April 1st 2020

By Thom Hartmann

A normal person as president would anguish over telling his nation that a quarter million people were going to have to die because he listened to Fox News hosts and spent two months holding rallies and playing golf when he could have been ordering test kits, ventilators and personal protective equipment. Imagine John Kennedy or Barack Obama in the White House Situation Room and their top scientist says to them, “Mr. President, we have determined that a quarter million Americans are going to die. You have to prepare the nation.“ A Kennedy or Obama would, like Lincoln did, be tortured by this horrible reality. He would be thinking of how to nurture and reassure the people, knowing that tens of millions of Americans, within a matter of weeks, would lose their parents or grandparents, siblings or children, best friends or neighbors. He would be reflecting on his past failures and how he could apologize and atone for them. Think of how Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had to prepare the American people for war, and in both cases they prepared the country for years before we entered those wars. They did everything they could, and still they held us close through those horrible times. Trump did none of the above. He simply strolled out and said words to the effect of, “Well, 2 million of you were supposed to die, but I fixed things so it’s only going to be a quarter million. I’m an expert on these things and you should be thankful that I’ve got the numbers down this far. Good luck.“ Trumps sociopathy is so painfully obvious, his inability to have empathy or to care for anybody other than himself and his own family so burningly apparent, that Americans can only watch in shock and horror. The election, and a new president, cannot come fast enough.