Donald Trump’s cold indifference
I like to listen to experts. Experts spend years in school studying a thing, then decades doing it forty hours a week. You have to be a special kind of idiot to think you can get off your couch after 90 minutes of YouTube and suddenly think you know something better than the experts do. Yet the internet has no shortage of such people. Such people are magical thinkers. Such people are ignorant.
I also like to listen to people with experience. I’ve never negotiated the Amazon river nor have I climbed Mount Everest, nor have I any intention of doing either. But if I were to attempt one or the other I’d talk to someone who’d done it before. I wouldn’t give a graduate of Google University the time of day. Isn’t that just common sense?
So when a coronavirus patient and their doctors say, “Trust me, you don’t want to get this bug,” I believe them the first time I hear it. When patient after patient after patient reaches for hyperbole to describe how dreadful COVID-19 is, how uncomfortable, how devastating, how it’s their worst nightmare, worse by far than any sickness they have ever had, I wouldn’t dream of contradicting them.
In fact, I am so thoroughly convinced that what they’re saying is true that I go to great lengths to protect myself against the coronavirus, including wearing masks when I’m in a public place, washing or disinfecting my hands thoroughly, never touching my face when my hands could be infected, maintaining social distancing and disinfecting all groceries and mail brought into my house. I’m a believer. I don’t have to go and find out for myself.
Of course I know that, for some, COVID-19 symptoms are mild. Some people report having no symptoms at all. That’s all well and good, but I don’t want to take the chance. Why would anyone take the chance when there’s a very real possibility that their COVID-19 experience could be the worst experience of their life, or that it could end in their death? Again, that’s just common sense.
Yet, according to Donald Trump, 99% of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.” This contradicts everything the experts say, and everything that people who have had the disease say. Trump says it because he wants it to be true, and he’s coldly indifferent to any suffering or death it may cause. All he cares about is perception. If enough fools believe him then they will return to work and he can get the economy back to where it was — just in time for the election. He doesn’t care if they’re risking their lives for him. As far as Trump cares, they can go ahead and die.
By the way, Trump endures no cognitive dissonance by saying that most coronavirus is harmless, even though he also said earlier that coronavirus is a “terrible plague from China” and warned Beijing “must be held accountable” for its spread around the world. Such contradictions don’t phase Trump in the least. He wants it both ways. He wants everyone to be fooled into thinking it’s no big deal and he wants to blame China for it. He says what he needs to say moment to moment to give him (in his view) his best chance for re-election. He does this because he’s an evil, psychotic, narcissistic asshole.
If he’s re-elected Trump will probably spend little or no time even bothering to defend his track record on coronavirus. By that time it won’t matter because he won’t be running for anything. He will be too busy playing golf, hate-tweeting and helping Republicans and his rich friends rape the environment of its resources and the government of its gold.
This is why this psychotic, child-raping murderer must be stopped in November. Think of your vote the way you think of your mask, as the one thing that stands between you and death. It just might. 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.