Welcome to my diary...the goal is to share with you the sights, sounds, and yes, even the smells of what it's like to be an Imbrogulio in a foreign land.
In the building where we live, as is typical in most apartment buildings here, there is a guard that monitors the entrance. Our building has three pedestrian and one vehicle entrance, so there are about a dozen guards total that rotate assignments. Some of them last for years and others only a few months and they engage us in varying degrees. A couple of them jump up from the desk when they see a resident coming and push the elevator buttons to call it while others will just nod. One thing they all do when stationed at the garage entrance is they will come to the door to see who is driving and wave. Appreciate the security and will wave back every time, but there is one guy that goes to another level. Whenever we come into the garage or front door, with his left arm he will throw this salute.
Not great quality cause I took it while moving, but it is a total Heil Hitler pose. When he is standing, will click his heels together when performing it. Analytical me understands he is just being demonstrative in his greeting, but since we are living in a conspiratorial epoch, could he be giving me the ol' Heil salute? I am one of the only white fellas in the building. And if so, is he throwing it out in solidarity or is he secretly mocking me? The Naizi's appropriated a bunch of Buddhist imagery and this could be a religious thing. Probably best not to ask
Briefly and relatedly, I am sure I have shared my 33%/66% theory before, but basically it is that 2/3 of the people out there are convinced of at least one conspiracy theory and you should back away from them slowly. It's easy to identify the ones getting it from Fox News, but this absolutely crosses all gender, race, cultural, etc. boundaries. Feels like we are ticking up and that it is now 75%. What do the rest of us do with them? Reason and rationality don't work. Everyone says that they just avoid whatever the "subject" is but that simply kicks the can down the road. I'm a fan of direct confrontation and shame and if they don't like it, fuck 'em...life is too short to have them in it.
So last week I gave a family update and said some decent things about the kids. If they ever read this, they will likely skip over the next post cause they heard positive stuff. Therefore, it is safe to hide a very concerning feeling in this entry. I think Babydoll has some form of mania and worry not about her safety, but those of others. Here are a couple of examples. TOday was her second to last exam and it was at 2pm, but she asked me to drive her over as she was gonna help a classmate study. She said that this person has bad study habits and waits to the last minute to cram the info into their brain for the test and how that is not the right way to study. Scary right? That is the only way normal people study and have never known anyone to do so otherwise. On its own, I suppose I could ignore it, but without any prompting, she sends me this picture from her notebook the other day with the message, "that's a pretty good larynx"
I know that people will say that she is just neat and what a dedicated student, but all of her notebooks are written in this bizarre small handwriting that looks like they are typed. I don't recall too many manifestos from the ladies, but this is what I imagine they all look like. I received that message and it was like I could feel cold hands wrapping around my larynx. I am only half kidding.
Something got messed up this week. I wrote the above a few days earlier and on SUnday went in to clean it up and add a spiel about how this virus is killing my mom. Not that she has it, but how she is losing her mind due to being quarantined for the last two plus months. It went deep into details and darkness. For whatever reason, I could not get this program to acknowledge or save any of that and do not have the emotional energy to try to recreate it. It was good to get it out of my brain and my suggestion at the end for all of us to share this stuff with others cause it helps to unburden your own mind and is good to know that others are going through some shit too.
Will cut this short this week then. Hopefully will be able to find some funny over the next few days.
A bit erratic with the timeliness of these posts, but no one gives a shit, so...
For today, thought I'd try to give a family update in the Christmas letter tradition. Receiving those from people is always hilarious and have wanted to send a funny one about how much of a disappointment the Boy is, B-doll being a candidate for beauty school, etc., but never did cause I didn't want to poke karma.
The Boy turned 21 a few days ago. Not many people on the planet that haven't had some landmark date or event occur during the quarantine and his 21st meant that no blackout/strip club antics were gonna happen. Pretty sure he has scratched all those itches as he's had a fake ID since he got to college, and was able to go clubbing here as the drinking age is 18, but felt a bit disappointed for him. To be honest, I have no recollection of doing anything on my 21st but I also had access to booze at 18 legally, so it wasn't any big whoop. He told us he walked to a friend's house at midnight on the day and drank a Budweiser, which is probably as lame a celebration as you could dream up.
He just finished year 3 and his cool summer internship that was at a drug manufacturer in Durham NC just told him that it is gonna be virtual...not sure if he'll still get paid. He was talking to B-doll a couple weeks ago and told her he just got back from a jog. We all laughed...and then we got worried about his mental state as we have never heard of him running just 'cause. One thing he has been doing with his extra time is teaching himself how to cook stuff, which is an admirable skill that travels well. His favorite desert has always been Apple Pie and he shared pictures of his latest efforts.
