely written by Stephen Miller. The only thing Trump writes himself is his name in black Sharpie.) Trump offered no guidance or policy, no explanation for why testing is unavailable. He issued vague promises of loans for businesses before offering tax deferments to individual Americans soon to have no jobs or incomes to tax. Health care support for victims? Nothing.

Frum states the obvious even red-hats are soon to understand:

More people will get sick because of his presidency than if somebody else were in charge. More people will suffer the financial hardship of sickness because of his presidency than if somebody else were in charge. The medical crisis will arrive faster and last longer than if somebody else were in charge. So, too, the economic crisis. More people will lose their jobs than if somebody else were in charge. More businesses will be pushed into bankruptcy than if somebody else were in charge. More savers will lose more savings than if somebody else were in charge. The damage to America’s global leadership will be greater than if somebody else were in charge.

There is always something malign in Trump’s incompetence. He has no care or concern for others; he cannot absorb the trouble and suffering of others as real. He monotones his way through words of love and compassion, but those words plainly have no content or meaning for him. The only thing that is real is his squalid vanity. This virus threatens to pierce that vanity, so he denied it as long as he could. What he refuses to acknowledge cannot be real, can it?

The only saving grace in this graceless, classless, heartless presidency is that this virus may end it the way unseen bacteria ended the invasion by H.G. Well’s Martians. But it is still a long way to November.

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