Transition to Greatness

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

It’s Trump’s latest slogan and it stands for the following pipe dream: in a matter of weeks the US will be fully open for business again, people will be back at work, the economy will start recovering in the third quarter of 2020 and thanks to pent-up demand will do even better in the fourth quarter, and in 2021 America will have the greatest economy ever, even greater than the economy that was shut down by the corona virus.  Obviously Donald J. Trump, who masterminded this miracle, will be re-elected.  However, there are some irritating obstacles that need to be removed for this to happen: the CDC produced guidelines for a responsible gradual reopening of parts of counties and states that would significantly slow down the process, so they will never see the light of day.  Officially there are now over 85,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US, but according to a Harvard study the real number is over 110,000, and that is too high to give people confidence in anything the president says or does, so the number needs to be lowered by questioning the cause of death in many cases.  And then there is the exasperating Dr. Anthony Fauci with his dire predictions for the fall.

At a Monday presser Trump tried to frame his optimistic scenario by lying about where America ranks in the world in testing and death rates, saying: ‘We have met the moment and we have prevailed.’  Sadly he was contradicted by Dr. Fauci, who warned in Senate testimony that reopening the country too soon and without adequate testing and attention for local conditions would generate a new wave of infections and deaths in the fall that would jeopardize any chance of an economic recovery in the near future.  The president called Fauci’s remarks ‘unacceptable’ and took particular offense with the doctor’s admonition that prematurely opening schools would increase health risks for children, parents and grandparents.  Trump appears to understand that as long as children don’t go to school many parents won’t be able to go to work, assuming that their jobs still exist, but he is not in a position to argue with Fauci.  When it comes to matters of life and death a majority of Americans want to be told the truth, something the president has never been able to do.  To make things worse for him, today Fauci’s warnings were augmented by Dr. Rick Bright.

Bright, who was fired from his position as the government’s point man for vaccine development because he refused to promote the drug Chloroquine, testified in the House that the White House was unprepared for the pandemic in spite of frequent warnings, and predicted ‘the darkest winter in modern history.’  Among the things the administration failed to do was stockpiling medical supplies, something Trump consistently blames Obama for, conveniently disregarding that the previous administration was stymied in all its efforts to make such purchases by the Tea Party.

Although the president will probably be trumpeting about greatness for a while it won’t get him re-elected, so he’s already pivoting to a last resort ‘whatabouttism’ he calls ‘Obamagate.’  In the cockamamie narrative under this title Obama, and by association Joe Biden, conspired even before the 2016 election to undermine a potential Trump administration by using the FBI to spy on the president’s campaign and profiling Trump confidants like General Flynn as agents for the Russians.

In spite of the shameless assistance he is getting from AG Barr this gibberish won’t get Trump elected either, and with the corona virus having entered his residence he has entirely different problems to deal with.  All staffers and housekeepers in the White House have to be tested daily and wear a mask now, but the president doesn’t wear one.  He expects to be protected by everybody without protecting anybody.

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