By David K. Shipler
Americans
have a better chance of keeping themselves and others safe by ignoring what
President Trump says. He has already contributed to the
death of an Arizona man who, along with his wife, took chloroquine
(used to clean fish tanks!) the day after Trump misinformed the country about
its anti-viral effectiveness. Medical experts criticized the Food and Drug
Administration’s emergency authorization for its use, because too much can
kill you. In fact, its use against malaria is not necessarily
applicable to COVID-19 without careful clinical trials to establish proper
dosing. In the wife’s case, it sent her into critical condition. Even doctors
who listened to Trump are writing prescriptions to hoard
the drug for themselves, depleting supplies for those who really need it for lupus
and other ailments.
This is
what the United States has come to. You can’t believe your president, the one
who is getting a 55 percent approval
rating for the way he is mishandling the pandemic. You shouldn’t
have accepted his cavalier assessment that the supposed severity of the virus
was just the Democrats’ “new
hoax” that would soon disappear.
You can’t trust his absurd assurances that sufficient tests and medical
equipment are available, or that they’re not really needed in bulk.
You certainly shouldn’t act on his
push to fill
the churches on Easter and to go back to work—advice he’s now
recanted by extending preventive guidelines until April 30. His cavalier,
contradictory, self-absorbed briefings have encouraged millions to take the
disease less seriously than warranted, which could lead to the collapse of law
enforcement, health care, fire departments, infrastructure maintenance, and
food supplies as those essential workers drop into sickness.
Trump
is a national security risk. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying
attention. He refuses to talk to governors who don’t fawn over him. He claims
to have inherited “a broken system.” Yet he has been in office for more than three
very long years, during which he has watched TV compulsively, tweeted his
grievances and insults, played lots of golf, come to work late in the morning,
and governed the way Boris Yeltsin did in Russia as it descended: by simply firing
people, as if the federal government were his TV show, The Apprentice.
The
cost is now apparent. An excellent analysis
by Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times documents the handicaps created by the widespread
vacancies in key federal positions, the massive departures of top scientists
and specialists in emergency management, and the colossal inexperience of
political lackeys Trump has appointed. It’s a reminder of the Soviet Union in
its final years, as political orthodoxy mattered more than expertise.
There
is a reminder of another kind. Anyone who has been in a Third World country,
whether in deep poverty or in wartime, knows the familiarity of harrowing
accounts we are now receiving from American hospitals. In Cambodia, too,
patients waited for hours or days in hallways. There, too, doctors and nurses
were overwhelmed and often helpless in the face of insufficient methods of
treatment. People died when decent medical care could have saved them.
We are
now in a Fourth World, “a new category of nations: those once mighty and noble
that are falling into frailty and disrepute.” Those words are from a piece I
wrote the day before Trump was inaugurated. It was entitled, “America Enters a
Fourth World.” My apologies for quoting myself, which puts me off when writers
do it. But I’ll continue shamelessly, and you can read the whole essay here
to see how obvious Trump’s defects were even before he took office as “the most
childish, reckless, and truthless president in modern American history.”
The Fourth
World “is a place of undoing. It is a place where moral values of the common
good are picked apart, strand by strand, until only the shreds of caring and
justice remain. It is where progress is dismantled: progress—albeit fitful and
incomplete—in mobilizing the society through government to protect the
impoverished from utter ruin, the innocent from false imprisonment, minorities
from tyranny, children from hunger, families from dangerous foods and medicines
and polluted air and water, and the earth from the end-stage of catastrophic
global warming.
“There is
nothing divinely ordained about America’s greatness. Once Trump and the
radicals who will populate most of his cabinet finish their efforts to destroy
what has been painstakingly constructed over decades, it will take a generation
to recover. That is the actual time when it will be appropriate to plead, ‘Make
America Great Again!’”
The term “Third
World,” coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, evolved into the optimistic
label “developing countries.” But in the meantime it spawned the category “First
World” to mean the industrialized capitalist countries, and the “Second World,”
the industrialized communist countries. Only “Third World” survived for a while
as common shorthand.
Welcome now to
the Fourth World. “In Trump’s vicinity, truth dies,” I wrote the day before his
inauguration. “He facilitates the erosion of shared reality in a polarized
society more infatuated with opinion than fact—or, rather, that believes
opinion is fact.”
Three years
and two months later, he is still fooling millions of Americans. His misleading,
self-serving opinions interact with a credulous public to produce a toxin. “Don’t
believe anything that the president says,” advised the Arizona woman whose
husband died. In other words, we need to observe social distancing—from the
President and his babbling.
Previously published by the Washington Monthly.
Previously published by the Washington Monthly.
Toxin is the right word! What could be worse than an utterly ignorant public who would enthusiastically vote into office an arrogant, lying fool such as Donald Trump - to occupy the most important position in the world at this time?! But whom really to blame? Who's actually responsible? I blame the American educational system - as shaped by the Right Wing - to be sure to NOT actually educate children to become knowledgeable THINKERS! It's truly tragic. Thanks for this article. I appreciate your outrage. We need more of that from more people!
ReplyDeleteLately we have seen so many graphs with curves and the admonition to "flatten the curve." If we take a look at the harshest of those curves, the one we'd ride with no mitigation measures, and apply it politically, here's what I see: I see us nearing the apex with Trump and his lies, certainly with his lies, and I think the apex of Trump himself and the ensuing free fall won't be far behind. Numbers of people tested, infected, hospitalized, dead, these are tangible, knowable numbers. Scientists all over the globe are studying these and other numbers and are learning a lot from them. Their reports will be easier for Trump to spin or wish away, but he'll never be able to escape death counts.
ReplyDeleteLikewise with the stock market. He can't spin away the S&P 500 and other measures of market performance. Perhaps here is where he's most vulnerable - for example, just before all of this started, a friend of mine said her in-laws hate Trump but will vote for him again because of their 401Ks. I do wonder to what extent the market's rise in the last three years has been a function of Trump's puffery. I wonder if, after the coronavirus passes, the market will settle on some middle ground. I suppose we'll never know, especially if it takes years for us to reach the point where we can say we're past the coronavirus.
And so, maybe Trump's lies, or at least their impact, have reached their apex. Maybe Trump himself has reached his apex too, or will soon. Maybe we are about to watch him ride that steep curve down. We have to hope.
dear mr. shipler, thank you for telling the truth
ReplyDelete