When Worlds Collide - Trump's disinformation meets Trump's delusion

       

       This is what happens when you put the most scientifically-ignorant, dishonest, self-centered child-like person at the head of what was once the most powerful and scientifically-advanced country in the world. 
       Thanks to Donald Trump's incompetence, even his sycophants are reduced to spouting gibberish at each other. 

"Wartime President" Trump promises 100,000 dead in Coronavirus fight

        In a White House press briefing on Sunday, March 29th, President Trump told the assembled reporters that his holding the body count to 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States means he's done a good job! The death toll today is just under 3,000 Americans. Only 97,000 more to go, Trump.
        Avast, ya swabs...hoist the Black Flag!

Trump cited projection models that said as many as 2.2 million people or more might die. “And so, if we could hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 – it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000 – we all together have done a very good job.” And he's usurping the title 'wartime president' in hopes that his history-ignorant supporters will lump Trump in with actual wartime leaders like Roosevelt, Wilson, and Lincoln.

Everyone remembers Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address where he cited 10,000 sacred battlefield fatalities as a very good job for a first-term president. One of FDR's most evocative, and final, fireside chats in late February 1945 still trigger warm memories when he proudly announced to Americans that 7,000 Marines and sailors killed at Iwo Jima showed what a great wartime leader he'd become. So Trump owning up to his projected death count - that he caused through sheer ineptitude - is somehow presidential. Apparently, all great presidents have to constantly remind everyone how incredible they are. It comes with the territory because memories are so short.

Trump honestly thinks that, due to his delaying any testing or taking serious measures in the U.S. until it was far too late to contain the spread of the virus, he should be congratulated for a death toll that will top 100,000. Well then, if it only kills half of the initial 2.2 million estimate…so 1.1 million dead, can’t Trump still claim success because his delayed efforts only led to half the number of predicted deaths? What does this say about Trump's empathy? What does this say about the Trump-defending GOP that remains silent?

So in less than a half a year, we could have twice the number of deaths the U.S. suffered in 10 years of fighting in Vietnam - a war in which Trump actively avoided service - and yet Trump thinks that means his efforts were successful.

One of the striking features of this virus is it is killing Americans who are from Trump's largest pool of supporters, those 60 and older. Yet Trump seemingly has no compassion for them. One hundred thousand of them dying because of his failure will have no more impact on him than the last breeze. But this kind of impact happening one hundred thousand times should be what he actually receives...

One wonders what ultimate benefit was it for them to vote for Trump? He destroyed the health of the nation by failing to lead when he was first told about the virus in January. That failure led to a catastrophic collapse of the stock market. In a little over one month, Trump's incompetence responding to the spreading pandemic triggered an over 10,000 point loss which completely wiped out his entire economic bragging point for the past 3 1/2 years.

Trump made the bald-faced claim that if not for him and his administration being in charge right now at this time, we "wouldn't even have a country anymore." How does he know this? Conjecture and alternative facts do not equal reality. At the rate he is going, Trump will cause the demise and collapse of the United States just as sure as his negligence back in January led to the massive spread of the coronavirus across the nation.

Remember when Trump asked, regarding electing him, "What have you got to lose?"

Now you know. 

For starters, 100,000 Americans to CoVID-19 is what we've got to lose. But in Trump's mind, that's a good job.  

Stupidity - Trump and his twitter feeds

According to reporting from the Boston Globe, West Wing staffers say they intentionally insert grammatical errors into messages they draft for Trump's Twitter account, trying to mimic the president's peculiar style. Two staffers who talked with a Boston Globe reporter said Trump’s online voice at @realDonaldTrump, highlighted by his boorish language and broken syntax, “emphasizes his rejection of the elites” …and that helps him appeal to his low-information loyal base.

Stupid is as stupid does

While Trump appears to, with some embarrassment, delete earlier tweets that were originally posted with strange wording or child-like spelling errors — the most well-known is the bizarre "covfefe" tweet — he seems proud of the vast majority of them filled with capitalization of random words, quirky grammatical inaccuracies, and an overuse of exclamation points and ellipsis’. They all fall into a subterranean-level stratum that his predecessors stayed far away from. Prior presidents using Twitter and other social media strove to come across as intelligent, enlightened, thoughtful and appeared to be fully aware of the awesome and extraordinary responsibilities of the office of the president.

Trump does not.

British comedian and actor John Cleese nails it

          Nor does Trump attempt to appear presidential. As long as he appeals to his base at a simpleton’s level, with no understanding of governance, civic duty, or the dignity usually displayed by high office holders, they will support him. They think of him as the juvenile delinquent sitting in detention hall with them, and that makes Trump admirable. The Trump team likes to employ a strategy seen among other conservative trolls on Twitter: they intentionally screw up to, from their point of view, ‘own the liberals.’ They think if liberals - or educated people - point out the unprofessional, coarse, and childish nature of Trump’s tweets, it means those people have been ‘owned’ by Trump. He outwitted them by tweeting like a dolt. How exactly that is accomplished is never explained but it doesn’t matter so long as his base BELIEVES that’s what Trump has done. Style trumps substance. Fiction trumps fact.

The mind of Trump

Some White House staff members even take a perverse pleasure in the scoldings Trump gets from better-educated readers who are stunned by the Trumpian language the staffers have attempted to imitate, believing that debates over Trump’s grade school errors and typos fortify the belief in his base that he has the common touch. To put it bluntly, the base approves of his being an ignoramus…because it’s just like them.

Thoroughly Pathetic

So you have to be a dum-dum who likes misspelled words, overuse of exclamation points, random capitalization, broken syntax, and made up stories from the dum-dum who sits in the Oval Office claiming to be ‘presidential.’ And those dum-dums cheer on that kind of ignorance. They see it as an asset.

It makes sense that Trump and his team would be obvious about his lack of understanding and his appeal to the lowest expectations of his base. Since Trump’s presidential style, if you can call it that, revolves around grievance politics, he and his handlers like to metaphorically poke a stick in the eye of anyone with more than a fourth-grade education – you know, to put them in their place.

Trump Loves Stupidity

          Trump and his twitter enablers spend more energy inventing fractured posts complete with deliberately misspelled words and nonsensical capitalizations than working on a comprehensive strategy for dealing with North Korea. That would take real work, and as we have seen, Trump is allergic to real work. It cuts into his golf time.