B-doll is a week and a half away from finishing her Junior year of High School and she is damn fortunate to be able to be attending classes in person. Her school was on-line for a couple of weeks, but other than that, they have been in session. She took four AP classes this year and the last few days have been those AP exams. Normally, these exams are given in different time zones to accommodate the worldwide student population, but this year, for reasons that I have been unable to discern, they decided to give one on-line exam and everyone takes it simultaneously. That means an exam time of 11am in California is 2am for Taipei. Effin' ridiculous and makes no sense. They have multiple tests usually, so what the fuck? It's a money grab anyway and everyone knows it, but you gotta play the game. Her final exams are next week, then she does 2 weeks of the T.A. (teacher's assistant) gig she has done the last two summers, and then has a 6 week internship at a research facility that sounds too good to be true. Don't want to say too much about it at this point, but she sourced it on her own and have come to admire her self-discipline with regards to her studies and keeping her shit together.
As for The Boss, no question that this is the longest stretch she and I have been in the same town since 2011. Her job is either traveling, or planning to travel, so she is not terribly busy at the office. To supplement her company knowledge, she arranged for her and her team to take turns working a week at the warehouse. They have a process for cycling through the office types to give them some experience in the different areas of the floor and today is day three of her week. So far, she seems to be having a good time...apparently, she caught a burglar yesterday and also claimed to be the first person in our family that has ever worked an honest day of labor. Rosie the freakin' Riveter. She is not used to being on her feet for 8 hours and told us she was going to bed early last night. Babydoll and I said in unison 'Goodnight Rosie'. It is good that she is doing a week of labor as I hope she gets back on a regular sleep pattern. Ever since we were quarantined, she has been staying up weird hours binging Chinese soaps. While that in itself is cause for concern, not having a regular sleep schedule can be a major factor in mental health. It has been relatively calm at home though, so I shouldn't complain.
As for yours truly...baseball season ended on Monday. We don't play a ton of games, but our last one was a rip snorter. We got up big early and the other team clawed back to tie us at 9. We were home team so had last crack, but we also had a hard time limit to finish and only 5 minutes to do what we could. A walk and a steal, followed by a shot to the gap to bring home the walk-off run as time ran out made for a great finish. Then we all went for ice cream after, just like the good ol' days. I felt pretty damn good about myself by the end cause we didn't play well the first couple weeks, but really pitched and hit well as the season closed. I know I am not a great coach, but think I am a pretty fair manager.
Walking to the baseball field on campus, pass by the elementary school classrooms and see their art projects displayed in the halls. Enjoyed a recent one where the kids drew self portraits of themselves wearing masks. I assume they were told to decorate the masks with meaningful things to them.
I think this kid likes sushi and cell phones
And I would hang with this girl who likes ramen, bubble tea and puppies while grooving to some tunes.
Not much more to share about me for now. I did see a news story yesterday that I found to be hilarious and endearing. I refer to the Taiwan News site often in this space. I know it is not whatever the Taiwanese equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize level of local journalism, but they share the virus updates regularly and the site does not seem to be inciting hatred, which is rare to see these days. It is the local news stories and how they are presented that tickles me on many occasions, and the headline of this one begged for further reading; Video shows Taipei cops arrest pandemic jerk.
The article starts by describing a woman on the subway being told to wear a mask by transit cops, refusing, and then when they ask her to leave, she loses it and starts attacking a female cop. Her male partner (Officer Liao) shows up and the woman starts wailing on him for a minute or two before he has to physically subdue her. Officer Liao says to the lady once she is pinned, "Have you had enough?" The article then describes the officer thusly:
Liao is a third-degree blackbelt in Taekwondo, stands 180 centimeters tall, weighs 85 kilograms, and is known by his colleagues as the Taipei Metro version of Holger Chen (陳之漢), reported Liberty Times. Liao said that he had tried not to retaliate against the woman as she assailed him and instead just focused on fending off her blows.
I know you are now asking, 'how tall is 180 centimeters, what is 85 kilograms in pounds, and who the hell is Holger Chen?"
5' 9", 187 lbs, and this fuckin' guy.
That was not a bad interview and the dude has well developed thoughts (in addition to being swole).
My favorite part of the pandemic jerk story is at the end when it says the Taipei Metro chairman praised Officer Liao for his actions and gave him 30 metro tickets and a gift box of chicken stock. This sounds like news from the Macon County Tattler rather than one from a city of 8 million people, but that is what makes it so endearing.
The switch flipped and we are in it. This will be the 9th Taipei summer we have experienced but the first when we'll be here for the whole thing. I know it is coming and also that it is gonna be awful, but knowing the pain is coming doesn't mitigate its affect. I will be mentioning it often in hopes that writing about it will be a form of therapy and the challenge will be to come up with new and funny ways to describe it without repeating old jokes like...You know what they say about the weather in Taiwan in the summer? Wait 5 minutes and shoot yourself in the face. Gold Jerry.
