Donald Trump's strange way of thinking

There is nothing either good or bad,"  Hamlet tells his old childhood buddies in Shakespeare's play, "but thinking makes it so." President Donald Trump acquired that principle this week as he strove in vain to turn bad news about the coronavirus into a positive, throwing the quickly developing number of cases as something worth being thankful for - proof of success in extending testing. 

"We're doing so well after the plague," he told a huge number of students at an assembly in Arizona, where Covid-19 cases are spiraling up. "It's going away."

Inreality, the quantity of new Covid-19 cases was expanding over the earlier week's levels in more than 30 states by Friday. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Congressional committee that Covid-19 has "brought this nation to its knees." Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, offered this guidance" Plan A: Don't go in a crowd. Plan B: If you do, make sure you wear a mask."

Jill Filipovic called the US "an outlier among nations, with more cases and more deaths than any nation in the world." Its people "make up just over 4% of the world's population, but about a quarter of global coronavirus deaths," she noted. "And yet we haven't reckoned with this massive, unmitigated public health failure."

Trump and the White House gave inconsistent messages on testing. First, the President said he advised his group to slow it down, then he pushed back when his aides said he was simply joking about that ("I don't kid"), lastly chose:  he was being sarcastic. In fact, the administration said it was going to quit financing 13 community-based testing sites. "Instead of pulling back on testing, the nation needs to double down on it,"wrote the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times.  "This is how we beat the 'invisible enemy,' of which the president speaks. Not by covering our eyes and pretending it isn't there."

There is no harm in testing, wrote Frida Ghitis; the harm, Trump appears to believe, rests in how the outcomes could influence his re-appointment possibilities. "What Trump is trying to do is convince the public that the continuing disaster that is his handling of the crisis is not really happening. Don't look at the growing number of cases and deaths, he's telling us; it's a mirage. Everything's okay."

US travelers could be banned

The US could even endure the outrage of seeing its citizens barred from going to Europe, where strict lockdowns have monitored the virus mostly under control,wrote David Andelman. If the US fails to meet the criteria being considered by the European Commission, member states could treat Americans as they might people from Russia and Brazil, driving the US even deeper into pariah status. Travelers from China, the nation where the pandemic began, would likely not be banned." 

In Croatia, a charity tennis competition had to be dropped and the the world's number one male player, Novak Djokovic declared he and his wife both tested positive for coronavirus.As surging cases across the US and in countries around the world are demonstrating every day," Holly Thomas pointed out, "a preemptive assumption that business can continue as usual can have devastating consequences."

Cecilia Muñoz, who led the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama administration, argued that we should be honest about who's most at risk as states reopen. "Some governors, with the support of our President, have been careening forward in willful disregard of the evidence, which now unequivocally tells us that these decisions will have a disproportionate impact on Black and brown lives," she wrote, refering to inequities in health and in the economy.

Another stressing factor is that the age profile of Covid-19 casualties has shifted significantly, with over 60% of diseases in the US now under 50.

"The 20- to 40-year-olds appear to be spreading the infection unperceived," wrote biologist Erin Bromage. "They are just as easily infected as the elderly, but much more likely to show no or mild symptoms. People in these age groups are the ones who have allowed the virus to smolder through our communities and erupt into flames when they make contact with a susceptible population."

At a time of huge uncertainty, Rebecca Bodenheimer is among the numerous guardians who have been wrestling with the topic of whether to send children to summer camp. "After more than three months of shelter-in-place and social isolation, my son and his peers have major quarantine fatigue," she wrote. "They're frustrated and upset about not being able to see their friends, engage in any sports or go to any kid-friendly venues. While I understand well the risks of spreading Covid-19 that summer camps entail, I'm much more worried about the social-emotional toll the pandemic has taken on my son. That's why I'm sending him to camp."

Joe Biden's advantage

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, numerous presidential candidates decided to conduct their campaigns from home than travel the country, asking for votes. "In those long-ago 'front porch' campaigns," wrote historian Thomas Balcerski, "the approach both accentuated candidates' likability through a folksy veneer and limited their liabilities by controlling the environment in which they appeared."

