You might need to die to get Trump reelected

Giving your life for a bad cause...

Yesterday, I wrote about baseball and assured anyone who missed my daily diatribe on the COVID-19 pandemic I’d be right back at it before you know it.

Turns out, that was one of my few accurate predictions.

Today, as I studied the four sheets of paper that now pass for a newspaper (I actually counted) and made my usual internet stops, I was greeted with several stories about what reopening the economy actually means.

According to the New York Times, they got hold of an internal White House document (which is a fancy way of saying someone leaked it to them) that now projects 3,000 deaths a day by June 1st, almost double the current level of about 1,750.

Projections also forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The fear is that reopening the economy now will put us right back where we were in mid-March.

Jobs vs. lives

One of the reasons I trust Dr. Anthony Fauci more than anyone else in this mess is he tells us stuff we don’t want to hear and that’s probably exactly why the Trump administration doesn’t want him testifying in front of a subcommittee in the Democratically-controlled House.

According to CNN, a “senior administration official” – which could mean anybody including the head janitor – said that top health officials need to focus on their work, not delivering testimony, which makes sense as long as you consider part of their “work” to be standing behind Donald Trump for hours on end while he blows hot air from the podium.

Those daily press briefings, that were considered essential at the beginning of this mess, became unnecessary once the people around Trump realized pretty much every time he opened his mouth, he put a Florsheim in it, which assumes Florsheim is still making shoes and Trump would deign to wear something the rest of us could actually afford.

It would now seem those daily press briefings were more about politics than information and if they weren’t helping Trump politically, they’d stop holding them.

Anyway…

Apparently, no longer having to serve as Donald Trump’s human background scenery has freed up enough of Dr. Fauci’s time that he can appear before a committee in the Republican-controlled Senate where Anthony is less likely to be asked questions embarrassing to the White House.

But Dr. Fauci still talks to the media (which is probably going to get him fired at some point) and continues to tell us the uncomfortable truth.

Like this:

“How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be, some form of normality, sooner rather than later?”

As I pointed out in an earlier piece; about 100 Americans die in automobile wrecks every day, lung cancer kills about 400 Americans every day and during the 2017-2018 flu season about 500 Americans died every day.

If the projections are right, are we willing to accept 3,000 deaths a day to get back to normal?

And since we seem to be pretty much OK with other people dying, throw this into your thinking: would you still be OK with those 3,000 deaths a day if you were one of them?

That’s the uncomfortable question Dr. Fauci is posing and if Trump was any kind of leader, that’s the conversation this nation would be conducting. It’s a conversation worth having.

But instead we get bullshit about lights at the end of the tunnel and Jared Kushner – who appears to have some rodent-DNA – insisting that “President Trump has created a pathway to safely reopen our country.”

The economy vs. politics

As you might have already noticed Donald Trump thinks everything is about him and using the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop for a Fox News town hall meeting didn’t change a thing.

Trump took the opportunity to point out no president has been treated worse than him, even Abraham Lincoln, which kinda minimizes the whole John Wilkes Booth thing.

So knowing Trump’s proclivity for self-interest, how much of reopening the economy has to do with the unemployed Americans who are suffering and how much of reopening the economy has to do with Donald Trump getting himself reelected?

Apparently the president’s advisors have informed him that he’s losing ground to Joe Biden – yet another in the list of depressing alternatives the Democratic Party has offered us – and restarting the economy, even though it’s going to kill a bunch of people, is considered essential to Trump’s reelection.

So ask yourself this:

Is it more likely that Donald Trump wants to restart the economy because he gives a rat’s ass about the little guy or does Donald Trump want to restart the economy because his ego can’t take the thought of being a one-term president?

Seems to me, Donald Trump’s track record suggests the correct answer.

Stay safe, everybody…it’s about to get harder.