There is no bottom. We as a nation learned that, what, two hundred weeks ago? And last week’s lesson? The number of shoes to drop is infinite. Elon Musk is working out how to use that to power his cars.
Who’s next? Come on, it’s the question everyone’s asking themselves.
The acting president of the United States is hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center with COVID-19. He is an object of confusion about his condition and the subject of who-knows-what Frankenstein-ish medical experimentation. His “body man” now tests positive for the coronavirus along with almost two dozen others inside the White House or in Donald J. Trump’s orbit. Yet to test positive are more GOP senators who were sitting near now-infected Sens. Thom Tillis and Mike Lee at Amy Coney Barrett’s Rose Garden coming out party on Sept. 26. Some sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee charged with holding her confirmation hearings. (Others met Barrett at a maskless reception inside the White House.)
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie checked himself into a hospital on Saturday after testing positive.
Maeve Reston of CNN writes:
For much of this year, Trump has spun an alternate reality about the dangers of coronavirus — disputing science and the efficacy of masks, downplaying the risks to the American people, and making false statements about how 99% of coronavirus cases in America are “totally harmless” or that the virus “affects virtually nobody.”
He encouraged his aides and advisers to live in that dangerous fantasy land, pushing his luck to the limits as late as this past week when he again recklessly gathered thousands of unmasked Americans at his political rallies and packed the top officials in government into a Rose Garden ceremony for his Supreme Court nominee. All the while, White House officials embraced the fallacy that administering rapid coronavirus tests frequently at the White House could provide a shield of immunity.
The Trump presidency began by insisting Americans deny the evidence of their own eyes. His press secretary angrily demanded they believe his inauguration crowd exceeded those of all presidents who came before his (especially Barack Obama’s). The White House’s alternate reality “crumbled” on Friday, Reston adds, when Marine One airlifted the acting president to Walter Reed.
Republicans long knew the former reality TV star heading their party was leading it off cliff, yet just kept marching. Now they are falling off it like … you know what they are falling like (Washington Post):
“There was a panic before this started, but now we’re sort of the stupid party,” said Edward J. Rollins, co-chairman of the pro-Trump super PAC Great America. “Candidates are being forced to defend themselves every day on whether they agree with this or that, in terms of what the president did on the virus.”
[…]
“Their extraordinary rejection of what scientists have been recommending is coming home to roost,” said Irwin E. Redlener, founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
Redlener, a former Biden adviser, said that “everyone who hitched themselves to the president’s dishonest messaging about the virus is being confronted with the reality that the president himself is sick.”
Twitter users and others on Saturday began invoking Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” the classic cautionary tale of wealthy hubris and denial in a time of plague. Like Prince Prospero, Trump’s “incompetence, cynicism, and recklessness,” this “perilous variety of magical thinking,” writes New Yorker‘s David Remnick, threatened not only his own health but the lives of those gathered around him. He inspired self-destructive behavior amongst his less-protected followers that sparked deadly outbreaks from coast to coast. At least guests at Prospero’s fateful ball wore masks.
Poe concludes, “one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.”
“Am I going out like Stan Chera?” Trump asked aides. Chera, a New York real-estate developer, died of COVID in April.
That is to be determined. But his myth shattered, Trump might yet go out like Barry Goldwater.
Update: Removed Lawrence Tribe’s tweet. Seems it was appropriated.
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