Hard not to complain about the heat...OK, impossible for me...but really shouldn't do so as we are in a place that feels almost completely normal. Coming close to the end of baseball season and we practiced/played Monday through Thursday evenings. Friday night, we had friends over for drinky-poos, went downstairs to the Vietnamese place for dinner and came home for a round of Cards Against Humanity. Had never played and was excited to having heard about it for years. It was funny the first couple of rounds but it wore thin relatively quickly. Saturday we went to a friend's place for a BBQ and we are taking Betty to a steak joint tonight for Mother's Day.
This is not to brag or make you feel sad, but to give you hope that life can get back to normalcy. Every conversation with a person I talk to here says the exact same thing; how lucky we are to be living in the best place on Earth during this time in history. It's been 28 days since there has been a single non-imported case, and while they aren't saying so and remain vigilant, they have beaten it. Have been predicting/hoping that other countries that have done the same can start interacting and that we can beat the heat here with a trip off island, and saw this article where they are talking to Australia and New Zealand about creating a travel bubble with Taiwan so that people can go places without having to quarantine. Please make this happen.
I have to walk through the elementary school to get to the baseball field and saw the latest artwork project displayed on the walls.
Have to assume it was an exercise to draw a masked self portrait and to express your feelings on the mask. This kid apparently likes sushi and his electronics
I liked this girls the most...her snack sized puppy named Honey, lots of music and bubble tea.
This mask shit is not enjoyable for anyone, but it is not hard to do.
The Boy turns 21 on Monday and while he won't get to celebrate by having his first drink, will always be able to tell his children the story of 2020. He seems fine and have been impressed that he's been teaching himself how to cook real food with his extra time. He sent us some photos and the stuff looks good, and this week he has started experimenting with baking his favorite treat...Apple Pies.
The lattice one looks cool but he said the crumble crust tasted a lot better. Am sure he is playing too many video games, but taking this unique opportunity to learn a skill that will follow him forever is admirable.
My poor mom on the other hand seems to be losing it. She got diagnosed last Monday with having a UTI (look it up) and that has caused her mind to cloud in the past. They put her on antibiotics and hoped it would get her back to some clarity, but has been agonizingly slow in doing so. It has been a week of not understanding why she is not at the home she lived in years ago, 'why are you doing this to me' and going through her phone book calling everyone asking those questions. We Skype and she is looking at me and asking where John is. I ask her who I am and she says my son John, then asks in the next breath where her son John is. My sister asked me what it feels like to have a twin, Sexy of course.
I've read and been told how to react to this kind of dementia, but as an impatient person, it is mind bendingly frustrating and know I am not doing a great job of it and that makes me feel awful.. Not being able to see anyone other than the other old bats that walk down the hallway or go out of her place for anything has to be contributing to this confusion. Reading is really not something a 93 year old can do with pleasure, and even navigating Netflix is far beyond her technological aptitude. I know a lot of other folks here who have similarly aged parents in the States and they are all having similar issues to some degree. These people might not die of the virus, but they are another casualty that is hard to quantify. After us expats talk about how fortunate we are to be here, the next sentence is how fucking pissed we are at the States for the way that even the most basic of remedies like wearing a mask is now the frontline of the political divide. I knew that getting the 33% of Americans that ride or die with that guy to come together would be unlikely, but their fervor with doing so is stunning.
Sorry, not a great nor funny entry today. Think I have a bit of what they describe as survivor guilt
As mentioned, Betty went at my mane with the hair straightening thing on Saturday. It took about an hour longer than she thought. It looked weird as you can see...a cross between Trump's doctor and Spinal Tap's David St. Hubbins. By the way, St Hubbins is the patron saint of quality footwear.
Did that this night as we were going out with friends for dinner, which we can do in this burgh Thought it would be fun, but the look didn't even last an hour before frizzing out. One of the ladies we went out with has talked me into doing a Brazilian blowout with her and we are looking to get that on the books soon.
Following up on last week's news of the ill-fated Goodwill fleet and the many sailors with the virus that were allowed to run roughshod around the island, today marked the 14th day since that happened and not a single case of transmission from them has been found. It was hinted that these sailor boys visited all the "girlfriends" and that says a lot about their copulation methods...will leave it to you to discern exactly what. They are going to test all the quarantined sailors again before freeing them from isolation. Taiwan went 6 days in a row without a single case and that string was broken yesterday with 3 new imported cases (from Senegal and Japan). We're getting close to being free of that shit here, but as long as people come from somewhere else. it is unlikely to be eradicated. What do you do?
It is clear to our clan that a visit to the States this summer is completely off. B-doll, who had a nice internship lined up in DC, has cancelled that and was fortunate to secure a 6 week gig here and a prestigious research facility. As we are off for 8 weeks and would need 21 days of isolation to re-enter society, we have resigned ourselves to spending June/July here for the first time in 9 years. The sweaty gorilla in the room is that this place absolutely roasts in the summer and this week saw it begin. Over a 100 fahrenheit every day, often over 110, with it cooling down to the 90's at night. Oh yeah, as humid as your worst nightmare too. There are absolutely no days off where a breeze or rainstorm does anything to break it. A rainstorm will just increase the sauna effect and also increases places for the mosquitos to breed. Probably shouldn't have listened to that podcast about how mosquitos have killed over 50 billion humans in history this morning. A breeze makes the instantly rotting garbage smell smack you in the face like your sticking your nose into the presidents ass. The VP knows what I'm talking about. I will say that the locals do an admirable job of getting trash picked up every day, it's just that any garbage is weaponized withing minutes of being exposed. What I'm saying is that I will probably not be taking a break from posting and will almost certainly use this space to whine about it for the next 5 months. Just a warning.
