A Man of No Consequence — Part 4. The Final Countdown
By: Kevin Donovan
Tags: Election, Herd Immunity, Superspreader, Trump, Covid 19

A Man of No Consequence — Part 4

The Final Countdown

Courtesy of Milwaukee Journal Sentinal / Of Rural America 2020

We are tired.

For many of us, we have had all we can take of Donald Trump and we’re counting the days, if not the hours until this American nightmare is over. I’ve done my share of Trump-bashing over the last year — we’ve all probably had enough of that too, regardless of which side we are on. But my primary intention is as simple and primitive as a screaming prairie dog: To warn of impending danger.

In Part 1 of this “A Man of No Consequence” series, way back in February of this year, I deconstructed the pathology that can emerge from anybody who lacks an understanding of cause and effect, predicting that Trump would be unable to react effectively to a national emergency. While those on the inside were selling their stock, it was pre-pandemic for the rest of us, so there was no way to know what such a scenario might look like.

In Part 2, in April, as our first wave of Covid-19 was washing over us — remember when we were “all in this together” and we were working together to “flatten the curve”? — I noted that Trump lacked the three essential qualities of responsibility, patience and empathy to lead the country to relative safety as we waited for a vaccine. As a lifelong cheater, we could expect Trump to cheat when it came to the healthcare guidelines and encourage others to do the same. As predicted, he has gone on to prove that he was not just unfit, but possibly the most emotionally ill-equipped person on earth to provide the unifying leadership we needed.

In July, I posted a Part 3, which referenced the inability of Trump to develop and implement anything close to a coherent plan that would lead us toward recovery, relying instead on the authoritarian approach of altering reality, or at least attempting to, as a means of maintaining power. Trump’s alternate reality was predicated on a twisted understanding of the relationship between the economy and the pandemic: the delusion that opening everything would diminish the effects of the pandemic, when in fact restarting the economy was directly dependent on our being able to rein in Covid-19. Exhibiting an infantile understanding of object permanence, his magical “solution” to reducing the number of cases was and still is to reduce testing.

Throughout the spring, summer and into the fall, Trump made it impossible to achieve any meaningful progress by sowing division across the country and undermining the directives of his own CDC with explicit claims that we should defy them, ultimately making himself an example of his own irresponsibility.

As our worst-case scenario has played out over the last ten months, we are bearing witness to someone who has no grasp of cause and effect, no capacity for responsibility, patience and empathy, and no comprehension of the devastating consequences that are a product of his own behavioral deficiencies. The lack of consequences for Trump’s actions has delivered the worst possible consequences for those who are no longer with us, for those of us who loved them and for those who have sacrificed so much to keep them alive.

Courtesy of Shutterstock / frontiers Science News

As of this writing, there appears to be no clear end in sight for this version of uniquely American carnage. For those few who still haven’t decided who to vote for, consider that no plan or policy exists to gain control of the virus; in fact, the Trump Administration has chosen the opposite, effectively jettisoning the guidance of some of the world’s most knowledgeable medical professionals in favor of the catastrophic quack-enabled approach of herd immunity — the act of letting the virus run its course by intentionally doing nothing. His method of putting out the fire is to let our house burn to the ground.

With clear eyes and good faith, we must ask ourselves, at what point is it justified to declare our president insane? The adoption of herd immunity could only occur in the absence of responsibility, patience and empathy and the presence of insanity. Make no mistake: many more people will die if Trump is re-elected, which means we must come to terms with the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t care what the death toll is. It is a shocking conclusion to reach, but it has a simple explanation.

He doesn’t care about you.

Trump’s super-spreader campaign events are never actually about his followers, they are about him. As with everything in Trump’s orbit, there is no plan for a second term: no objectives, no initiatives, no vision other than his need to preserve what may be the world’s most fragile ego. His actions and policies are based on who likes him, who is nice to him, who will benefit him. Just as it was four years ago, he has no intention of uniting and leading the United States because that would require him to transcend his own perceived self-interest.

If Trump loses, he will likely spend the lame duck session vindictively burning everything he can to the ground — a tantrum that is predictable because we have grown accustomed to enduring his victimization when he isn’t justly rewarded. He will attribute his loss to everything and everyone but himself.

The Trump presidency can be summed up in five words: He doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t matter if you are a Trump supporter, if you are an evangelical, if you are a Republican conservative, and probably even if you are a member of his own family. He doesn’t care about you.

As his campaign rallies continue, we can only watch in horror as the spread of Covid follows in his wake, infecting hundreds with, at a minimum, a new pre-existing condition and delivering a death toll that will only be known sometime after election day. It is an act of irresponsibility and negligence that would be criminal if he didn’t hold the title of president.

When we look back some day at the casualties of Trump’s carnage, will the people who worshiped him have the self-awareness to know or the courage to admit that that he never really cared about them? That he never cared for anyone but himself? And will they wonder, as we so often wonder when looking back on tragedies, How could we not have known?

In the end, we the people are the only ones who will suffer the consequences of a man of no consequence.