The Slow Down The Testing Edition

Issue #23
June 23-24 2020

After his cataclysmic flop last Friday night in Tulsa, President Donald J. Trump was back comfortably sloshing around in his more natural environment by Tuesday. He dove head straight into the veritable toxic vortex of Phoenix Arizona on the very day where Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations hit a new record.

In blazing 109-degree heat, and with a nearby brush fire clouding up the sky and making it somewhat harder to breathe, the president then led some 3000 of what has to be among the dumbest dumbfucks in America into a local evangelical chamber where they were herded into cheek by jowl with less than ten percent wearing masks.

The religious charlatans who run the church, in an act of pure Trumpian mendacity, loudly proclaimed that they found a method to fully defeat the virus with an air filtering system that they say kills 99.9% of the virus. If that were only partially true we could end the pandemic by next Sunday. If by some miracle the assertion bears more truth, it still would not prevent you from getting a big dose of the virus from the asymptomatic Jesus Freak sitting 7 inches from you. Turns out hundreds of these lost souls started lining up at midnight Monday so they could get a better seat in this abattoir. Reporters on the scene say that in the early morning before the rally, these Fine Folks were “penned” tightly together in some sort of holding action before they were let in. That gave the Covid plenty of fresh meat before they were given the protection of some fans and an overpriced air conditioner.

If they luck out they can hear another 17 minute explanation of how Trump can drink water without getting any of it on his tie, how he can ice skate down perilous ramps and how, if he wishes, he is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Oh yeah, and how the BLM protesters are all “hoodlums” or as Donald’s son put it the other night – “animals.” A great finale would be for the rally to end with the Second Coming and the Rapture so Jesus can yank these fine people directly up to heaven without them first having to suck on a respirator for three weeks. In any case, it’s estimated that by the weekend there will be exactly ZERO ICU beds available in Phoenix metro as hospitals were running at about 90% capacity right before Tuesday’s big spike in cases. All of a sudden that old saw of “Praise Jesus and Pass the Ammunition” has taken on a whole new set of interpretations.

However grotesque Tuesday’s event in Phoenix looks, it pales in comparison to Friday’s laughable debacle in Tulsa where Trump wound up with an audience made up of his family members, their friends, and few dozen transients who needed somewhere to sit for a few hours and be entertained.

No question whatsoever in MY mind that the fizzled Tulsa rally will be remembered in history – along with a pandemic death toll destined to top a quarter of a million—as the most egregious event marking the collapse of the Trump re-election campaign,

There’s also NO question in my mind that Trump has finally realized he is losing and probably already knows he will continue to lose right through the election. Indeed, he knows this better than most scared-to-shit liberals who are as spaced out as the Jesus People are in believing that by some miracle, Trump will prevail in November. Oh yeah, sure. That he has bled support, that he is 7-15 points behind in every single national poll, that he is underwater in every swing state where he eked out his 2016 electoral college win, that ¾ of the country are sympathetic to the BLM protests, that Bolton has revealed just how big an ignorant nincompoop Trump is (No, Donald, Finland is not part of Russia and Britain does have nukes), that the DOJ is falling apart under the less than stable genius of Bill Barr, that key conservatives on the Supremes have turned on him, that on Tuesday the hard line Trumpy governors of Texas and Florida finally ordered their subjects to wear face masks, that his support among women, suburbanites, and the elderly has cratered, and that he is running against a much more palatable Joe Biden rather than the nightmarish Hillary, well, hell, say some liberals, he’s still gonna turn it around because…because… because…. exactly what?

The question then arises, if Trump knows he’s in deep shit and sinking deeper, why doesn’t he do something different? Why does he mostly repeat in Phoenix what was a debacle in Tulsa? Why doesn’t he bite the bullet and soften his rhetoric, why doesn’t he make even the slightest, even symbolic or empty gesture to attempt to grow his support? Huh?

I don’t think the answer to this is very difficult. This poor bastard is INCAPABLE of doing any of the above because he only has the one ignorant, self-serving, arrogant, racist, defamatory, petty, vengeful mode that is on display 24/7. In that narrow sense, though he has told 20,000 lies, he is in some ways the most honest president we have ever had. There is no private Donald Trump that is any different from the antagonistic, moronic, blathering, stumblebum we see in public.

If he didn’t have so much power, if he were not responsible –directly—for tens of thousands of Covid deaths and tens of thousands yet to come, we would be obligated to pity his perennially tortured soul.

But, we’re not about to go there. Instead, put on your hazmat suit and join me for a couple of minutes in a journey inside Donald’s head. It’s ugly business but somebody’s gotta do it.

Trump has always been an overt racist. That’s a long-standing feature of his pre-presidential profile. So no surprise there. There’s some interesting video out there from the late 90’s and early aughts where he muses on how stupid most Americans are and how easily they are duped if you push the right buttons. This, of course, is the creed of all grifters and con men. And we know that’s what he is.

When he ran in 2015-2016, almost certainly not expecting to win, he let his freak flag fly as if in gale level winds. And to his surprise and to that of Jeb Bush, Rubio, and just about everybody else in the world, it actually worked. Now come the asterisks. It worked mostly because Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. Deservedly or not, her sky-high negatives were what they were and her insistence on running with so much negative baggage was in itself deplorable, and she was clearly putting herself above the interests of the country.

(By the way, do you remember who her running mate was? It took me an hour last week to remember that it was Senator Tim Kaine, the closest thing to a human sized jar of vanilla pudding).

Back to our narrative. Trump wins and nobody can believe it really happened. Eleven thousand votes in Michigan – where he is now so far behind his campaign just might write it off)—put him over the top in our totally obsolete and radically undemocratic electoral college. Clinton had failed to as much as campaign in these key swing areas because in her own supreme arrogance she thought Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were all in the bag. She was also hurt by underperformance – lowered turnout—by black voters who found her uninspiring. As did many young people who desired someone with more invigorating proposals like Bernie Sanders. And, ok, Hillary was also hurt by the leaked emails (that were real btw) and I don’t think a couple of million dollars, if that, in Russian Facebook ads made much of any difference.

You can argue about and dissent from all of the above except for one thing: Trump won by being Trump.

As we now enter his frontal lobe, we see that he has been totally convinced that THIS is the winning formula. It’s a reassuring notion for him as he does not have the imagination, the smarts or the inclination to switch up his game. He came in as a total asshole. He has “governed” as a total asshole. He beat impeachment as a total asshole. He is campaigning in his re-elect like a total asshole. And he will lose in November as a total asshole and be remembered in history as a total asshole. What’s the big mystery here, folks? WYSIWYG as they used to say in the days of CPM.