The reign of Mad King Covid goes from tragedy to farce and back in an instant.
The acting president wanted his return from Walter Reed Hospital carefully staged and captured on video. He exits Marine One, ascends the stairs of the South Portico, removes his mask, poses on the porch à la Mussolini, gives America two-thumbs up (yours), and labors to breathe like a goldfish spilled onto the floor. We watch him turn and enter the White House, still infectious, to shoot a propaganda video surrounded by staff already anxious about catching the plague that hangs about him.
Don’t fear the Reaper, his Madness declared on his doped-up return to the White House Monday evening. “Now I’m better and maybe I’m immune? I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives. Get out there, be careful,” said a president on steroids:
His behavior alarmed public health experts.
“It is inexplainable that the President of the United States, who is actively shedding virus in millions of particles, would walk into that building with an enormous number of staff, unmasked,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at George Washington University School of Medicine.”
It is really hard to understand how no one told him not to do that. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge of his care other than the President of the United States, other than the patient,” Reiner told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars witnesses the obeisance underlings display around the acting president: “No matter how broke, I’ve never had a job where I was willing to debase myself to keep it. What is it with these Beltway types?” Indeed, even the mad king’s doctors agree to his every whim like Osric, the foppish, court hanger-on in “Hamlet.”
Even conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg is disgusted. The White House is treating its war on the plague like a reality TV show in which real people die. “Imagine being a loved one of one of the 210,000+ people who died in that ‘war,’ and seeing this boastful garbage,” Goldberg tweeted. “Can these people take anything other than trolling, fan service and throne-sniffing seriously and soberly?”
“I’m so glad that he appears to be doing well, that he has doctors who can give him experimental drugs that aren’t available to the masses,” said Seattle’s Scott Sedlacek, one of COVID-19’s first U.S. victims. “For the rest of us, who are trying to protect ourselves, that behavior is an embarrassment,” Sedlacek added.
The Associated Press report continues:
Marc Papaj, a Seneca Nation member who lives in Orchard Park, New York, lost his mother, grandmother and aunt to COVID-19. He was finding it tough to follow the president’s advice not to let the virus “dominate your life.”
“The loss of my dearest family members will forever dominate my life in every way for all of my days,” Papaj said, adding this about Trump: “He does not care about any of us — he’s feeling good.”
“Slow-motion train wreck” is overused. The fall of Rome was slower and perhaps a more accurate analogy. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones interviews his father, Cullen, author of a book on the collapse of Rome. There was not a singular event, Cullen Murphy explains:
It was a slow, lumbering, messy deterioration. When you look at what is happening to the United States right now you see something very similar. It’s not being caused by one single silver bullet of a threat. It’s many things happening at once, whether it’s lack of investment in core activities, whether it’s diminishing trust in institutions, whether it’s growing corruption, whether it’s inequality.
I remember once asking a great scholar of Rome, Ramsay MacMullen, if he could sum up the history of the Roman Empire in a very limited number of words. His sentence was, “Fewer have more.” It’s not hard to look around you and see something similar.
Can the collapse be stopped? Perhaps four weeks from now it might. Donald Trump is shedding support as fast as he is shedding virus.
As the acting president’s reelection prospects head toward Walter Mondale territory, Sabato adds, “I don’t care what anyone says. The Crystal Ball is keeping Wyoming in the Trump column.”
He’ll always have Wyoming.
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