One more semi-related piece of regional intrigue. A bunch of like minded China hating types from Vietnam, Hong Kong and Taiwan have an online group where those countries entered an alliance against Chinese bullying in the neighborhood. As those place all love their tea with milk (Thai iced and Taiwanese Bubble) they have named their group the Milk Tea Alliance. A clever and delicious sounding name. Australia has been having a war of words with the Chinese of late and they were just added to the group. I think they can do better with the Australian addition being a baby formula Aptamil, but I have got to get me a t-shirt with this image on it.
Have been grateful this last week in that there has been some sports to distract. Didn't want to, but have been keeping up with that ESPN Bulls documentary. Felt I needed to as all the sports fans I know are tuning in so need to be updated to join the conversation. Since we don't have ESPN, the way we watch it is by using our VPN to log into Tokyo to get their Netflix feed. 4 episodes in and even as this documentary is reportedly controlled by Michael Jordan, he still comes off as a (n amazingly talented) passive aggressive dick.
The other fun thing last week was the NFL draft, which I would watch anyway but was unusual this year for obvious reasons. Seeing the homes of the GM's and coaches, as well as the player home celebrations was quite interesting. I loved the mom that pulled the girlfriend off of the draftee as she was preening to the camera and even laughed at Belichek posing his dog to make their pick. My personal favorite was the Raiders first round draft pick Henry Ruggs III sitting on his couch wearing a white bathrobe with the Old Spice logo on it
I want one. My Mandarin DJ name has long been Da La, which means Big Spice, but I can't kick it as hard as I used to so have officially graduated to Old Spice. Mr Ruggs was not wearing that robe for no reason but did so to highlight Old Spice's $320k donation to the United Way. Love that guy now and expect him to be wearing a Super Bowl ring within 3 years.
One more draft item to note...the Patriots drafted a kid that has a white supremacist tattoo because of course they did.
Last week I shared a cricket video from my year in Melbourne in 1983. An Aussie band I came to love from that time has been posting audience photos from past shows to keep in touch with their fans, and yesterday, they uploaded this photo from October 9th, 1983.
Don't see myself in there, but I was beaming as are all these folks. Some very cool friends I made during that year took me to this very show and it was, as they say in Cold Chisel speak, Fuckin' classic.
Finally for today, we bought a mint plant for our balcony a month or two ago as Betty likes to make fresh mint tea for herself. My father tortured us as kids by making us do yard work from sun up to sundown on weekends. I kid you not...we had to stop cause we couldn't see any more. This trauma, which probably gave me whatever work ethic I had that has been wiped away the last 9 years, instilled a life long aversion to doing any yard work of my own. Having this mint plant is about all I can stand and I still hate the responsibility of keeping it alive as it is such a needy little thing. If it doesn't get a ton of water every day, it wilts and looks so sad, and would be dead within two days. Better are the little cactus plants we have in the office. Betty and I are both Snakes in the Chinese horoscope and have read that they are considered lucky for that sign so we've had our two little guys for several years now and all the maintenance they need to thrive is an ice cube in the pot once a week.
Was talking to The Boy the other day and remarked how that it was nice that he called me. I shouldn't have been happy as the true reason he called came out later during the conversation that he is looking to buy a car, but at least he waded through other topics first. Anyway, he has been good about calling Grandma and has set a reminder to call on Sunday's, which is the day she has no caregivers and feels the most lonely. Grandma is in an Assisted Living place in California and as with most of those, outside visitors are not allowed. Not even my sister who lives nearby has been able to go in to see her since it went into effect. She does drop off homemade food regularly and yesterday was able to see her as she came out to the balcony to wave.
Funny and sad. Calls to her help connect with the outside world and hopefully keeps her sane. I call on Skype everyday and she usually gives me crap about my hair and I admonish her for not getting out for a walk or exercise. Still, gives her something to do. I tell the Boy that Grandma is like the mint plant these days and needs a healthy dose of water to keep her alive, and also that it would be nice for him to call us more frequently too. He doesn't need to check in every day, but maybe give us an ice cube once a week.
