January 23, 2016. Donald Trump, the candidate, boasted, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It's, like, incredible.”
The audience at his rally in Sioux Center, Iowa laughed, perhaps enthralled by what he had said right before that: “My people are so smart!” And, he went on, “so loyal!”
 |
| Donald Trump descends Trump Tower on an escalator to announce his candidacy for US president on 16 June 2015. Photograph: Christopher Gregory/Getty Images |
It was that loyalty he was praising when he talked about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, loyalty that in his mind showed that "his people" were "so smart."
And that Iowa crowd laughed. Oh, Donald, they thought, Such a master of hyperbole!
Except he meant it.
So far as we know, he hasn’t shot anyone yet, but he has contributed to the deaths of over 195,000. And his “so smart” people apparently remain loyal.
It’s been a conundrum to me. I can almost reach an understanding of his attraction: he’s entertaining, in a rather nasty kind of way--his "jokes" tend to be at the expense of others, but he also voices the fears and frustrations many of our compatriots feel: after years of hearing how Washington doesn’t understand or care about them from cynical political operatives and their clients, this guy rides down an escalator and says he’s going to fix everything. If you bought into his characterization of how bad everything was, his presentation was superficially very appealing.
Among other things, he talked about the country’s need for a cheerleader, “somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again,” he said. [Emphasis added.]
So here’s my question for his supporters, now, after his almost 4 years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, now that we’ve heard from his own mouth how he knew covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but didn't bother to devise a national plan to address it, or to even pull up the plan previously sketched out and modeled that his administration had consigned to mothballs: are you okay with this guy dissing you to a degree that endangers the lives of everyone you care about?
Hear me out. A leader leads. That requires informing followers when there's a problem, telling them what the problem is, and what the plan is for dealing with the problem. A leader knows that to address a crisis effectively, it's necessary to get folks on board to solve it. That means trusting the citizenry to rise to the occasion, in short, recognizing that the people are smart enough to respond appropriately to the information they’re given .
Listening to the Woodward tapes, what I hear is that the president who didn’t “want to create a panic” feared doing so because, when National Security Advisor O’Brien told him the gravity of the situation, he himself panicked. He found himself in the place where he claimed that policeman in Kenosha was when he emptied 7 bullets into Jacob Blake: the president choked.
Or worse: he thought his job was to be a cheerleader and keep everyone chipper while they were dying because, well, what can you do about a pandemic, really, until “like a miracle” it goes away?
Maybe he feared that if he galvanized the public to confront the pandemic, it might interfere with his own interests: cause a negative stock market reaction, or demand leadership action that couldn't be easily rolled into a sound bite and tied up with a bow by Election Day.
To put it bluntly, it looks to me like the president thinks the American people are too stupid to handle a serious national emergency. And since staying in office is the only value he cares about, he can just ignore the daily death toll and spreading cases and talk about other things, or blame it all on whoever comes to mind: China, Democratic mayors, Democratic governors, medical personnel who don't like him...
In short, he keeps relying on our stupidity to let him run roughshod over our very lives. He’s been doing this now for almost 4 years, with increasingly destructive results.
 |
| Election polls, Harpswell (ME) Community School during covid-19 pandemic July 2020 |
There's an election coming that allows us to prove him wrong. Aren't you tired of his manipulations, of his shape-shifting truth to benefit himself, regardless of its impact on the national interest?
No comments:
Post a Comment