Dear America,
In today's mail, our household received a card, ostensibly from the CDC. It had no address on it, but rather was emblazoned with these words: PRESIDENT TRUMP'S CORONAVIRUS GUIDELINES FOR AMERICA. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Donald Trump sees the coronavirus crisis as a campaign opportunity. He is on television every night saying more or less the same thing, sanguinely and pontifically, albeit not really truthfully. But his veracity doesn't seem to matter, as I heard John Carl, the reporter from ABC News say when being interviewed about his new book, "Front Row at the Trump Show." It's about Trump and his cavalier attitude toward the truth, and in that context, Carl observed that Trump's attenuated attitude about candor makes no difference with regard to his political standing. Those who already know he is a liar just have their opinions confirmed every time he opens his mouth. And as to Trump's die-hard constituency, the fact that he is a liar to the bone doesn't matter. The lies he tells are the ones they want to believe. So when he says that this whole Covid-19 business will be over in two weeks, his true-believers believe him, and even if it were a possibility, those of us who see him for what he is can't believe him because of all the lies he has told us in the past.
And as for the odious nature of his opportunism, blatant and despicable as it is, it won't change people's minds about Trump either. As I've said before, being from Long Island I saw Trump's vacuous visage beaming from the television every time I went back to my origins to visit family for holidays. I remember the first time I saw him on the news getting out of a limousine and holding court on one thing or another, I asked my brother who he was. I was in my early thirties at that time, and since I was born about two months after Trump, he was too. My brother said something like, oh, he's just some rich guy from the city. He didn't even know what Trump did to make himself so prominent as to be on the news...just that he was some rich guy. So, for forty years or so--ever since he came into daddy's money--he has been promoting himself shamelessly, and at every opportunity...getting his picture taken with everyone who couldn't get away from him quick enough and talking to anyone foolish and shallow enough to indulge his insatiable appetite for publicity. Rona Barrett is one such person I remember interviewing him about all kinds of profundities as if he were qualified to comment, apparently just because he was rich, when it was obvious he wasn't as soon as he opened his mouth. But his buffoonery was never a disqualification as far as the sensationalists in the media were concerned. For some reason people wanted to see him--perhaps like they wanted to see the two headed chicken in the side show--and he was therefore good for ratings. Trump saw that and since he has no scruples of any kind, was off like a rocket promoting himself, toward what end no one knew...until 2016.
This particular promotional gambit--the "I'm saving America and I'm going to tell you about it every day" routine--is particularly contemptible given what we are all going through and the dangers we face, but I knew it was coming after the first of his incessant press conferences. Even I thought he handled himself fairly well, with only one or two self-serving comments...a record for an hour in his life. Then came the second such photo-op and the third and on and on. And his true nature came out more and more in each one, but that didn't stop him. He knows something that Hollywood has capitalized on for probably a century: there is no such thing as bad publicity. And in Trump-world, there is no excuse for not seizing every opportunity to get some, good, bad or indifferent and tawdriness aside. Just stay obtrusively public and keep talking and mugging for the cameras because as P.T. Barnum has been apocryphally attributed with saying, there's s sucker born every minute...and I might add, approximately 140 million of them voted in 2016 and might again in 2020.
The problem with this thing we got in the mail, and that you and all your friends probably got too, is that it is against the law, specifically the Hatch Act, for federal employees to promote political candidates with federal resources. So, some Trump shill at the CDC should now be subject to prosecution, or a least to being fired, and my guess is that it's the guy at the top, Trump appointee Robert Redfield: Trump's sycophant-expert of the moment. I just hope he...that is, neither one of them...gets away with it.
Your friend,
Mike
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