October 3, 2020

Trump Has Covid. Now What?

 

 

The main function of conspiracy theories is that absent a belief in an all powerful God that controls all events in the world, we at a base level desire to know that somebody is in control, that this global society isn’t constantly flying off the rails.

The problem is though, that nobody smart is in charge, and our global society really is constantly flying off the rails.

I’m seeing a lot of liberals and progressives and just non-marxists on the left in general, talking about how Trump getting COVID is probably just another media stunt, that this is somehow going to be good for him, that he is going to use his illness to try to delay the election, or that he is using the media cycle to distract from everything from his tax returns showing evidence of fraud and evasion, to the fact that his administration hired under-qualified doctors with little medical experience to over see the detention camps if they were “philosophically aligned with the mission” which turned out to be genocideally forcing immigrant women under the knife for hysterectomies.

And I’m seeing the Right-wing true believers now saying that the reason that Trump and his inner circle caught COVID isn’t because he refused to follow a single health and safty guideline from the WHO or CDC, but it’s because the Democratic Party are using Biological Warfare against Trump and his inner circle.

Applying Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is often the correct one.  And the correct answer is this.  Trump is incompetent, and fucked up.  He fucked up big time.  If you want evidence, look at his entire real estate career and his entire presidency.  It has been a single continuous failure.  Fucking up is all Trump has ever done.  And he never apologizes, because he is a narcissistic monster.

So first, to the idea that TRUMP GOT COVID ON PURPOSE OR IS FAKING IT.
His getting COVID is not something he did on purpose to distract us from the issues.  Ever since day one every news cycle has been filled with 5 new horrible things that Trump has done that were either unprecedented, unethical, illegal, or just violated basic social norms and human decency.  Everything the man does is horrible, he is a walking trash fire, writing in his own personal hell of narcissistic reaction, , barely understanding the world around him.  The only reason that this monster hasn’t had his face smashed in by the people he fucked over, is because he was born rich, rich people don’t roll like that, and poor people don’t have access.

It isn’t an October Surprise.  It isn’t a calculation.  It isn’t a miracle.  It isn’t RBG in heaven arguing her first case with God. It isn’t because of all the witches hexing him on twitter (although, thank you very much for doing that, that made my day).

Trump got COVID19 because he didn’t listen to science. He has botched the public response since DAY ONE. 

Back when  it wasn’t clear how bad this would get, Trump and the GOP tried to sell the whole “staying open” thing at first saying that our grandparents should be willing to die so that we can work in unsafe conditions and also get sick and die.  That we should all go out and die for wall street.  This was the cardinal sin that was never corrected for, and landed Trump in the Hospital.

Because he refused to respond adequately, the virus moved from being contained to being community spread.  That led to the mask thing.  To wear a mask was to admit that he failed.  So he was against masks.  That was the second sin Trump committed that landed him in the hospital.

Trump decided that people shouldn’t wear masks at his rallies, which he would continue to hold, like the one in Tulsa (which by the way, Herman Cain also refused to wear a mask, got COVID and DIED because he listened to Trump and didn’t wear a mask at this rally).

Everything he has done so far, it is not part of any master plan, it’s reactive, it’s ego soothing, it’s totally surface level, there is nothing else to it.  He isn’t smart.  He isn’t complex.  He has no clue what he is doing.  That is why he is such a massive failure, and everything about his presidency is a massive failure.  We should get used to saying that the people who run this country are idiots who don’t know what they are doing.  They are all just making shit up as they go along, there is no plan, there is no steady hand on the wheel, it’s all a bunch of made up bullshit, and all of us working class people have to suffer the consequences of their failures, because that’s how capitalism is structured.

He doesn’t care about other people, he is more concerned with looking right than being right.  Which means he can never admit to being wrong, ever.  His fragile ego is so frail and brittle that he totally self-destructs, like we saw at the first presidential debate with Biden, where he did nothing but scream and yell and interrupt Biden the whole time.  People are saying that that was his strategy.  No.  That wasn’t a strategy.  That was incompetence.  That was a toxic person, who hadn’t done their homework for the whole semester, writing a bunch of bullshit on the exam, and then arguing with the teacher that the test wasn’t fair.  It was pathetic, childish, incompetent, a total hissy fit.