A couple of personal things off the top. It has been exactly 16 months since my last haircut. About a month ago, when we had to go into quarantine from an overseas trip I sorta stopped going at my hair with a comb in the shower for a couple days. It had become harder and harder to get it combed through, but after a couple of days without going through it, dreads started to form and it became impossible. It wasn't long before I had a ton of them and a couple were rope like in texture. I had no clue that was gonna happen and always assumed that folks with dreads were cultivating them, but in looking it up after found it is the natural end point for curly hair. My girls have long hair but theirs is way different and we cannot care for it in the same way and they were not much help with my dilemma.
Went out to dinner with a buddy and his two teenage boys, and the dad is a black guy with a bald head, but his mixed sons have nappy hair that they keep short. I know the boys from baseball and they've both been big fans of my hair experiment, really the only ones that have said 'cool hair', and as we're talking my buddy says his wife would be a good person to talk to as she has learned how to take care of her kids. We arranged an evening together for her to come over to talk about it. As we're talking, she senses that I am not a huge fan of taking time to process my hair as I've never spent more than 10 seconds doing anything to it other than wash it. I have never used a dryer or even a hair brush. After a good 30 minutes, she convinces me to let her go at it. Took about an hour, and she had to cut out a few of the heavier dreads, but by the end, was able to brush and comb it all the way through.
Since the likelihood that we get to come to the States this summer is in the single digits at this point, and knowing that the heat here is relentless, can see an end point to the mess. Before it goes, am gonna play with it and this weekend plan to have Betty straighten it out. I dream about having straight hair that blows in the wind and have high hopes. Tune in next week for a photo of that.
Taiwan is still in good shape and we are able to go to work/school/the field to coach baseball. One of the restrictions at school, and all indoor businesses here is that mask wearing is required, which means we have to practice and play with them. This season in 7th/8th grade and we took our team photo...one that I will cherish forever.
All is not completely well here though and this week saw the biggest virus related scandal so far. While all the details are not yet known, here is how I understand it from what has been written. The Taiwanese Navy had some mission planned for mid-March and proceeded with it. That mission included a visit to the island nation of Palau, one of the few countries that diplomatically recognizes Taiwan, as a goodwill visit. The so-called Goodwill Fleet then did some secret mission, most likely to monitor China in some way, and then they returned home. The colossal fuck-up came when the Navy allowed the sailors to just get off the boat and enter into the community even though there are reports some of the sailors were sick. And what do sailors do when they get shore leave? You know it...the hit every whore house and Costco. Seriously, that is exactly what they did. Word got out fast that a bunch of them had the virus (22 of them on the initial announcement and 6 more since) and then they went into full contact tracing mode. They do an amazing job with tracking as they not only devote a ton of human resources to it, but use every trick in the technology book to review where their phones have been and you can see a version of the places they went that is published so people know if they may have come into contact with them here. We've all been making fun of this list as a ton of the places listed are hourly motels and Costcos, a couple of which had to be closed for days to be fully disinfected.
Side note: Think I have mentioned that the daily case update comes out at 2pm and I have become addicted to them. When they are referring to clusters like the Goodwill Fleet, or earlier regarding a tour group to Egypt that had a several cases with new ones being added daily, they refer to those excursions as "ill-fated". An unusual word but one that is now a big part of the local ex-pat community's lexicon. Once the number of cases reaches a level, they change it from ill-fated to doomed.
Until we get a vaccine, this tracing is how it needs to be, but seriously doubt most of the States has the bandwidth to do this to the level needed. Plus, what percentage of 'Mericans are gonna sign onto getting their every step monitored by The Man. Here is another thing that would be nice to see in the States...as this was obviously a total screw up, the President, who I have a total crush on, got up and not only apologized, but as Commander in Chief, took total responsibility. It is OK to be jealous.
One of my earliest virus gags was along the lines of how you're not supposed to touch your face, which led to me asking if it was ok to touch your balls. Once again, turns out that I was prescient in that men are more vulnerable to the virus as the testicles have similar proteins to the lungs and intestines that the thing likes to live. As we fellas have them and you gals don't, that means we have one more special place for the thing to grow. Not a 1:1 with scratching them, but still...news you can use.
A new one I've been working on surrounds the virus symptom that you lose your sense smell and my ability to be the canary in the coal mine. I will fart and if you can't smell it, then you are a potential health risk.
Alrighty...that's about it. Consciously didn't rail on you know who this week cause it is getting really old. I did read a piece by a British guy that gives his perspective on him that I found spot on and have pasted it below if you're interested. Before that, ran across a couple of videos that will appeal to no one but me.
The first is from the only cricket match I attended. It was a 20-Over affair between Australia and New Zealand at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) in 1983. As boring live as you can imagine, but a 17 year-old me drinking beers (green tinnies if I recall) in the sun on a hot day is a fond memory. Towards the end of the match when New Zealand was behind and making a run to win, I remember how this Kiwi named Lance Cairns electrified the crowd with a batting performance for the ages with 6 sixes. This is a 4 minute highlight of that effort...
The other video is also an I was there thing, and it is a vintage performance from the Meat Puppets in their prime at the tiny McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica from 1992. I remember it being a brilliant night and this whole show video, with better sound than it should be, is proof positive. Curt Kirkwood is one of my all time favorite guitar players and you can see why. Again, not for everyone, but if you are cool...
Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:
"A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all. He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: * Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. * You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
Movie alert! Everyone is looking for something to watch and all of have something to recommend..including me. I am currently watching The Wire for the first time, having saved it for just such a rainy day, and can attest that it is as fantastic as they all said. In thanks to the algorithms that provide content to me, like every story on the planet Uranus with a hilarious headline, I received a story about a new movie out in a couple days called Butt Boy. If you haven't heard about it yet, you most certainly will.
Here is the link to The Daily Beast's article about it, and you really owe it to yourself to read up about the plot, but in a thumbnail; A man in a dead end job and boring life gets a prostate exam. It affects him so much that he starts putting more things up his butt resulting in him putting a young child up there, and by some twist of the cosmos, things that go up there disappear. Don't want to spoil the ending for you, but talk about must see.
Have been making an effort to circle around to folks I talked to early in their lockdowns to take their pulse as to how they are coping, and had a back and forth with a friend that's been working from home for a few weeks. She's a little bit older than I and offered that while she isn't happy about it, she gets to go to the stores during senior hours as she is 60. I hit 55 in September so asked if she joined AARP and what she found to be useful with it if so. She did join but has found no discounts or access to stuff that she uses. She asked me what I thought and while I haven't seen anything either, I do watch a bunch of daytime TV with my mom when I visit and there are a ton of products that I see in my future. I know I am covered if I ever get mesothelioma but do not think I worked with asbestos. I definitely want one of the carts that they ride around, and the bathtub that has a door that you can walk into looks useful although I see the seal of that thing wearing out in short order and having a flooded floor that I would slip on and crack a hip. I tell my friend that I see a device advertised often where you insert a sock on it and can slide your foot right into it without bending over. As a person with a herniated disc, getting my right sock on is a struggle and probably will only get worse. I ask if she has seen it and say I cannot remember the name but stop myself and say..."oh yeah, I remember, they call them Filipinas." She says is obvious horror, "Like the people?". I haven't seen this person much in many years so she forgets my style of humor. Nearly every caregiver my mom has is from the Philippines and workers in that industry are the biggest export they have. That gag is part of my 10 minute routine I'm working on about turning 55. Have told it to some Filipinos and they totally love it.
May have written this already but it's still on my topics to share list. It has been put on hold a bit lately as we are just not seeing many people these days, but a new greeting I have been using when someone arrives is to ask them, "Were you followed?" It's an ice breaker.
Not much to say in CoronaCorner this week other than Taiwan continues to be the global leader. For the first time in 36 days, there were no new reported cases yesterday The country stands at less than 400 cases (that is total infected, not dead) and they are not resting on their success with added mask wearing and other requirements being added regularly. They even took timeout from their daily briefing to address a concern that boys were being teased at school for wearing pink masks. Check it...
Oh yeah...the Taiwanese professional baseball league started last weekend. The first to resume in the world. The league only has 4 teams in it, and there are no fans in the stands, but one of the teams, the Rakutan Monkeys, loaded up some sections with cardboard cutouts (wearing face masks), mannequins and a robot band to provide some color and humor.
Just read that this week's Monkey games are gonna be broadcast in English and think they are trying to sell them to ESPN or something. First pitch is 2:05AM in the States but think you could avoid spoilers.
Finally for today, got to tell Babydoll a family story. She was very young when it happened but the details as to how my father passed away came up the other night as we're watching Let's Make A Deal. She has heard me tell the joke many times that goes, 'I want to die just like my dad...peaceful and asleep. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.' We get to see a couple of Let's Make A Deal shows per week and it is kind of our mindless together time. There are a couple types of contestants that when they reveal themselves for who they are, we immediately know they are gonna get the crappy prize or Zonk. The first is the person that invokes Jesus/God before their prize is revealed. The other is the dumbass that makes their pick by stating, "Go big or go home Wayne!".
The absolute worst example of the latter person was a lady that won a car worth $17K, and when Wayne went to ask if she wanted to trade it in to go for the Big Deal that was worth $21K, he was visibly shocked she said yes. Should you not know, when you go for the Big Deal, you have a choice of 3 curtains, so your odds are 33% and so giving up $17K for a 33% chance at $21K is bat shitty. They come back from commercial break and Wayne doubles down stating the obvious and says he has to ask why she was going for it, and this moron says. "I have a two year old daughter at home and I want to teach her to go big or go home" They open up her curtain and it is the gawdamn exercise package (the Jesus/go big types always get the exercise package). You taught your kid a valuable lesson lady, that is for sure. Several in fact. This package includes a treadmill and this tire flipper thing, which is 1/2 a tire on some mechanism that simulates flipping a tire and would probably be used zero times in anyone's life. The lady did look like she could use an exercise package, but think the car woulda been more her style.
