I’m going to go right ahead and assume a lot of my readers are not big Donald Trump fans. If you are and you can’t stand to hear him criticized, you definitely came to the wrong place.
On the other hand, wait long enough and we’ll have a Democratic president, he or she will screw up and I’ll draw cartoons about that, too…assuming I’m still around after our current Zombie Apocalypse.
And now that we have that out of the way…
This morning I was reading a story from the New York Times (y’know the fake news media) and it made an interesting point. In the past when Trump got in trouble he could spin, lie and bluster his way through the crisis. Nobody cared enough to fact-check his claims.
Now, faced with facts and experts, those techniques don’t work so well.
Trump’s claim that he had things under control is undercut by the fact that we’re now under house arrest. Trump’s claim that the coronavirus was a hoax was undercut by thousands of people getting sick. Trump’s claim that a miracle drug is on its way is undercut by Dr. Anthony Fauci saying it isn’t.
Here’s a paragraph from a CNN (another fake news media outlet) fact-check article:
On March 9, Trump tweeted, "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!" On March 10, the day before the WHO's pandemic declaration, Trump said, "And we're prepared, and we're doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."
He added: "It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen.”
It has seemed to me and others that Trump originally saw this as an economic problem that might affect the stock market and if we all pretended it wasn’t happening things would be just fine.
Well, it isn’t and they aren’t and rose-colored glasses didn’t help.
Finally, he has met an enemy he can lie about and it just does't matter.