Donald Trump’s new “solution”
The last time I had to endure the indignity of sharing this sceptred isle with Donald Trump, in August of 2019, he reminded us of his inability to learn. He apparently was still confused about the difference between the names the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England. He told a crowd in Pennsylvania just the year before, “I have great respect for the U.K., United Kingdom. Great respect. People call it Britain. They call it Great Britain. They used to call it England, different parts.”
One year later he still didn’t understand that they’re three different names for three different things. The United Kingdom is composed of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and some minor islands in the vicinity. Great Britain, or Britain for short, is all that less Northern Ireland and the minor islands. England is just England, tucked away on the island of Great Britain, made historically important because it was the seat of government for Britain and the U.K. and most of the kings and queens familiar to Americans. There you are, if you didn’t know that already you just learned in thirty seconds something that the “stable genius,” Donald Trump, president of the United States, has been unable to learn in three and a half years.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that for Trump, “coronavirus,” “COVID-19” and “SARS-CoV-2” are examples of how the bug that caused our current pandemic has “a lot of names.” While it’s true they are often used interchangeably — I frequently do it myself in these hallowed pages of Palmer Report — they are not the same. Coronavirus constitutes a family of viruses that includes COVID-19, which is a portmanteau for COronaVIrus Disease 2019. SARS-CoV-2 is the strain that causes COVID-19. Again, if you didn’t know that already then you just learned in thirty seconds something that the “stable genius,” Donald Trump, president of the United States, has been unable to learn in six months.
So we have a man who had unprotected sex with a porn star, who doesn’t understand the name of the organism responsible for the greatest pandemic in modern human history, in charge of keeping Americans safe during that pandemic. What could go wrong?
It doesn’t help that Trump’s “solution” to the whole coronavirus thing is to stop testing. You heard that right. Just in case you thought at first that Trump was merely saying that because America has such “great testing,” America therefore also appears to have more of the disease — which, though wrong, might at least be a reasonable thing to say — it turns out that he’s actually blaming the act of testing on the existence of COVID-19 in the United States. Trump’s solution? Stop testing. This existential form of shooting the messenger is how the “stable genius” is going to solve America’s coronavirus pandemic. It literally is an instance of what you don’t know can’t hurt you — Trump style.
This is all part of Trump’s rationale for going ahead on Sunday with his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We know it’s safe to hold a mass meeting of 19,000 human beings in one place because Mike Pence, head of one of the confusing arrays of White House coronavirus “task forces,” says so. By the way, Trump, who cannot resist lying, even when there’s no reason for it, says the venue, the BOK Center in Tulsa, holds 22,000 people. That’s simply wrong, as usual. It holds 19,000.
Oklahoma is a disaster, a COVID-19 Petri dish where cases and deaths are rising at an alarming rate. But Oklahoma’s cretin governor, the same idiot who took selfies including his family out at a restaurant in the middle of the pandemic, gave the go-ahead for the state to reopen. So, to put it in Trump terms, there’s gonna be a lot of deaths, a lot of deaths. And it will all be thanks to Donald Trump.
But the narrative that Joe Biden is “just as bad as Donald Trump” persists, despite the fact that Trump has, effectively, finally done what he said he was going to do. Trump has shot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lost a single member of his base as a result. Of course, the man he shot wasn’t on Fifth Avenue, but in Oklahoma. And it’s not just one man but hundreds, possibly thousands of human beings. People alive today will be dead within six months as a direct result of this evil man.
Meanwhile Trump wants to shoot one more victim. He wants to shoot the messenger called testing. Testing for coronavirus is what makes it possible for Americans to identify who has it and who needs to be quarantined. If he has his way he will, in his twisted and sick view, “look better,” because the statistics will no longer reflect an increase in the number of cases. If Trump could also find a way to suppress the number of deaths then he would do that too, at least until after the election in November, then he won’t care.
But, as I write this, 118,283 precious human beings are dead thanks to the negligence and idiocy and laziness and evil of Donald Trump. He needs to go and we need to defeat him in November. We owe it to the memory of those 118,283 people. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.