So that happens and as we are recapping it, we talk about how we are going to avoid the exercise package when we go on the show (planned for summer 2021 by the way) and I say that I need to not get the treadmill as that is what killed Grandpa. I see she hasn't heard this, so explain that my folks had a treadmill in their garage, which was never used of course, and when he was 82 years old decided to give it to an acquaintance. As he is unloading it into this person's garage, he has a massive heart attack and was dead in minutes. I pray that is one of the ways I go out, although being vaporized by an undetected meteor impact is # 1
Well that was a dark way to end today's missive, but as Chuck Berry said...C'est la vie say the old folks, goes to show you never can tell.
Yesterday at school, ran into a guy I'm friendly with and as we are chatting, the day's tally of people that were tested positive for the virus came up. At 3pm here every day, the government announces how many new positives happened along with other virus news. Here is an example. There is a picture of the dude (Chen Shih-chung or Uncle Chen) that does the announcement every day and thought it was a stock photo they re-ran with each article cause he is always wearing the same thing, but someone did a collage of the photos and they are all different and the way you can tell is that he has a different color microphone.
Genius.
So I'm talking to they guy and note that there were 3 cases announced that day and he goes "damn...I had 6 in the office pool." Pretty dark office pool, but that a country of 23 million that is a few miles from China can have under 10 cases is still noteworthy.
That got me thinking of potential other games to play. Without sports, am sure there are a lot of gamblers out there needing a fix. The rest of us are hanging on what shitty thing the president will say next and so have come up with The Blame Game. It is hard to have a thought that hasn't already been on the internet five thousand ways, but I do not see this one anywhere. There is trump bingo, but feel this could be my lasting legacy. At the very least, I am putting in my claim in the name of the King of Spain
The rules to the Blame Game are pretty simple: During his daily press conference, who will be the first person the president blames. It doesn't have to be about the virus per se, just blame for something he obviously did. Have been compiling a list (really, this took 5 minutes and probably missed 10 obvious ones) and have assigned odds for each.
Odds
Media
3 to 2
Obama
2 to 1
The Democrats
3 to 1
China
4 to 1
Deep State (Career service)
5 to 1
World Health Organization (WHO)
7 to 1
Governor (any Blue)
8 to 1
Deep State (his own appointee)
10 to 1
Gov. Cuomo (NY)
10 to 1
A company (any)
10 to 1
Gov. Newsome (CA)
15 to 1
Gov. Whitmer (MI)
15 to 1
Mexicans (or any brown nationality)
17 to 1
GM
20 to 1
Muslims/Jews
20 to 1
Medical professionals
25 to 1
3M
25 to 1
the Field
45 to 1
Governor (any Red)
75 to 1
Generators
75 to 1
Fast Food
75 to 1
Himself
99 to 1
As a fan of horse racing, you can place your bets in standard win, place, show, exacta, trifecta, etc. A couple of over/unders are how many of these will he blame in any given day (over under 3.5) and how long will it take to blame the first one (over/under 12.42) .
Pretty damn satisfied with myself on this one and hope it caches on. May add an exotic wager on what color Uncle Chen will use that day. Betty just tossed out the over under on when the WHO guy will resign/be fired. I asked 'What guy?" and she said, "The WHO guy." I replied, "That's what I just asked, who?" Curious to see how long I can milk this Abbot and Costello routine.
OK then...how is it for you wearing a mask? The locals have always been into it but I've always resisted cause I felt it more important for them to see my gorgeous mug, but have started donning them recently in stores/public spaces cause people were starting to stare. Last week they mandated that they be worn in places like the subway and school.
On Tuesday of this week, we had our first baseball practice with the mask requirement in effect and we all wore them.
Side note, how many baseball programs get to have practice this week? I read that the local professional baseball league is starting this weekend, which will be the only one on the planet. They are gonna play games in empty stadiums, but one team is going to put 500 robot fans in the seats to help create some energy in the stadium. Obviously way better than a mob of Patriot honks. That team is the Rakutan Monkeys and while I used to be a Brother Elephant supporter, am all in with some Monkey love now.
It's been a problem for me before but became a safety issue in that when you wear glasses and the mask, the lenses fog up. I started asking around, especially to my local friends that frequently wear masks as Chinese folks all wear glasses if there was a way to alleviate this problem and no one had a solution. Did a fairly deep web search and their solutions are temporary on non-functional at best. I see doctors on TV (before I turn my head away due to nausea) during surgery and a lot of them are wearing glasses without issue, so there must be a way. Normally, for day to day activities I can work around it, but at this point for baseball, am just holding my breath when the ball is coming at me. Would welcome any comments or suggestions you may have.