When the pandemic started, Trump and his Democratic opponent, previous VP Joe Biden, were confined to the equivalent of their front porches, however not by decision.

Seven days prior, the President wandered out for his first mass meeting, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Areas of the field were vacant and the anticipated flood crowd didn't emerge. Interestingly, "Biden appears to be substance to address a lot littler get-togethers and for the most part stay virtual," Balcerski noted. "In our new work-from-home time, Biden's methodology may demonstrate increasingly alluring to those voters who value his regard for general wellbeing and security."

Dean Obeidallah watched: "Donald Trump loves packed campaign rallies, positive media coverage and not being the butt of jokes. Based on those metrics, Trump's campaign rally Saturday in Tulsa -- his first since the Covid-19 outbreak -- was a big fat failure on all counts."

At that rally, Trump said something that expert David Axelrod, who was the strategist for Barack Obama's two winning presidential crusades, found "unintentionally revealing." Trump surrendered that Biden is "not radical left" - despite the fact that he charged that the left controls him.

"Donald Trump is a cultural warrior," Axelrod wrote. "His politics depends on mining the fear and resentment of white, working class voters who feel they are on the losing end of economic and demographic change. Joe Biden is culturally inconvenient for Trump's re-election project. An older, white, Irish Catholic from a working class Pennsylvania family, Biden is just not frightening enough to the voters Trump needs to scare."

Over four months before the election, national and state surveys show a sharp move in support of Biden. Trump is failing to meet expectations among  non-college white and evangelical voters, while suburban voters and people over 65 "give Biden the edge, and you can see the President's challenge," Axelrod wrote.

Pushing the buttons

"Trump is responding by pushing all the buttons that worked for him as an outsider candidate in 2016," wrote Michael D'Antonio. "He indulges in stream-of-consciousness rants, like the one explaining his recent physical struggles at West Point. He pastes ugly nicknames on his opponents. And he continues to rail against immigration."

"The trouble with Trump's rerun approach is that he's not an outsider anymore. He's the President -- which means he bears responsibility for the state our country is currently in. Things are so bad that he's even lost his chance to brag about the economy, which was once at the center of his claim to success."

Trump's recent performance was roasted in a leading conservative venue, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. "Something shifted this month," wrote columnist Peggy Noonan. "He hasn't been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows."

The Journal's editorial board rendered this brutal verdict: "As of now Mr. Trump has no second-term agenda, or even a message beyond four more years of himself. His recent events in Tulsa and Arizona were dominated by personal grievances."

In Biden's camp, the unavoidable issue is who he will pick as his running mate. He's vowed that he will pick a lady, a guarantee that resounded with Donna Zaccaro,  a documentary filmmaker whose mother, Geraldine Ferraro, was picked in 1984 as Walter Mondale's running mate - the first lady to run on a major party ticket for VP.

"Biden's campaign has reignited our hope to one day see a woman in the White House," she wrote. "Critics have complained that he has unnecessarily 'limited the pool' of potential candidates. As Geraldine Ferraro's daughter, I say that choosing a woman should not be seen as limiting the field. Rather, it levels it."

Bolton's takedown

Donald Trump can't say he wasn't warned about what might happen when he employed John Bolton as his national security adviser.

In a 2018 CNN Opinion column, Peter Bergen stated, "Bolton takes very good notes about what his counterparts say in meetings and what he says to them, so we should expect another Bolton memoir at some point -- this one about his time in the Trump administration."

A week ago, that expectation was fulfilled. Bolton's staggering takedown of Trump was published, bearing a title adjusted from the hit musical Hamilton:"The Room Where It Happened." Bergen's review of the book noted that, "Bolton's personal contempt for Trump oozes from almost every page. In the 500-plus page memoir it's hard to find any moment where Trump is portrayed in any kind of positive light."