Skip to main content

A Really Talented Virus

Berkley, Michigan
Saturday

Of course, this would have to happen on Trump’s watch. We all knew it would be something big. We all knew we couldn’t possibly make it through the whole four years without stumbling on something he could seriously fuck up.
We thought it would be more of a garden-variety disaster — a war, earthquake, wildfire, tsunami, cat-5 hurricane, etc. These we understand. These have media profiles we’ve grown used to. Each is easily imaginable as the kind of challenge Trump and his GOP stooges were born to botch. They’re only in it for the grift, after all. Competence just gets in the way.
But they weren’t thinking plague. Way too biblical. Way too low tech. Not to mention low visibility, which Trump thinks is for losers. So it totally blindsided him. He couldn’t see it, so he never saw it coming.
Of course, neither did we. We weren’t expecting COVID to be so prodigiously talented at self-promotion (the Donald Trump of microorganisms?). A ninja that sneaks in under the radar, it invades our respiratory system, makes a few million copies of itself, then lays low for a week or so. It doesn’t even let us know it’s there until long after we’ve passed a bunch of those copies on to the next guy.
Which scares the shit out of Trump. He’s a germophobe to begin with, so the whole idea gives him the willies.
Then there’s the invisibility thing. Not being able to see or even sense his enemy is something totally new to him (me too, but I’m not in charge of the free world). And what he can’t see, he can’t make a deal with. Or sue. Or get Bill Barr to cover up.
Then, of course, there’s the infuriating fact that COVID is impervious to insult. He can’t just tweet it away. It doesn’t do press briefings (invisible things rarely do). It has no interest in photo ops or interviews on Fox, and it doesn’t need Mitch McConnell to wreck the economy—it can do that on its own.
So Trump’s anxiety level is surely cranked up to eleven. He can’t spin this. He can’t gaslight it. He’s desperate for somebody to blame, and the old razzle-dazzle isn’t working anymore. He has no credibility with anyone outside his imbecile base. The non-Fox media now debunks his lies in real time, before they even get out of his mouth. And as the curve gets steeper and refuses to flatten, that same imbecile base might actually start to find out—the ultimate hard way— how they’ve been conned (though that’s far from a sure thing). The thing is, it might be too late, because his words could start killing them off, maybe as soon as next week.
Look at the demographics. The highest percentage of his dumbfuck supporters are in the high-risk zone for the virus. They’re over sixty. They have more than their share of compromised immune systems, derived from an assortment of long-term health issues. These people would be right in COVID’s sweet spot, even if they weren’t being gaslit by Fox.
But instead of protecting them—the only voting bloc he has left—Trump is telling them to go out and party. And, no surprise, they’re stupid enough to listen. Which means a rather large number of them — six or seven figures, maybe — won’t be voting in November.
As demographic shifts go, this one’s a killer.

Comments

  1. juddlesApril 2, 2020 at 12:34 PM

    I'm afraid that Trump's old razzle-dazzle might be working well, even outside his base: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/trump-genius/609142/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If You Were Putin, What Would You Do?

  S o let’s say you’re Vladimir Putin. Scary, I know. But let’s just say you’d been trained by the old KGB to hate the United States with a white-hot passion that you’ve had on simmer since long before you became dictator. It’s a hate you were taught in the Brezhnev years, which were almost as bad as Stalin’s but with mass death ruled out, more or less. You nursed the hate through the convulsions of the early nineties, when your beloved Soviet Union was scrapped and replaced with economic chaos and widespread privation, which the Russian people somehow endured, as usual. Then finally, in 2000, you got your shot. You took over the whole country, and your hate was given room to breathe. Still you took your time. Fourteen years till you “annexed” Crimea and moved on the Donbass. Two more years before you engineered Brexit and the self-destruction of the UK, the same year you stole a U.S. presidential election for a pliable con man you’ve owned for three decades...
2 comments
Read more

DEI-Bashing and the Battle for the Soul of Big Law

  T here was a time, not long ago, when a major corporate law firm would look to burnish its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” credentials in the marketplace. At which point that firm might hire a writer like, say, me. It was a given that Big Law firms needed to become more diverse, at least if they wanted to stay relevant in a work environment that was no longer male, white, straight, and old. Firms everywhere invested real money in the recruitment, training, and promotion of lawyers from widely varied backgrounds, and they paid people like me to brag about it to the world. Every firm needed a DEI page on its website. Some wanted printed brochures. Some wanted advertising. Most wanted the legal community, especially law schools, to know about their diversity efforts. Law schools were by then rating firms by their DEI “scores,” and the firms with the best scores were getting the pick of the litter from the graduating classes. What I liked about the work was...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Sort of Pro Bono Work is Big Law Signing Up For?

  B ig Law is on the hot seat. Major firms have unexpectedly been thrust into the front lines of the war against Trump, and all their options are bad. I wrote about this two weeks ago, and since then a slew of big firms have either made a deal with the devil or joined the side of the angels. On the minus side, all but one of the top twenty firms have either taken the “deal” or stayed silent. I personally think they’re playing a bad hand badly. On the plus side — beyond those top twenty behemoths — there are hundreds of very large firms who have taken a stand, of sorts, against the junta. If you’re interested in keeping score , you can do so, but the whole thing keeps getting weirder. As we watch these “deals” being made, the one common denominator — and the most publicized aspect — is the “pro bono” work these firms are committing to. About a billion dollars’ worth of lawyering is available to be used in “conservative” causes. What does this mean? What ...
2 comments
Read more