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What Can We Learn From Trump Getting Sick?

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Last night I was watching Fox News  (I always watch/listen to the enemy just to keep them closer than my friends) and the banner message that kept running across the bottom of the screen said, “Liberal media cheers that President Trump is sick.”

So this morning, to check out the extent of the liberal cheers being directed at Trump, I read the op-ed that will be posted in tomorrow’s edition of The (‘failing’) New York Times written by our friend Nick Kristof which says exactly the opposite of what Fox News believes the liberal media is saying about Trump and Covid-19.

Nick’s op-ed begins by telling us that we shouldn’t be nasty or snarky just because President Trump is sick. Instead, “Let’s learn from the president’s infection. Let’s make this a wake-up call that leads to mask-wearing and social distancing, saving lives.”

He then concludes his homily in the following way: “So as the Trumps battle the virus, let’s learn lessons, sharpen our wits — and commit ourselves to a lifesaving norm of social distancing and wearing masks.”

This may come as something of a shock to Nick, but maybe because he’s been sitting on the family farm in Oregon perhaps he’s missed a few things. The truth is that I don’t need to learn anything about the virus from Trump falling ill. The only thing I’ll learn if he recovers is that he will receive a level of medical care which most Americans who contract the illness won’t receive thanks to how one, single person has behaved.

Several months ago I came driving home to find my street being repaved. In order to drive down the street, I had to tell the cop who was standing there that I was a resident. So I stopped next to him and because I was alone in my car my mask was on the seat next to me.

I dropped my window and but before I realized anything the cop was leaning over, not wearing a mask, and his face was about a foot away from me. I yelled at him to back off which he didn’t, by the way. I then shot the window closed and drove towards my house.

This incident occurred just before my state’s Governor, Charlie Baker, imposed social distancing statewide. But I had been wearing a mask and staying away from people for at least three or four previous months. And I knew lots of people who were doing the same thing.

But I also saw a lot of people like this cop who weren’t behaving the way they should have behaved. And the reason they weren’t doing what we all need to do is because one fat, stupid and egregious narcissist sitting in the Oval Office has been telling everyone that they don’t have to behave the way they should behave.

I’m not surprised that Trump’s dwindling collection of media allies are going all out to keep him somehow from taking responsibility for the fact that nearly one thousand Americans are still dying from the virus every day. In the entire history of this country, there has never (read: never) been such irresponsible behavior by the guy who sits behind the Resolute desk.

I think it’s not only disingenuous but somewhat alarming when intelligent and well-meaning liberal editorialists like Nick Kristof imply that ‘we’ are somehow all at fault because ‘we’ need to see this virus as some kind of “wake-up call.”

Since early February I have gotten up every morning knowing that I can’t leave my house without a mask. I have also not visited with any of my children or my grandchildren because I know that such visits represent an unacceptable risk. And I’m hardly the only American who has put off seeing their kids.

Sorry Nick, but I don’t need a wake-up call and neither do any of my friends. What we need is a Chief Executive who should be modest and honest enough to accept the blame for pretending that we can just ignore the ‘Chinese flu’ because it will soon ‘go away.’

Poor, Poor Donald Trump.

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Just in case anyone believes I have been too harsh in my comments about Trump’s alleged viral infection, the picture above came to be known as the ‘Central Park 5,’ a group of teenage kids who were arrested in April, 1989, for supposedly raping nd brutally attacking a White, female jogger in Central Park. The five kids, all in their teens, were convicted and sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. In 2003, following a DNA match between the victim and an adult serial rapist and murderer, the remaining two defendants were set free.

Several weeks after the kids were arrested, a young real-estate developer named Donald Trump paid over $80,000 for all four major New York newspapers to run this ad:

This ad created a firestorm of publicity about the crime but it also vaulted Trump ono the top of the media heap where he has remained ever since. When New York City finally admitted that the wrong kids were ,locked up and reached an out-of-court settlement to compensate these young men for having lost more than a decade of their lives, Trump publicly denounced the city government for ‘caving in’ and paying out any money at all.

Now let’s move forward to a more recent time. And the time I am talking about is 2011, when Trump was mulling over a Presidential run and with the help of his dear buddy, Roger Stone, began to question whether Obama was born in the United States. For Trump, the ‘birther movement’ became a quick and clever way to see how people would react to a racist smear not just against a Black man, but against a Black man with a Muslim background as well.

Trump’s campaign worked so well that racist attacks on African-Americans and Muslims became a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign. Whenever his rallies got tired of chanting ‘lock her up!’ he could lead them in another favorite chant, ‘send them back!’

If you think I’m being at all unfair about Trump’s racism, here’s a published quote from the 2016 campaign:

I wish I were making up my characterization of Trump as a racist but I’m not. Not only has this guy been playing a public, racist card for more than 30 years, but he has consciously injected racism into the political narrative every chance he gets.

Trump started his attacks against the Central Park 5 just before Ed Koch left the Mayor’s office in New York and was replaced by a Black politician, David Dinkins, who served one term. He served only one term because his successor, Rudy Giuliani, ran the single most racist mayoralty campaign if all time. I was living in New York back then and I remember the degree to which Giuliani injected the most disgusting racist commentary into the 1993 campaign.

And now we are, more than 30 years after Trump first pretended that racist rhetoric has a rightful place in the American political debate, and he’s at it again. You think his refusal to condemn without qualification all supremacy movements and speech is just a ‘mistake?’ Some mistake.

I thought the most important and telling moment of Tuesday night’s debate was when Joe stated that Trump’s lack of response to the corona virus had resulted in 1 our of every 1,000 African-American men losing their lives, a toll which could possibly reach 1 in 500 by the end of the year. And Joe made this statement in response to something Trump said about how he’s always been a ‘friend’ of the Blacks.

Is it really fair to say that Trump did nothing about the virus because, like everyone else, he didn’t realize how serious it was? Or is it possible, maybe just maybe, he let the whole issue alone because the Pandemic first started hitting Black communities far beyond the infection rates being felt among Whites?

I don’t think that my question is all that unfair.

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