Donald Trump shows his steady and calm leadership at a recent coronavirus press briefing.
So now, a half century after dodging military service due to bone spurs in his heels – his doctor wrote him a “very strong letter” he told the New York Times in 2016 – Donald Trump, a living profile in cowardice, has declared himself a “wartime president.” Trump’s vain self-aggrandizement is essential to keeping his perpetually fragile ego fed. He is sustained by his detestable self-puffery, of which he is totally unaware because he has no capacity for self-reflection.
Trump’s off-the-charts sociopathic narcissism and vileness is on display whenever he steps to the podium. He is incapable of empathy, totally uninterested in things that do not impact him personally, and unable to engage in fruitful dialogue. Every day, in his pathetic screeds and tweets, he reminds us of the fantastic job he is doing (it’s really incredible, we’ve never seen anything like it), the mess he inherited from his predecessor (who steadily brought the country back from the brink of financial ruin), and his bitter grievances against the majority of Americans who wanted him impeached and removed from office.
At a recent coronavirus press briefing, NBC’s Peter Alexander dared to ask, “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now and are scared?” This was a legitimate, as well as a softball question, one even a novice politician could have easily dodged, or answered politely and superficially. But Trump is all id, a perpetually reactive repository of bile and pus. “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. It’s a nasty question,” he barked, before boasting, “I’ve been right a lot.”
That Trump has severe personality and character disorders which render him unfit for the presidency is hardly news. He is never responsible for his failures, or accountable for his crimes and misdeeds. He is always persecuted, innocent and triumphant. Trump has spent his entire privileged life seeing the world through his narrow and warped lens. He believes that his perceptions, fleeting and unsubstantiated as they may be, are reality itself: Obama was born in Kenya. He had the largest audience ever to witness a presidential inauguration. His call with Ukraine’s President was perfect. We’re very close to a developing a vaccine to end the pandemic.
At the end of February, Trump called coronavirus the Democrats “new hoax,” which is exactly what the sycophantic hosts of Fox News, with the exception of Tucker Carlson, were saying about it until recently. After weeks of dismissing the pandemic as nothing to be concerned about, the hosts of Fox’s afternoon show, The Five, are now each broadcasting from home to stay safe. On March 18, Sean Hannity proclaimed, “This show has always taken the coronavirus seriously. We’ve never called the virus a hoax.” On March 9 he said, “This scaring the living hell out of people, I see it again, as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.” That’s why in a recent poll nearly two thirds of Fox viewers said they were not concerned.
Maybe, just maybe, the coronavirus – not the virus itself, nor the economic devastation and human suffering it will cause, but Trump’s utter incompetence, ineptitude and ill-preparedness as a leader during a time of national crisis – will lead to the death of his ugly reign. The impact of the coronavirus, just as the impact of climate change, is as real as it is non-partisan. But while climatologists can’t prove that climate change itself is the cause of a particular storm, the devastating impact of the coronavirus is easy to definitively measure. A calculable number of people, conservatives and liberals, will get sick and die, lose their livelihoods, and have their social lives unimaginably altered directly as a result of the pandemic. Trump’s arrogance, vacuity and all-around miserableness as a human being are in the spotlight every day, now seen by all through the lens of a national emergency with no end in sight. How rooted in delusion is Trump? He declared a national emergency when there wasn’t one and denied a national emergency when there was one.
Meanwhile, fears are rising that Trump could declare martial law, or move to postpone or cancel the election. Should Trump come to the conclusion that he would likely lose to Biden, I put nothing past him. A desperate Trump is a more dangerous Trump and there is little sign that the Senate or courts would take strong measures to curtail his power. One thing you can be sure of: Trump will continue to spew lies, stoke deep divisions, and do everything he can to use the current humanitarian and economic crisis to his personal advantage.
Can the Democrats, backed by Bloomberg’s countless millions, mount a successful campaign to remove the malignant tumor that Trump is from our body politic? That is no less an important question than how to flatten the curve of the coronavirus, but first things first.
The immediate collective challenge before us is to stay calm and find our way to the other side of this crisis. That will take perseverance, patience and sacrifice. At the same time, we must mobilize as necessary, especially in the 10 or 12 states where the election will be decided, to remove Trump from office. In either case, the consequences of failure are too dire to imagine.