Never Promised You a Rose Garden
The Covid-19 Class of 2020
How sick is the president?
What treatments are being used?
What is Pence doing and who has the power?
Has a transfer of Presidential power been drawn up and readied to sign, just in case?
Answer to all the above?
We don’t know.
We don’t really know the status of the President. We had his doctor, an osteopath (not a virologist) perform a very misleading and evasive press conference where he refused to state whether Trump had been on oxygen (basically, ‘not today’). He spoke more like a lawyer with a guilty client than a doctor informing the world (as the world has a stake in this as well) about the health status of the leader of the United States. Then he gave some ‘alternate facts’ about the timeline of the President’s infection and treatment (placing his diagnosis as last mid-day Wednesday (it was announced Friday morning) and his treatments starting on Thursday (previously announced as Friday). And then walked them back in a rushed press relase (with misspellings).
Does anyone here know what the hell they’re doing?
Of course, I’ve been asking that for nearly four years.
And how did the most protected man in the US get Covid-19? Really, Trump lives a viral bubble, you’re not supposed to get coronavirus anywhere near him or he’ll cry.
Again, does anyone here know what they’re doing?
And now we are finding out, almost by the hour, that the exposure most likely came from the nomination announcement/party thrown at the White House Rose Garden by the Republicans to celebrate their latest power grab at the Supreme Court. So far, we have President Trump, Melania Trump, Sens. Lee and Tillis, the President of Notre Dame University, Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager Bill Stepien, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Sen. Ron Johnson and now Former Gov. of New Jersey Chris Christie, all testing positive from either direct attendance of this little shindig, or from contact with someone who was there. The pictures from the gathering are eerie, like a people posing on the Titanic before it sailed. You look at them, mostly maskless, hugging, leaning in to talk over the noise and think, ‘this is not going to end well’.
And they were warned, many, many times. Blinded by arrogance and political opportunity, they just sailed on, disregarding all precautions and safety measures, secure in their virus-free world. But corona don’t care.
It doesn’t care. If you’re aggressively stupid, if you politicize the basic measures available to you, mock them, make a show of flaunting them, it will find you, it will sicken you, it will kill you. It is the Liam Neeson of viruses. It doesn’t care.
I feel no sympathy for them. They showed no sympathy for those trying to stay safe, those with underlying conditions, those who wore masks, who stayed home, who cared enough to try to even keep them safe. They didn’t care, they showed their contempt daily, eagerly, gleefully. Now, many of them are paying a price. No sympathy. We’ll likely hear about more infections as those who have announced have probably infected others. They will probably infect others who have been working to keep safe, who have been playing by the rules. Drivers, aids, maids, servers…
Those people deserve some sympathy, (and the same healthcare) as do others across the world who depend on a strong America, and now see the weakness of a man so caught up in his power fever he refused the science and help that were offered, smacked it to the ground and dug his heel in it.
Trump and the GOP have failed America, on purpose is seems, to benefit their personal political desires. They’ve taken every opportunity to lie and downplay the threat to this nation, and now their arrogance has come back on them. Trump has endangered everyone near him: staff, Secret Service, supporters, other members of the GOP leadership, donors, hundreds of people he's personally responsible for exposing to this killer. The GOP leadership is taking a huge hit. And they only have to look in the mirror to see who is at fault.
Trump and the GOP are a complete and utter disgrace. to this country. Frankly, it was inevitable Trump would get this with his defiance of commonsense and science. He deserved it.
And we still don’t know how he is. Like nearly everything this administration does, they’re not giving us the complete truth.
We all hope he pulls though, as that is one more thing in this disaster-movie-without-end year of 2020 we do not need. We all hope he’s learned something on the other side, maybe empathy and compassion.
But I doubt it.