As it usually is in these situations, it was the simplest of questions, a potential slamdunk for an ordinary politician, hell, for an ordinary human being. But we are talking about President Donald Trump, who is a hollowed-out pumpkin filled with a slurry of toxic waste, so the most ludicrous softball questions become moments of torment and confusion because he just doesn't get how being a person works.
On Tuesday, at an event where he brayed about the small business loan program that's become a money trough for corporate pigs to feed at, Trump got a question from a reporter. "You’ve spoken about your friend who passed away," the intrepid journalist asked, tossing a soft, underhand pitch. "I was wondering if you have spoken to the families of anyone else who has lost a loved one to COVID-19. If there’s any particular stories that have affected you."
Right now, you, sitting there as a semi-normal human being, you could toss out a couple of examples about stories that affected you. Maybe you could talk about Sklyar Herbert, the 5 year-old girl in Detroit, who passed away a week before. Maybe you could mention one of the doctors or other first responders who have been taken out by the disease they were fighting. Maybe you could talk about someone else you know, like the elderly retired professor I knew who I just found out died of coronavirus. It might be emotional. But you could do it, though.
But Trump couldn't. He answered, "Well, I have — I have many people. I know many stories. I’ve spoken to three, maybe, I guess, four families unrelated to me. I did — I lost a very good friend. I also lost three other friends — two of whom I didn’t know as well, but they were friends and people I did business with, and probably almost everybody in the room did. And it’s a — it’s a bad death. It’s not a — it’s — it’s a bad thing. It grips onto some people. Now, we found out that young people do extraordinarily well." And then that was it. The brain worms then made him pivot to schools that are opening up which led him to criticize distance learning because of course he did.
We know that whenever Trump is called upon to offer some kind of sympathy for the dead and sick, he either quickly reads a rote script or he changes the subject, often to how "horrendous" or "brilliant" COVID-19 is, as if it has to be the worst illness in the history of the world because that's the only virus that can be an opponent worthy of Donald Trump.
Trump has made a big show about how he refuses to wear a mask because he's been tested and doesn't have coronavirus. At the event Tuesday, in Oval Office gatherings, neither Trump nor the people there, including Drs. Birx and Fauci, wear masks. You know that he sees wearing a mask as a sign of weakness. You know that he's demanded that no one be allowed to wear masks. No one is gonna make him look like a disease-fearing pussy. He is the uber-mensch. All others cower beneath his exceedingly healthy orange glow.
Essentially, that's his attitude towards the dead. If you get sick, you are weak and you are preventing the economy from "roaring back," so he'll order you back to work or have governors force you back so you lose your unemployment benefits. If you die, you're a loser because it makes him look bad. Here's what he managed to say yesterday: "We mourn — and I have to say this so strongly — we mourn every life tragically lost to the invisible enemy, and we’re heartened that the worst of the pain and suffering is going to be behind us." The worst is not "behind us." We're in the worst right now, with cases rising in some states, falling in others, and staying steady in the others.
The sick and the dead are inconvenient because they prevent him from gallivanting around the country and prancing like a coked-out baboon in front of his adoring, cretinous crowds. He talked about how tragic it would be to have social distancing at his rallies of the damned: "I can’t imagine a rally where you have every fourth seat full. Every — every six seats are empty for every one that you have full. That wouldn’t look too good." Your fever and cough are keeping the president from having good-looking campaign events, you selfish fucks.
Note: Of course, as long as it's the poors, immigrants, prisoners, and the weak old people (not strong like his wheezing ass) that die, well, that's just thinning the herd until we get to immunity or something.
But I keep coming back to that fuckin' question. Trump admitted that he has not reached out to a single family of someone who died. He didn't take any time to ring up some widow in Alabama or Texas or Kansas, the states that he won. That's just fucked up. He can't because to do so would be to concede that the deaths mean something beyond lower approval ratings. He can't because he's incapable of exuding the kind of empathy that's necessary to come across as anything other than the popularity-driven, praise-thirsty, narcissistic monster that he is.
Instead, he pretends that 60,000 deaths are bad, but, hey, a million deaths is worse and China must be lying; he's petulantly defensive, pissed off that all these weak losers are dying and that he's supposed to pretend to care. Fuck that. Not when it's more fun to shitpost about Brian Williams or CNN.
He says the disease is going to disappear "like a miracle," except it's not. It's going to slowly peter out, the bodies stacking up, becoming to him like a wall preventing his reelection. Your death means nothing more and nothing less.
