Doubling Down

How many times have you read that Trump has “doubled down” on something? A hundred times? It’s almost always a situation where someone tried to call him on his bullshit, pointing out that what he said or did or predicted last month is now demonstrably false or inappropriate. I just googled “Trump doubles down” and got 208 million hits.

Trump is compelled by his disease to double down on everything. If he didn’t, someone might conclude that he was actually wrong about something, and that must never happen.

The very real damage he has done with this personality defect includes costing people their livelihoods and even their lives. Remember the Central Park Five, those kids wrongly convicted of the Central Park Jogger attack? It was Trump that led the charge, relentlessly insisting on their guilt and prosecution without any evidence or due process, doubling down on this position even after the five were shown to be innocent and were released after years of incarceration, and continuing to double down even to this day.

And then there was the “Birther” movement. You may or may not remember that this absurd harassment of Barack Obama was led by Trump and kept alive by him years after everyone who was open to actual evidence about it realized it was nutty. Trump and his newspaper-of-record, the National Enquirer, wouldn’t let it go. Trump banged away at his talking points: “What’s he hiding? Why won’t he produce his long-form birth certificate? Every president should be required to do it! I have investigators in Hawaii and you wouldn’t believe what they’re finding! We’ll be releasing information soon”.

Right. We wouldn’t believe what they’re finding. You won’t release information because there is none. And oh, by the way, there were never any investigators, either. And the reason Obama didn’t want to produce his long-form birth certificate was that he was busy being president and couldn’t be constantly responding to every lunatic making crazy demands on him.

Obama bore the whole years-long assault with his remarkable equanimity and good humor, and, because it seemed like the only way to put an end to it, finally did produce the magic birth certificate, which of course convinced no one of anything.

And, of course, Tweety predictably declared victory, not because it proved Obama wasn’t born here, but because he had succeeded in forcing this unnecessary action by Obama when no one else could (because no one else gave an actual shit). And just to put a Trumpian bow on the whole thing, the man-baby refused to release his own birth certificate.

So I think we have to forgive Obama for doing the thing that lit the fuse that ultimately led to the Tweety administration – he had the audacity, after all the aggravation Trump caused, to poke some gentle fun at him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ dinner. Watch this clip to understand the pathogenesis of Trump’s “movement”.

On that night, Trump’s humiliation was such that he vowed to take revenge against Obama and all the “elitists” who refused to take him seriously. And, as revenge-taking is one of the few things Trump actually excels at, he did it.

Trump’s first and only real policy imperative on being elected was to undo anything and everything the Obama administration had accomplished, no matter how great or how trivial. From the Paris climate accords to the Iran nuclear treaty, and from school lunch standards to re-naming a mountain,  the man-baby got busy reversing it all. If he couldn’t prove Obama had been an illegitimate president, he would erase the record that he had ever been president at all, illegitimate or otherwise.

The most important element of this project was the elimination of “Obamacare”. Trump’s Obama-erasing could not be complete as long as the historic, landmark health care initiative was still in place, especially since it had ‘Obama’ right in its name! Trump could not rest while the thorn of Obamacare was still in his paw.

As we all know, the republican obsession to gut or extinguish Obamacare has resulted in a years-long string of bills meant to diminish it and law-suits aimed at declaring its central tenets illegal or unconstitutional. But Obamacare survives, primarily because so many people believe that it was a good thing to enable tens of millions of people who hadn’t had health insurance to finally get it.

Which brings us to the Coronavirus pandemic. A lot of people with an ounce of empathy, i.e. democrats, as well as a lot of people who could never be accused of having any real empathy at all, i.e. some health insurers, have implored Trump to open an enrollment window for Obamacare during the Covid-19 crisis so that some of the afflicted can be helped, if only a little. People who have lost their jobs and thus their insurance because of the pandemic could benefit. Insurers had expected the Trump administration to open the window last Friday.

Although the annual enrollment period ended a couple of months ago, the Trump administration initially responded by saying they would “explore the options” of re-launching the HealthCare.gov website.

The decision has now been made. Nope. No Obamacare registrations during the pandemic. That might make it seem like Barack Obama helped someone, and worse, might imply that Trump had been wrong about something. Time to double down.