The Carnival Barker President vs the Coronavirus

I've said this on social media several times: the office of the President of the United States, and the person occupying that office, carry a high level of seriousness.  The responsibilities of the President demand a high degree of seriousness.  The President is not just another average citizen, like Bob the bartender or Joe at the local diner.  His (since all the presidents to date have been men) words wield substantial influence: they can either avert or pave the way to war, they can influence the stock market, they can determine the outcome of an election, or they can shape foreign policy.  A considerable number of people hang on the President's (any president's) every syllable like they were the Words of God themselves.

So when the current President of the United States calls efforts to raise alarms about a potentially global pandemic a politicized hoax, I get more than a little angry.

Here's Donald Trump at a rally in South Carolina last night (Feb 28, 2020), doing his usual disjointed rambling thing: "Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. . .they're politicizing it.  We did one of the great jobs - you say, 'How's President Trump doing?' They go, 'Oh, not good, not good'. . .and this is their new hoax. . ."

And here he is on Twitter: "Anti-Trump Network @CNN doing whatever it can to stoke a national Coronavirus panic. The far left Network pretty much ignoring anyone who they interview who doesn't blame President Trump." @trish_regan @FoxNews Media refuses to discuss the great job our professionals are doing!"

Now, you can interpret those remarks any one of several different ways, but the most generous interpretation is that Trump is calling any criticism of his response to the virus and/or attempts to warn the public about its severity a hoax meant to weaken him politically.

Here are some Coronavirus facts:

• It's already infected somewhere around 80,000 people worldwide
• China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy have all reported outbreaks of varying sizes
• In the past 48 hours, there have been four cases of unknown origin (meaning, none of the victims had recently returned from a country where there was a Coronavirus outbreak) reported in the United States
• One of those four victims has died 

Does this sound like a hoax to you? Or does it sound like something that should be taken seriously?

Trump's "hoax" comments might be believable if he didn't already hamstring America's ability to respond to the Coronavirus by making deep cuts to the CDC, slashing its global disease response budget by 80% and disbanding its global health security team in 2018.  And if he wasn't already getting bipartisan pushback from Congress over these budget cuts.  See, the possibility of a global pandemic has already been on the radar for a while - even the most clueless members of Congress have been aware of that.

But not Trump, evidently.

Here's what could very well happen, thanks to Trump's irresponsibly stupid comments: some people - probably some of Trump's followers -  will believe him when he says the virus is a hoax, so will ignore or mock all the information from public health officials.  They won't practice any of the suggested preventive measures, and we'll have several what should have been easily-preventable cases of Coronavirus in the United States. This isn't that farfetched, when you consider that Trump's "hoax" remarks are being amplified and repeated by the likes of Laura Ingraham, Fox & Friends and Rush Limbaugh, or sitting US Senators are repeating debunked conspiracy theories.

And it's already shaping people's reactions:

What's going to happen if (possibly when) people start getting infected in large numbers? The most optimistic scenario forecasts dozens of infectees and a 1-2% fatality rate. That's a lot of victims.  What about the potential economic hits due to missed work, disrupted global supply chains, the strain on the country's health care network?  We've already seen the effect the Coronavirus is having on the stock market.

Do you feel better about Trump's lackluster approach to tackling the disease, his disdain for many essential government programs and services, or his uninformed, seat-of-the-pants approach to running the country now? I sure as hell don't.

This is why a buffoon like Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near the White House.  The job of President of the United States is no place for the mediocre, the lazy, or the willfully ignorant.  Unfortunately, Trump is all of these things. And if you try to say "We couldn't have known," I'm calling bullshit.  We did know.  After five seconds of hearing Trump give a speech or respond in a debate, we knew.  It was obvious. Trump was thoroughly unfit to be president.

And the inadequate preparation for/response to the Coronavirus is yet another example of his unfitness on display to the entire world.

The Wanna-Be American King

The concept of accountability has gone missing in Washington DC.

Donald Trump was never going to be held accountable.  He's probably never been held accountable in his entire life.  Certainly not since being sworn in as president.  The day after Robert Mueller testified in Congress about his involvement with the Russian government in the 2016 election (in which he only escaped being indicted due to DoJ guidelines), Trump was putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to uncover (or fabricate) "dirt" on the man who he assumed would be his opponent in the 2020 election.  Where a normal person might choose to lay low after such a close call, Trump decided to double down on his corrupt behavior.  He never made a secret of it.  Hell, he openly talked about it in televised interviews.  None of Trump's aides, advisors, or cabinet officials have been able to restrain his worst impulses except around the edges.

And Congress? The co-equal branch of government specifically designed in many ways to act as a check on the Executive branch? The House of Representatives took its responsibility seriously and impeached the president. But the Senate is refusing to do its job.  It ignored the evidence, refused to hear witness testimony, and will very likely acquit Trump in a speedy sham trial a few days from now.  The Senate didn't just fail to hold Trump accountable, it - specifically Senate Republicans - flat-out refused to do so.

