“It’s the incompetence, stupid!”

What one word or phrase best describes the Trump presidency? So many to choose from.

Chaotic. Paranoiac. Belligerent. Reckless. Mendacious. Arrogant. Greedy. Bullying. Combative. Tactless. Mean-spirited. Bigoted.  Willfully ignorant. Demagogic. Dishonest. Un-American.

Is there a single word for “demanding total loyalty, obedience, deference, and subservience”.  There must be.  Does “tyrannic” say it all? That’s the word you find when you look up “rule by fear”, but I’m not sure that’s exactly what’s called for here, at least not all by itself.  There’s so much more that needs to be said.

Anyway, if we’re making up bumper stickers, I guess we don’t have to limit ourselves to one word. But there probably should be one slogan that we can all agree to and rally under – one rebuttal to the “Make America Great Again” deception.

I’d vote for “It’s the incompetence, stupid”.  A close second would be “It’s the stupid incompetence”. To me, that’s the greatest problem Trump poses, particularly during a real crisis, an existential crisis where his “I’ll wing it” method of governing simply doesn’t work.  When real leadership is required, confidence is nice but competence is required. If you don’t have it yourself, you must recognize it in others and rely on it where you find it.

Trump doesn’t have it and has no idea what it looks like.

It’s all up here. The only metric I need.

That was Trump’s answer when asked what metric he would use to make the most important decision of his presidency, i.e. whether to “re-open” the country during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s really not surprising, since that’s how Trump decides everything. No facts or science gets in the way, no professional counsel or expert opinion. Just whatever flies out of his head onto his Twitter. He has such fantastic instincts.

If Fox and Friends likes the sound of it, we’re done. Sometimes it works the other way around, too: someone at Fox blathers something, and the next thing you know it’s flying out of Trump’s Twitter.  If it turns out that the initial blathering posed problems, he simply denies he ever re-blathered it. Fake news. Lamestream media playing “gotcha”.  No, what he really meant was the exact opposite. See?

And that, kiddies, is how a bill becomes a law in the Land of Trump.

There’s so much about the Covid-19 pandemic that the Man-baby just can’t grasp. First and foremost, he can’t just simply pronounce it over and proclaim yet another fantastic accomplishment. Better than anything any president has ever done before, except maybe Lincoln. He was pretty good, too.

Everyone who understands science and medicine will tell you that no real progress can be made until we have widespread , virtually universal testing in place. We have to know who is presently infected, and who has already had it. That’s because it’s highly contagious and we have no way to prevent its spread. And no way to treat it. We don’t even know for sure at this point whether you can get it a second time. Or even whether you can give it to or get it from your pets.

Trump is on record as saying that we won’t have testing for everyone. He said, “Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes.”  Of course, it doesn’t really mean anything anymore for him to be “on record”, but it does give you a clue to the absurd reasoning he’ll be using to make the biggest decision he’s ever had to make.

If you encourage people to go back to church, to work, to concerts and ballgames, they will simply continue to spread the disease until every last one of us gets it.

Tweety and his minions want to point to the “peaking” of new cases as a sign that the worst is behind us. They have forgotten that the whole point of “flattening the curve” was to spread out the inevitable infections over time so that our health care system might not be overwhelmed all at once, and perhaps give researchers time to come up with a vaccine or treatments, and time for manufacturers to make enough protective gear. “Flattening the curve” and “turning the corner” are not the same.

If it looks like we’ve actually managed to flatten the curve at this point, it is because of the success of the social distancing and other measures we’ve all agreed to over the last weeks. If the country is “re-opened”, those gains evaporate. We have to wait until we have a means of prevention or at least treatment.

If Trump says, “OK, that’s it – country’s open again!”, are you going to do anything differently? Are you going to put down your face mask? Go out to restaurants? Ride public transportation? I’m not and maybe you aren’t either, but there are millions of people who are still listening to the man-baby and still think he knows what he’s talking about. If he tells them it’s over, well, that’s all they need to know.

They think he’s competent.

But despite it all, there’s still some great news to report. The good old U. S. of A.  is back on top! In just 45 days we have gone from having no deaths, fewer than 15 cases, and going down to zero fast, to having the most Covid-19 deaths in the world and three times more confirmed cases than any other country.

We’re Number One!