Donald Trump insured that the fly, not Mike Pence or that “monster,” Kamala Harris, who womansplained to the vice president, would be the story coming out of the vice presidential debate by calling into Fox News before the sun was barely up. He delivered a message to that pesky Commission on Presidential Debates to take its virtual debate scheduled for Thursday and shove it.
There’s no need to go virtual, since he’s “not contagious at all.” Or so says Dr. Trump, who knows more than his physicians, who can’t offer a second opinion because of blanket NDAs. What’s all the fuss? Aides promised they would back up Trump’s self-prognosis with multiple negative tests before the event, an utterly meaningless prediction meant to convince planners that he wouldn’t turn the Miami event into a superspreader like the party for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett or the one the next day for Gold Star families (spreaders themselves, according to Trump) with their penchant for kissing and hugging, or, just give him time, Melania, the recuperating first lady taped by her former assistant complaining about putting up f***ing Christmas decorations at the White House.
At first, Joe Biden said he would abide by the commission’s decision. An hour later, he accepted Trump’s cancellation, perhaps enjoying Trump digging himself into an ever bigger hole. Another debate would expose Biden to the contagion he apparently escaped at the first debate in Cleveland. Trump arrived late to the hall and, according to moderator Chris Wallace, got in on “the honor system.” Biden will also save himself from a second exposure to someone who treated their first encounter like a tweetstorm, all caps, all insults, all the time.
Not holding the town hall also means saving hundreds of innocent bystanders from possible infection—everyone in Miami working at the site, vendors (more than a dozen caterers at his Duluth rally tested positive) and those who, for chump change, fly, staff, protect, make up, and salute Trump all along his merry, careless way to soak up the adulation of his followers.
By the end of the day, commander in chief Trump had gotten the clearance he desperately wanted from the doctors he outranks to resume activities come Saturday, a little late to reverse the decision on the upcoming debate. That might account for his growing agitation as the day wore on when he uncharacteristically turned on two of his most pliant lieutenants, predicting to aides that Attorney General William P. Barr would go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” for not indicting Biden and former President Barack Obama before the election and complaining that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had yet to release Hillary Clinton’s emails. He went on to call FBI Director Christopher Wray, who’s been on thin ice for some time, “disappointing.” Wray’s sin is continuing to talk about the election as legitimate and Russian interference in it as real.
Biden taking him at his word must have surprised Trump. In Donald’s world, stomping out of the room with “what a waste of time” trailing behind him is an opening salvo after which he’d return holding the upper hand. It’s hard to find anyone not on the payroll who agrees that he didn’t emerge from the first debate with a losing one. Aides were longing for another crack at Biden, with Trump primed to give him enough string this time to commit one of his famous gaffes]].
The debate over debates is the latest chapter in Trump’s epic mishandling of the pandemic. Since coming down with the coronavirus, rather than see his illness as a lifeboat to a course correction—I now feel your pain—he saw an occasion to browbeat his doctors, lie about his condition, and recklessly check out of the hospital early as if it were a hotel. Lifeboats are for weaklings who would let the virus dominate their lives, women and children and unmanly men who wear masks. The money shot for his triumph over COVID was from the Truman Balcony, saluting, perhaps in his steroid-altered mind, the larger-than-Obama crowd at his inauguration.
The cancellation unfolded as Trump’s biggest mistake from the first debate—his refusal to condemn white supremacists—came back to haunt him. Federal prosecutors announced the arrest of six men allegedly in cahoots with a militia group to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, known to Trump as “the lock-up queen,” and who had been confronted with a large group of armed “you aren’t the boss of me” protesters in the state capitol building over her order to wear masks. At the time, the president tweeted out “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
The Proud Boys Trump told to stand by at the first debate would be so proud. Just because there’s no debate this week doesn’t mean Trump shouldn’t release his last negative test, needed to trace the spread of infection within his administration. Despite repeated requests, he’s holding that information as tightly as the tax returns an appeals court ruled for a second time this week he has to turn over, including that embarrassing one where he paid Uncle Sam $750 and also took a highly questionable $70,000 dedication for haircare. The White House acts as if they’re being asked to do a deep dive into the National Archives and for no good reason.
To the contrary, after Trump nixed the second debate, Dr. Tom Frieden, who measures his words, said that the source of the current surge in the White House is not “unknowable,” as the White House insists. It’s only a mystery, Frieden said, “if you don’t want to find out.” Trump’s already turned down an offer from the CDC to get to the bottom of the spike that ’s no harder than tracing the outbreak after the choir practice in Washington state, or the gender reveal party, or the wedding in Maine. And it’s urgent since the top of the Washington establishment, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is living in quarantine and fear.
The fact is Trump can’t turn over his tests, negative or otherwise, for it would reveal he isn’t “the most tested person in the world” as his aides kept claiming to explain why he could hold rallies around the country, events at the White House, outdoors and inside, and otherwise act as if the virus was no big problem.
We’ve entered a new, and maybe final, stage in the Trump Show, after the “blessing from God” episode, in which our hero is cured. It’s not only because he got the best care the presidency can buy after being flown door-to-door into the arms of a dozen specialists, or that he wasn’t left to treat himself with hydroxychloroquine, bleach, or an unproved, rushed vaccine. No, it was due to “cures not therapeutics,” not mentioning that these experimental drugs are unavailable to you and me. You see, after all, it’s not much more than the flu. He’s been right all along.
The season is ending with a president not just homicidally reckless with 210,000 lives lost but suicidally with his own. With our own ears, we heard him admit how lethal the virus is, now we see, he bought his own con. The downplaying worked on him to the point where he’s not just jeopardizing those in the West Wing and willing to do the same to those in Miami, he’s entering the five-to-seven-day phase of the disease as if he’s immune, putting himself at risk. He’s not just dangerous to us. He’s a danger to himself. He wants us to trust him. That works for other presidents and maybe the next, but not for this one.