So Trump will face zero punishment for attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election.  Sure, he's been impeached, and that will be a stain on his legacy forever.  But as far as him suffering any immediate consequences that will prevent him from trying to rig it in his favor?

Zip. Zero. Nada.

Of course, there's the 2020 election itself.  Vote him out of office, right? That is, vote him out of office through the election he's actively trying to cheat in? Sure, piece of cake.

Now, I'm not telling anyone to give up in despair and not vote.  For god's sake, VOTE.  Because this election is probably the most important one in your lifetime.  But don't expect it the Trump campaign to play fair.  Don't be surprised by the traditional Republican tactics like voter suppression, selective voter ID measures, and limited polling sites in Dem-leaning districts.  Don't be surprised if Trump pulls out all the stops - like, say, deploying ICE to polling sites for the purpose of intimidating voters to stay home.  Or worse.

Additionally, Trump will probably do a whole bunch of idiotic, amoral, and illegal stuff between now and November.  And if the past has taught us anything, it's that Trump's antics will push his previous fiasco out of the public consciousness.  It's a well-established pattern at this point: Trump generates a controversy, it dominates the news cycle for a couple days, and is promptly forgotten once Trump makes another bonehead mistake.

Here's an example: have you heard anyone mention Trump's drone assassination of the Iranian general in the last 2-3 days? Trump nearly blundered the United States into a war, and hardly anyone is talking about it now.

Acquitting Trump will be giving him a green light to do whatever he wants, without consequences.  And given some of the things Trump has shown himself to be okay with doing (roughing up protestors, declaring martial law, curtailing the First Amendment, jailing his political opponents) make me extremely nervous.

I'm not saying it's certain that any of these things will happen.  But the chances that they do are a lot further away from zero than they should be.

So. . .thanks, Senate Republicans.

Speaking of that pack of worthless, unprincipled weasels - guess who else won't be held accountable?

Yeah, yeah, I know there's a lot of pent-up anger at the Senate over the impeachment trial's likely outcome.  There sure was after the Senate voted to not allow witnesses, therefore paving the way for the acquittal.  But will that translate to meaningful results at the ballot box? I'm not so sure.  First, there was a lot of anger in the 2018 midterms, too; but despite Democrats making significant gains (the much-hyped "blue wave"), Republicans managed to pick up two seats in the Senate.  They're probably counting on maintaining, if not increasing, their lead in the Senate.

Because despite all the angry phone calls and emails, and the op-eds rightly calling them cowards and worse, they have pollsters who have gauged the public's sentiment and know how their constituents feel.  They've known for a while, which is why they voted the way they did.  So aside from a few vulnerable Senators, they're not sweating reelection.  And if they do unexpectedly lose, they're not worried.  They can find a pundit gig, or a position on a consulting firm, or even just retire.  And in eight or twelve years, "Republican" won't be a dirty word anymore and they can reemerge from the political wilderness.  And Republicans have some experience being the minority party.  If Democrats do retake the Senate, they'll just go into opposition mode and make it incredibly difficult for the Senate (and the White House, if a Democrat gets elected) to do its job.

No, the only thing they're worried about is being excluded from the Big Club, and that only happens if they defy Trump.  Mitt Romney and John Bolton are quickly becoming cautionary tales.

So, to sum up, we've got a president who's unaccountable because his subordinates can't keep him in check, and the Senate simply won't; and fifty-three Senators who are unaccountable because they know the worst outcome for them is the unlikely chance that they don't get reelected.

Where does that leave the country going forward? Well, if Trump loses in 2020 (and that's a big "if" for multiple reasons), expect Republicans to "suddenly" rediscover all the principles and ideals they've been uniformly ignoring since January 2017.  And that creates a dilemma.

A Democrat president (and/or Senate) acting the way Trump has done will further erode the concept of presidential accountability and co-equal branches of government, so the right thing to do would be to heed those calls for accountability.  However, to anyone who remembers Republican behavior throughout the Obama administration knows that Republicans aren't making good faith arguments.  They only care about accountability to the extent they can use it to weaken Democrats and get themselves back into power. Consequently, there's a strong, justifiable argument for telling Republicans to sit down and shut up.  Additionally, if Republicans obstruct simply for the sole purpose of denying Democrats a legislative victory (it was Mitch McConnell's entire strategy from 2010 - 2016), a Democratic president may have to act unilaterally just to keep the government functioning.  It's happened before.

Thus, the Democrats' (and America's) predicament.

Of course, this all depends on the election's outcome.  If Trump gets reelected, it could very well mean the end of Constitutional democracy in America.  And that's not a dramatic exaggeration.  He's already been sent a message that he won't be held accountable no matter what he does.

How far do you think he'll run with that if he gets another four years?

Choose wisely this November.  Because a president that's not accountable to anyone is a king.