Your bag is empty.
Depending on whom you believe, late Friday evening the president of the United States soiled himself, wailed like a banshee or sat in a corner whimpering like a kid who’d been spanked.
Why?
Friday the White House announced that Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The day before, the president’s valet had tested positive. Friday night someone on Ivanka’s staff also tested positive, as did 11 Secret Service agents.
It means the president, vice president, most of the president’s staff and dozens if not hundreds of reporters have been directly or indirectly exposed.
We found out because those around the president are being tested for the coronavirus on a daily basis, while those in the general population still have trouble getting tested even if they display symptoms. Rank apparently still has its privilege, and it can get fairly rank around the White House. On Tuesday the in-house press-rotation pool joined the ranks of the privileged with free daily testing. There are now so few reporters in the White House that those of us who are left and not in the pool can watch—as I did Tuesday—cockroaches fearlessly race across the walls of the press offices in the White House basement.
The president, we were told, was “agitated” by the news of his infected staff, and he gave in to the medical reality of testing pool reporters daily only because it benefited him. “He kind of went mad,” I was told by a senior staffer. Really? How could you tell? My favorite rumor had Trump running through the West Wing, emitting high-pitched squeals like an NFL receiver who’d been tagged with a helmet in his egg sack. They may have been kidding.
Still, the president’s on-record reactions merit consideration.
I’m a former correspondent and producer for America’s Most Wanted on Fox Television. The profile piece I produced on serial killer Kenneth McDuff led to his arrest. I’ve written true-crime books. I’ve covered wars, violence and drug crimes. I’m a confessed former high school football coach for a conservative private Catholic school and Maryland public schools. I’m a former PTA president, and I ran a youth sports football program for my church for 11 years. I play in a rock-and-roll bar band.
I’ve seen a lot. The PTA meetings were killer.
I’ve never seen anyone quite like Donald Trump. Maybe it’s the nuance of his performance.
The president, vice president, most of the president’s staff and dozens if not hundreds of reporters have been directly or indirectly exposed.
His privilege has kept him free from responsibility his whole life. He has stated he has the absolute power to do as he pleases and he will take no responsibility at all for his actions. More important, he craves the camera.
He’s an old white guy of privilege, a wealthy con artist who has no concept of the problems 99.99 percent of the people on the planet face every day. Since he’s our president, this makes Trump very dangerous. His dual claims of unlimited authority and freedom from responsibility, as well as his obvious declining mental health, make him even more dangerous.
We’ve all seen the danger when Trump performs in public. He’s unhinged in a way rarely seen and even more rarely embraced.
I can think of only one guy from my past who reminds me of Trump. He was a blonde, overly confident drunk with a mullet who got into a bar fight outside the Stein Club near the campus of the University of Missouri in 1981. That guy was chewing on a wooden broomstick handle and made the mistake of swinging at a couple of cops, who then treated him like a tennis ball as they swatted him with their PR-22 nightsticks back and forth over their cruiser. The cops helped him to the hospital, and later to jail.
He acted like Trump. He even looked a bit like a young Trump, but he did not have Trump’s privilege.
Behavior like that of the long-ago drunk is, for many, the deciding factor in socially and politically distancing themselves from the president. It is why cogent human beings from across the political spectrum have decided to oppose Trump. Liberal and conservative, black and white, women and men and many in between. Zealots and atheists. Dogs and cats. Democrats and Republicans. Bugs Bunny and Road Runner. Romulans and Klingons. House Atreides and House Harkonnen.
There is a small, vocal and vituperative portion of the citizenry who continue to act in the Donald’s interest, though not necessarily in their own. It’s doubtful anyone could ever convince these fellow humans of any notion that is not preconceived. We must give up trying to convert them. The Kool-Aid has been consumed.
What is left for everyone is to act on their convictions. Vote. More than that, volunteer to help at polling places. Drive the elderly to the precinct. Be a precinct captain. Hell, run for office.
The only way the minority rules is when the majority is complacent enough to let it happen. This doesn’t mean armed conflict; it means involvement. The methods already exist. Screw the Russians and their interference. On Tuesday reports broke that members of Putin’s inner circle had also tested positive for COVID-19. Dangerous Donny was rumored to have broken down in a catatonic drool. So don’t be intimidated. Don’t be too bored or too busy to get involved. At least don’t cry about it afterward if you did nothing to prevent it.
The president will be your host for this November’s pay-per-view event, so let me remind you the Donald gets a cut no matter the outcome. He may not even care what the outcome is for his team, provided he personally comes out okay.
The event will be live streaming on several services, and all it may cost you is your government, your climate, your environment, your economy, your freedom and your life. What thrills! What chills!
Meanwhile you can keep tuning in most days of the week for Trump’s reality show. The current episode may be about staffers with the coronavirus, but stay tuned—there’s more! Watch as the president continues to sell his broken-down dreams of unscalable walls and immigrants who can’t make it to the U.S. unless they’re wealthy white people.
Cheer at Donny’s frequent implosions. Watch as he insults people and, as he did in the latest fun-filled episode, lobs racist comments at CBS’s Weijia Jiang, who teamed up with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to try to ask a question.
His “Dangerous Donny” reality show is still wildly popular. On Tuesday he was even trying out new slogans: “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS.” I thought he was announcing his resignation.
The show is slated to run at least through November and has a chance for renewal because the Democrats are cannibals who continue to feed on themselves. Once they finish, if they ever do, they will try to convince the electorate that the half-eaten corpse they toss into the ring is better for the country than an aging septuagenarian with questionable mental and physical health who often yells as though he has been drinking bleach.
The country is now all about division. How else do you explain a government that contradicts and fights with itself to the brink of destruction?
This November the Trump show needs to be canceled and Trump strapped into a straitjacket. That there is any discussion about the uncertainty of this occurring speaks to the state of politics in the United States, not to mention the gullibility of millions of otherwise humorless, angry and fearful people.
The country is now all about division. How else do you explain a government that contradicts and fights with itself to the brink of destruction? The division, festering since the mid-1980s, erupted with the arrival of Donnie Darko. Trump excels in the “Who’s on my side?” brand of leadership. How to describe this great divide in American culture? Easy. On one side you have those who support a man who suggested injecting disinfectant to cure a pandemic viral infection. On the other side? Everyone else.
Trump may deny it, but a nation so divided cannot long endure its own stupidity.
Trump likes to paint himself as a military president waging war against “an invisible enemy.” His comic-book attempt at aphorisms speaks to his reading comprehension, but putting aside his juvenile descriptions of the pandemic, Trump cannot sell the fiction that all is well as the number of dead continues to climb. Being the world’s epicenter for the pandemic is not good news.
The coronavirus is an unhinging moment in history for everyone in the United States currently alive. Trump? He doesn’t want to be bothered. He’s tweeting his disgust with his opposition, telling us how great he is and fighting publicly with anyone who dares question him.
Reality doesn’t matter to Trump. Divide and conquer is all he knows. But as hard as he tries to divide us, he cannot escape the reality that we are all potential hosts to this virus. Trump can’t fathom that notion. That’s why he’s agitated.
Perhaps if we all acknowledged the basic fact that we’re all equal, this divisive war could be settled the way Lincoln hoped the Civil War would be: “…that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Or maybe we could all ingest a little Clorox, sunbathe and relax. The virus will go away when the weather gets warmer. Like a miracle.