Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Frank Bruni: Injections of Bleach? Beams of Light? Trump Is Self-Destructing Before Our Eyes
The notion that he is bound for four more years is pure superstition.
“And he’s going to get re-elected.”
Not a day goes by without several friends — Republicans as well as Democrats — saying that to me. It’s the blunt coda to a bloated recitation of Donald Trump’s failures during this pandemic. It’s a whimper of surrender following a scream of disbelief.
Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he’s going to get re-elected.
With that refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair.
But somewhere along the way, we started to confuse a coping mechanism with reasoned analysis. We began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.
It isn’t. While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, it’s at least as possible that he’s self-destructing before our eyes. [..]
Don’t tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.
Michelle Goldberg: Coronavirus and the Price of Trump’s Delusions
A cult of personality is no match for a pandemic.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that a second wave of coronavirus infections this coming winter “will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” because it will coincide with flu season. He also called the protests against stay-at-home orders “not helpful.”
Donald Trump was apparently not pleased, tweeting that Redfield was “totally misquoted by Fake News @CNN.” On Wednesday evening, after another rant about fake news, Trump brought Redfield onstage at his daily press briefing, where Redfield had the unenviable task of trying to explain his remarks, which he acknowledged were quoted accurately, without contradicting the president. The fall and winter might be “more difficult and potentially more complicated” due to the confluence of coronavirus and influenza, Redfield said, but that didn’t mean the second wave would be “worse.”
Trump, meanwhile, spoke of the crisis in the past tense, as something America is now emerging from, suggesting that all the country will face in the future is “some embers of corona.” The day before, the country had recorded around 2,200 deaths, making it one of the deadliest days of the pandemic in the United States.
Over the last three and a half years, Americans have had to accustom themselves to a relentless, numbing barrage of lies from the federal government. In one sector after another, we’ve seen experts systemically purged and replaced with toadying apparatchiks. The few professionals who’ve kept their jobs have often had to engage in degrading acts of public obeisance more common to autocracies. Public policy has zigzagged according to presidential whim. Empirical reality has been subsumed to Trump’s cult of personality.
Amanda Marcotte: Now that Trump has suggested we shoot up Lysol, can cable news stop airing this crap?
“I’m like a person who has a good,” said the president of the United States, pointing to his head. Fact check: No
First things first: Don’t buy the right-wing media outlets trying to spin this. Donald Trump absolutely went on live TV and floated injecting household disinfectants into people’s lungs as a potential cure for the novel coronavirus.
Moreover, in what may be the most narcissistic act in all of human history, he implied that the reason this hasn’t been tried yet is because the entire medical establishment was not clever enough to think of it, and that only the mighty Doctor Trump has the genius brain to come up with such an idea. [..]
There has been a debate raging for a couple of weeks now over whether or not cable news networks should stop airing the live feeds of these daily rants disguised as press briefings. This moment, in a sane world, would end that debate.
By running his “briefings” unmediated every day, cable news is giving Trump the trappings of presidential authority that, in turn, create the illusion that he’s an expert whose advice should be trusted. Those trappings are incredibly powerful, especially for the nearly 63 million people who voted for Trump and dearly don’t want to believe they supported an imbecile who advises people to inject poisonous chemicals. [..]
In other words, what happened on Thursday was exactly what it looked like: A man who thinks he knows everything but actually knows nothing, who only halfway absorbed a presentation about how disinfectant and sunlight can kill the virus. He used this tidbit of information to bullshit wildly, saying stuff that was painfully dumb and dangerous because he is too lazy and stupid to have learned that household cleaners are poisonous.
This is not a person who should be presented on TV with the trappings of authority. If cable news networks want to air the daily briefings live, then for the sake of their viewers’ safety, they should cut away any time this “fucking moron” (in Rex Tillerson’s immortal phrase) takes the microphone. The only people who should be live on CNN are actual public health officials. This isn’t a game. People’s lives are on the line.
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