Who we are: The heroes and the asses

Having conceded defeat at the hands of one formidable enemy by opening the country amid a galloping pandemic, the Trump administration is now escalating a verbal fight against another foe. The purpose is to distract attention from Trump’s disastrous response to COVID-19, the real threat, and then shift the blame to a demonized other, the Chinese.

The president, as always, did nothing wrong. In fact, as he said early in the pandemic, with only fifteen cases in the country that soon would go down to zero, “we have done a hell of a job.” How about now, when nearly 70,000 have died as of the early morning of May 5.

How do you feel now, Trump, that the most optimistic projections are that more than 100,000 will die and the most pessimistic estimate predict a death rate of 3,000 a day, a million a year, about the ten out of ten grade you gave yourself?

According to Trump, he and his whole government are doing an excellent job. That evaluation is validated by the authority of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law and special assistant for everything.

If all this were not so achingly tragic and so outrageous and absurd, it would be comic. Plot line: A demented president who assumes everyone in the country is suffering from Alzheimer’s and can’t remember on Day 2 what he said on Day 1.

At first the president praised China for their handling of COVID-19. Now the Chinese are to blame for everything. Except there is no evidence of that. The Chinese may have underestimated the seriousness of the new Coronavirus and delayed in alerting the rest of the world. Taking COVID too lightly was a big mistake and failing to raise the alarm internationally as early as possible is culpable.

But one thing is a crystal clear. The Chinese are not responsible for this avoidable disaster in the United States; the Trump administration and its supporting cast of liars and sycophants are responsible.

The United States should not and does not rely on China or any other country for the security of its citizens.

Long before there was a single case in the United States, U.S. intelligence services were issuing urgent and repeated alarms in the most direct and dramatic way possible. Every day, the U.S. intelligence “community” prepares a written report for the president and delivers a verbal briefing. These focus on threats to national security. By tradition delivered very early in the morning, it’s the first item on the daily agenda of the chief executive. These documents and reports included multiple warnings about a pandemic threat coming out of China.

But, astonishingly, this president does not read the reports of his own country’s highly sophisticated and hugely expensive spy agencies. That is a serious dereliction of duty. Worse, as the intel people were raising all kinds of red flags, the president was denying there was a problem, accusing the Democrats of concocting the whole thing as a form of second indictment, and blaming his favorite scapegoat, the media, for blowing the threat out of proportion.

Through denial and delay, Trump made the pandemic much more costly in lives than it should have been. Now, in his haste for the country to return to work and business as usual so he has a passing chance of winning reelection, he is repeating on the back end the egregious neglect of duty he was guilty of on the front end. Only this time he is acting in full knowledge of the toll of death and destruction his decision likely will bring. And he is doing it for even more transparently political and selfish reasons.

As a leader, Trump is the perfect storm. He combines all the worst qualities in a single, self-satisfied package. The best single word to describe Trump is, naturally, an obscenity: asshole.

The philosopher Aaron James writes in a British online magazine that “the asshole is the guy who systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.” Vocabulary.com hits the nail even more squarely on the head when it says, “asshole is a common word for a jerk or idiot. If you call someone an asshole, they’re probably doing something not just stupid and annoying, but mean.”

Having an asshole as president in a pandemic is a PROBLEM from hell. But there are many other assholes that are also culpable.

In the New York Times, Paul Krugman recently wrote: “Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

“Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.”

There is only one more idea that I would add, one that is out of bounds for even the liberal media like MSNBC with its campaign featuring the heroes in the health care frontlines and other essential workers who risk their lives for the rest of us. The tag line: “This is who we (Americans, MSNBC) are.”

This country’s intellectual and moral degradation goes beyond a certain political party or the people who hold extreme right-wing views, although that is the epicenter of the epidemic of stupidity and mean-spiritedness. The nearly 40 percent of Americans and the more than 90 percent of Republicans who approve of Donald Trump bear a big part of the blame for the ongoing COVID calamity. These assholes are who we are too.