I don’t usually quote someone just to quote them, but conservative and rueful former Republican Max Boot really puts the, er, boot in on the Trump cultists:
One of the biggest, if unstated, reasons so many voters opted for Trump is simply because he is an entertaining showman. His unscripted rallies were so mesmerizing that he earned billions of dollars in free airtime. The underlying assumption was that the federal government is so unimportant that it could be handed over safely to a reality TV star who revels in “unpresidented” behavior.
This was the result of post-Cold War, post-9/11 complacency, with voters imagining that they could take peace and prosperity for granted. If the coronavirus should teach us anything, it is that governing is a deadly serious business. Electing a grown-up isn’t a luxury; it’s a matter of life and death. The price of “owning the libs” turns out to be far higher than even most Trump critics could have imagined.
I knew he would be a bad president — but even I didn’t expect him to be Herbert Hoover-level bad. In a way, you almost can’t blame Trump for his epic incompetence: He is who he is. He didn’t deceive anyone. I blame the voters who elected him — and the senators who refused to impeach him. They should have known better. Because they didn’t, we will all pay a fearful price. [WaPo]
Recently, a Trump voter rejoined my group at work after several years in another group, and when we razzed him about this admission, his excuse was that he wanted to wake up Washington. Not smiling, I said “16,000 lies, <name>,” and he just sort of melted. It’s a rare software engineer who can live on self-delusion, because reality tends to rear up and bop you on the nose too often.
Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota was recently interviewed by the local newspaper StarTribune, and he is a top of the line consultant on matters such as this. I particularly liked this bit, as it’s an implicit commentary on the lack of leadership at the top of our Federal government:
[StarTribune]. So in terms of closures that we haven’t seen, should we expect regional quarantines or cities cordoned off? Is that coming?
[Osterholm]. We’ve got to change all this. I’m trying to change the discussion. We can’t keep this suppressed. We’ve got to find a way to thread this huge rope through a little tiny needle. I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try to do that. One of the messages we have to give is getting people back to the middle. We have to say, “What are we trying to accomplish here?” We don’t have a national goal. What’s our goal? Is it to prevent everybody from getting infected? Is it to prevent people from being in the hospital? Is it to keep the economy at least viable? We don’t have a goal. That’s one of the challenges at the national level. And I’m tired of hearing people say, “We’ll do everything even if we overreact.”
I don’t know what that means. And so one of the things I’m trying to drive … is saying we need to think about what we might see when we loosen up society again, knowing that transmission will occur.
[At that point], we make every effort to … protect those most vulnerable. And we continue to emphasize social distancing, all the things that happen there. We don’t want people to be isolated … [but we have to] keep the hospitals from being overrun. We keep doing that until we get a vaccine.
It won’t be perfect. Some people will get sick, some may die. But it’s a way to get us to a place where [we can live with COVID-19].
Q. When will we return to normalcy?
A. I have no pretenses about what will ultimately happen. I get asked this all the time. I say straight-faced [that] we will never ever go back to normal. We will have a new normal, just as airplane flights took on a new normal after 9/11. I think that’s where we can thread that rope, to try to get there. At the same time, we also want to do what we can to help people psychologically work through this. This is really tough.
I get asked multiple times a day by the media: Aren’t you afraid you’re going to panic everybody talking about what you talk about? My first reaction is: You know what? The only people to talk about panic are the media. Have you seen anybody out rioting in the streets or burning cars or hurting people? Have you even seen one fight that occurred in a store over the last roll of toilet paper? I haven’t seen that. People are really concerned. They’re scared … but they’re not panicking. They want straight talk. They just want you to tell it to them, what you know and what you don’t know.
We just need to tell the truth. I worry that the truth is being lost in the politics of the moment, and I must say that’s not true in Minnesota … . You know me well enough to know that I’m not a partisan. I am very impressed with [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz and how he was worked with the commissioner and the state Health Department and made an attempt to reach out. He’s talked to all the former governors. He’s communicated with both sides of the aisle. He’s been forthright about what they’re trying to do. And that’s what we need. We need the straight-talk express right now.
Q. Do you want to say anything more about where things are being lost in the politics of the moment?
A. I think at the White House — I know this will be taken by a segment of the Minnesota population as I’m being partisan. I’m not. You can’t go from “It’s not a problem” to “It’s war” in two weeks without everyone understanding how you got there and what it means. When [they said this week] that the government can go in and take over these companies and make sure everything you need is going to be produced … that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Couldn’t be farther.
I know that’s a lot, but I think it’s significant. He’s clearly calling for better leadership, but I don’t think he’s going to get it. In general, he has experience and the communications style of someone who’s simply trying to tell us how things appear to be. We know with Trump, he’s always trying to spin things to his political advantage, and therefore he’s not trustworthy.
Osterholm may get it wrong, but he’s a helluva lot better than anyone out there who doesn’t have a degree in epidemiology.
