Hal Brown, Mar. 11, 2020 to...
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opinion plus some of today's stories that piqued my interest. Click on my photos to enlarge them. They are meant as moments of zen. Email Hal Brown (halbrown@columnist.com)
Back to earlier in March
Mar. 13, 2020
We know Trump has the sickness of malignant narcissism. Want more proof, look at this tweet.
Back in the day—i.e., 2016—I always figured there were two big reasons to hope Donald Trump didn’t win the Republican nomination. The first and most important was his straight-up appeal to bigotry and xenophobia, which the other Republican nominees mostly didn’t share. The second was that he might nuke Denmark.
That was the joke, anyway, but it was just shorthand for Trump screwing up some kind of foreign policy emergency, getting himself deeper and deeper into a hole, and then somehow ending up in a war that no one wanted. Nobody thought this was especially likely, but still, it was a 1 percent risk that the other candidates didn’t pose.
Then Trump got elected and three years passed. No war. No real threat of a war, either. Maybe we were all wrong?
Nope. “War,” it turned out, was itself shorthand for an emergency that Trump’s personality would cause him to mismanage. And the emergency turned out to be a pandemic. At first, Trump’s narcissism prevented him from believing that anything could be seriously wrong while he was in charge. Then his xenophobia caused him to address the problem solely by closing off a border, even though no one thought that would work. That eventually morphed into Trump’s bullheadedness preventing him from admitting he was mistaken and changing tack. And that, in turn, has caused him to close yet more borders.
From Canada:
Even when the president finally, reluctantly came to admit the seriousness of the situation and awkwardly read a script from a teleprompter in a national address from the oval office last night to announce a 30-day ban on most travel from continental Europe, he could not resist stretching the truth one more time, falsely asserting that "we're making antiviral treatments available in record time." Actually, no such approved treatments yet exist.
In the face of a virus that the WHO has just declared a pandemic, Trump's brand of carnival show narcissism is deadly. It is a time when the world needs to believe its leaders and to be told the truth, particularly when you can find internet advice to drink bleach and when people like disgraced evangelist Jim Bakker (who served time in the slammer for fraud) are promotingunproven "cures."
There are not many issues where an effective, believable communications strategy is a matter of life or death. COVID-19 is one. The president of the United States is failing the test.
Mar. 12, 2020
Two heroes:
Rep. Katie Porter (watch this video!)
How long will he last after this bluntly truthful testimony? ‘That’s really disturbing’: Dr. Fauci admits to Congress the administration’s ‘failing’ in the coronavirus response.
This is how he should have concluded his address:
Meghan McCain explodes on Trump as The View rips his coronavirus address: ‘This could be the silver bullet’ that takes him out
The View’s Meghan Mccain blasted President Donald Trump for his mediocre attempt to calm the nation during the coronavirus outbreak.
During the Thursday show, the co-hosts addressed the speech that was supposed to calm a fearful nation, but ultimately ended up being riddled with mistakes and inaccurate information.
McCain said that it did little to calm her fears.
“He does not inspire confidence. I could hear him breathing. could you?” said Behar. “Is there a microphone in his nostrils do you think? If he speaks of somebody who’s not in great health, and he’s been so exposed to a few people now who have had the coronavirus. He could come down with it.”
“The problem is when I watched it live like we all did, is he’s a politician that inspires anger really well,” McCain said. “If you want to get riled up and angry, he’s a politician who does it well. The ‘I feel your pain and fear,’ incapable of it. He could have been reading the phonebook last night. He should have been saying, ‘I understand Americans are scared.’ Have a Ronald Reagan-esque moment.”
Dana Milbank in The Bernie Sanders spoiler campaign begins ( $ WaPo)
(he began) … a new feature: the Spoiler Watch. It will track the campaign of vanity and self-aggrandizement the once-idealistic Sanders candidacy has now become. Everything Sanders does from this point on — until he eventually (hopefully) throws his support to Biden — will be to the benefit of a grateful President Trump.
Trump won the presidency, in part, because disaffected Sanders voters never embraced Hillary Clinton after the Vermont independent’s scorched-earth campaign in the 2016 primary. Now, he’s poised to do it again. He must not be allowed to succeed.
...
He goes on to write:
Sanders could have declared victory Wednesday and dropped out of the race. He has succeeded in pushing the Democratic Party to the left, and his differences with Biden are less about ends than means. As Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Sanders supporter, said this week: “Bernie Sanders won the idea primary.”
Yet Sanders, instead, extends the fight.
Only ugliness this way lies.
There will be more of the suggestions from Sanders’s supporters that the gaffe-prone Biden is senile. There will be more conspiracy theories about the hidden hand of the establishment — not actual voters — powering Biden’s victory. And there will be more of what Elizabeth Warren called the “organized nastiness” from Sanders’s supporters.
… and he concludes with writing that “every day Sanders delays the party’s healing is a contribution-in-kind to Trump.”
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