Have a read of Fintan O'Toole's really great bit of analysis of Trump and his weird, contradictory impulses as to how to react to COVID-19. Here are the opening paragraphs:
On July 4, 1775, just his second day serving as commander-in-chief of
the American revolutionary forces, George Washington issued strict
orders to prevent the spread of infection among his soldiers: “No person
is to be allowed to go to Fresh-water pond a fishing or any other
occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the small pox into the
army.” As he wrote later that month to the president of the Continental
Congress, John Hancock, he was exercising “the utmost Vigilance against
this most dangerous Enemy.” On March 8, 2020, well over two months after
the first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the United States, Dan
Scavino, assistant to the president and director of social media at the
White House, tweeted a mocked-up picture of his boss Donald Trump
playing a violin. The caption read: “My next piece is called Nothing Can
Stop What’s Coming.” Trump himself retweeted the image with the
comment: “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”
It
is a truth universally acknowledged that Donald Trump is no George
Washington, but his descent from commander-in-chief to vector-in-chief
is nonetheless dizzying. Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and
malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and
they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response
to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31,
when it had become horribly undeniable. The volatility of his behavior
during February and March—the veering between flippancy and rage, breezy
denial and dark fear-mongering—may not seem to demand further
explanation. It is his nature. Yet there is a mystery at its heart. For
if there is one thing that Trump has presented as his unique selling
point, it is “utmost Vigilance,” his endless insistence that, as he puts
it, “our way of life is under threat.”
If the United States is to
be run by a man who has perfected the paranoid style, the least its
citizens might expect is a little of that paranoia when it is actually
needed. Yet even on March 26, when the US had surpassed China and Italy
to become the most afflicted country in the world, Trump continued to
talk down the threat from the virus.
Many people have it. I just spoke to two people. They had it. They never
went to a doctor. They never went to anything. They didn’t even report
it. . . . The people that actually die, that percentage is much lower
than I actually thought…. The mortality rate, in my opinion . . . it’s
way, way down.
Oh, OK. I can't resist posting a few more paragraphs further in, which really do point to deeply offensive attitudes held by Trump:
Trump has long characterized those who do not
appreciate his genius as “haters and losers”: “Haters and losers say I
wear a wig (I don’t), say I went bankrupt (I didn’t), say I’m worth $3.9
billion (much more). They know the truth!” runs a typical tweet from
April 2014. In The Art of the Deal, Trump claims that “There
are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of
accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.” But in
Trumpworld, as in the rightwing ideology he embodies, life’s losers are
not just hateful. They are a different species. Winners are one kind of
human; losers a lesser breed. Trump— like so many of the
superrich—believes that this division is inherited: “What my father
really gave me,” he tweeted in June 2013, “is a good (great) brain,
motivation and the benefit of his experience – unlike the haters and
losers (lazy!).”
In How to Get Rich, Trump links his own
germaphobia to the idea that some people are born losers. Winners are
people who think positively—and positivity repels germs. “To me, germs
are just another kind of negativity.” He then goes on to tell the story
of an unnamed acquaintance who is driven home from the hospital in an
ambulance after being treated for injuries sustained in a crash. The
ambulance crashes and he has to be taken back to the hospital. “Maybe
he’s just a really unlucky guy. Or maybe he’s a loser. I know that
sounds harsh, but let’s face it—some people are losers.” The
train of thought here is typically meandering, but the logic is clear
enough. Losers are inevitably doomed by their own negativity, of which
germs are a physical form. Infection happens to some people because they
are natural losers.
In 2013 Trump suggested that there was an
upside to the great recession caused by the banking crisis: “One good
aspect of the Obama depression is that it will separate the winners from
the losers. If you can make it now, you deserve it!” Apply this to
Covid-19 and you get an instinctive belief that it too will separate the
wheat from the human chaff. Great public crises are not collective
experiences that bring citizens together. On the contrary, they reveal
the true divisions in the world: between those who “deserve” to survive
and thrive and those who do not. Faced with the threat of the
coronavirus, this becomes an ideology of human sacrifice: Let the losers
perish.
Trump has problems with his memory. The GFC started on Bush's watch not Obama's.
ReplyDeleteI think I got the Sars-1 about two years ago. And it wasn’t diagnosed since the problem was no longer on the radar. Believe me you don’t want that smoke.
ReplyDeleteCatallaxy is a bit duomaniacal at the moment in that they are focused on the current economic disaster, and on trying to shuffle the blame off onto China.
But really this economic disaster is the same disaster as always. Its the delusion that we can base economic progress on debt. Mostly cheap ponzi debt for the big guys. As opposed to retained earnings for the sole trader, without ponzi lending.
This delusion cripples us always and distorts all of society. But now its turned out to be fatal economically under what ought to be a fairly low level crisis. Plus there is this other delusion: that we cannot put the weight of the crisis onto the public service and the finance industry. Not only CAN we do this. We must. If we don't get the public and financial sectors to shoulder these burdens we will be crippled for decades to come.
If we were a country that primarily relied on small and middling sole traders, with big cash balances, and tooled up to the gills, then we could deal with problems like this SO FAST. Because they could turn their production around to suit the virus very quickly. Next thing we are over-flowing with masks, hand sanitisers, ventilators, vitamin D3, A, K2, selenium, zinc, zinc ehancers (like chloroquine) and next thing we are actually stronger than before because we have a new export sideline. So we would be "anti-fragile" as Nassim Taleb would have it. People would see this. And they would understand that we were not to be attacked or pushed around. Not like now.
ReplyDeletePeople understand economies of scale. We see them everywhere. Except in the data ( paraphrase Taleb). I actually think Trump does very well on a day to day basis, and then because he's surrounded by lunatics he's made two absolutely disastrous mistakes. But America itself has been rendered useless. Mostly from the bailout which lead to a new level of cartelisation. Trump has fallen for a second bailout of the bankers.
Late 80's US would have reacted to a crisis like this with powerful mobilisation. They would be right on top of things. Post Paul Volker financial crunch ... The Americans were extremely innovative and flexible. They moved like floating boxer coming in from all angles. They were still cool even then. Now they are scandalously useless. But you cannot put it on Trump. Nine days in ten he does a good job.