In local news, about 6 months to a year ago a Korean bibimbap place opened up next door to our apartment. Not opposed to it but never a big fan, we had it on our list to try but hadn't gone and saw a couple weeks ago that the sign was down and they had closed. 6 months is a bit faster than the normal failed business closure, which typically takes at least a year. Walked by it today and found that they had re-branded themselves as the Sunny Day Cafe. It looked more inviting so waddled in to look at the menu. Saw they had an espresso machine and ordered a cappuccino (which was good although they didn't have cinnamon) and asked to see their food menu. It was all in Chinese and the proprietors, who were very pleasant Koreans, spoke Mandarin and Korean but very little English and they could not translate. Have been using the Google translate app a bunch lately and tried it out on their very handwritten menu. The first item came back translated as "Infared Bugs". We will definitely be supporting our local business.
Finally for today, I have been looking for the definitive mash-up of what the treasonous. rapist cheerleader in chief did and didn't do in fucking up the country and being an accessory to murder. Found an article in The Atlantic by David Frum that does a great job detailing his crimes in his own words and deeds. None of these things can be denied cause it is all on the record stuff. I am copy and pasting the whole thing below and hope you take the 5-10 minutes to read it. There is a line in it that stood out to me that was so poetic and right on the money that it has to come from Confucius or Kanye or something...it reads,
"Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it. "
Here it is...talk to ya later. I Don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.
Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead
(The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.
For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.
Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.
The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 and March 21.
Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.
Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory. Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.
This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country.
It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond.Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.
At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”
Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:
Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
Trump and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an excuse.
But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason. The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran. Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over Tehran on January 8.
The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18, Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping, TheWashington Postreported.
Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed in Washington State.
Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the coronavirus as something external to the United States. He tweeted on January 22: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Impeachment somehow failed to distract Trump from traveling to Davos, where in a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he promised: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”
If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.
Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.
On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again, you know … that I closed the borders very early.”
Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.
The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on January 30, but recommended against travel restrictions. On January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February 2, the Italian ban applied immediately. Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump.
And Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Timesreported.
At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”
That same afternoon, Trump’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to combatting the virus, but to the demands of his own ego.
The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally Roger Stone. On March 2, Trump withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller; McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. As the epigrammist Windsor Mann tweeted that same night: “Trump’s impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”
Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.
“Best usa economy IN HISTORY!” Trump tweeted on February 11. On February 15, Trump shared a video from a Senate GOP account, tweeting: “Our booming economy is drawing Americans off the sidelines and BACK TO WORK at the highest rate in 30 hears!”
Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program February 24. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”
“We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.”
On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.:
The reason you’re ... seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours ... This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.
That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”
Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery. During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.
“If we were doing a bad job, we should also be criticized. But we have done an incredible job,” Trump said on February 27. “We’re doing a great job with it,” he told Republican senators on March 10. “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning,” he tweeted on March 18.
For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.
Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.
Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus as “their new hoax.” That line was so shocking, it has crowded out awareness of everything else Trump said that day. Yet those other statements are, if possible, even more relevant to understanding the trouble he brought upon the country.
Trump does not speak clearly. His patterns of speech betray a man with guilty secrets to hide, and a beclouded mind. Yet we can discern, through the mental fog, that Trump had absorbed some crucial facts. By February 28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.
But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement.
So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA. It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to 100,000 people a year die.
And so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.
On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”
By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first cases and halt their further spread—that opportunity had already been lost. It was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in sufficient time.
But on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.
So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.
On February 28, Eric Trump urged Americans to go “all in” on the weakening stock market.
Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
But the facade of denial was already cracking.
Through early march, financial markets declined and then crashed. Schools closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.
The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.
The White House had dissolved the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics? Not me, Trump said on March 13. Maybe somebody else in the administration did it, but “I didn’t do it ... I don’t know anything about it. You say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”
Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call.
Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.
On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”
Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29.
Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009.
At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own separate stockpile. “They have to work that out. What they should do is they should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never happen.”
Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’”
Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.
As his medical advisers sought to dissuade Trump from proceeding with his musing about reopening the country by Easter, April 12, Deborah Birx—the White House’s coronavirus-response coordinator—appeared on the evangelical CBN network to deliver this abject flattery: “[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit.”
Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.
The weeks of Trump-administration denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.
In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French officials accuse the Trump administration of diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven facilities for 70 years.
Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead. Perhaps the only political leader in Canada ever to say a good word about Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, expressed disgust at an April 3 press conference. “I just can’t stress how disappointed I am at President Trump ... I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime minister or president from any country ever again.” Ford argued for a future of Canadian self-sufficiency. Trump’s nationalist selfishness is proving almost as contagious as the virus itself—and could ultimately prove as dangerous, too.
As the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.
He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining. Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. An Arkansas pastor toldThe Washington Post of congregants “ready to lick the floor” to support the president’s claim that there is nothing to worry about. On March 15, the Trump-loyal governor of Oklahoma tweeted a since-deleted photo of himself and his children at a crowded restaurant buffet. “Eating with my kids and all my fellow Oklahomans at the @CollectiveOKC. It’s packed tonight!” Those who took their cues from Trump and the media who propagandized for him, and all Americans, will suffer for it.
Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.
Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.
Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.
Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.