Trump stated publicly, that he didn’t want people to wear masks to his rally because it would only remind him of his public policy failure.  That’s it.  There’s no plan beyond that.  He just doesn’t want to admit that he is wrong, because he is an unthinking monster incapable of critical thinking or empathy.  He is so awash in his own bald faced lies, he believes them.  He is the kind of person who would asphyxiate huffing their own farts to prove that his shit doesn’t stink.  Think of the stupidest meanest kid on the playground in middle school.  That’s who we are dealing with.  A morally stunted manchild incapable of admitting to failure, and is thus cursed to never be able to improve, grow, or learn.


TRUMP GOT IT BECAUSE IT WAS BIOLOGICAL WARFARE BY THE DEMOCRATS
Now, I’m a socialist, I do not carry water for the Democrats, and frankly I resent having to defend them. And as somebody who has studied microbiology, I have to ask, “How could Trump *not* have gotten COVID at this point?”  It’s a miracle it took this long. 

He did literally everything wrong that he possibly could have.  He did exactly the opposite of what everybody at the WHO and CDC told him he needed to do.  The real miracle is that it took this long for him to get it.


This isn’t part of any plan by the Democrats, this isn’t part of any plan by Trump.  Sometimes people just get sick, because that’s how Viruses work.  And to the right-wing conspiracy theorists pointing out that soon after Trump was infected, a bunch of other people around him who ALSO REFUSED TO FOLLOW BASIC SAFETY GUIDELINES also got infected?  To those people, this looks like evidence of a conspiracy theory afoot.  To me, I have to wonder if these people understand how infectious diseases work.  You get the virus from people who have the virus.  We told you to wear masks, we told you to social distance, and you refused.  The only person to blame is Trump himself.


I think it’s really important to combat conspiracy theories though, that’s why I’m recording this podcast today.  We need to confront conspiracy theories and magical thinking because if we actually care about the state of the world, we need to have a scientific approach to understanding it, or we are just going to delude ourselves into believing whatever nonsense we want to believe, instead of actually knowing things.

That’s the whole thing with this whole “make America great” slogan, America was never actually great.

America has been an undemocratic, capitalist shithole banana republic for most of the people living here, for most of its existence.  And guess what?  It still is.  It’s actually always been this bad, but the centrists were better at keeping the cosmetic up on the facade.  Liberalism has at long last given us Trump because America is also a narcissistic nation that is incapable of admitting to it’s mistakes.  We can’t admit that we were founded on slavery, that the founding fathers were a bunch of aristocratic slave owners who never wanted the vast majority of us to even have voting rights in bourgeois elections, and the US Government under the control of both capitalist parties has consistently attacked and destroyed left wing movements for worker power.  Anything good about America today is because working class people organized and fought and struggled and formed unions, and organized general strikes, and shut down the economy, and were able to pry temporary wins from the dictatorship of capital that still runs this country.  And we aren’t willing to admit any of that as a nation.  Not even Biden is willing to admit to all of that, because to do so, to really say that Black Lives Matter is to admit that they haven’t for the last 300 years in America.  To say that Medicare For All is a good solution is to admit that the capitalist system is wasteful, inefficient, and kills people.  And Biden is not willing to admit that.  To say that we need a Green New Deal is to admit that Capitalism is incapable of solving any of the problems it has created, least of which the existential threat which may cause the extinction of the entire human species at some point in the next few hundred years.  And Biden won’t admit that.

And because he can’t admit that America was never great, because we as Americans can’t admit that America, for the most part, has been wrong, has hurt people, because like Trump, we have not been able to admit our mistakes, to admit our failures, we have not been able to grow, to learn, to become better people, and we have not been able to grow, learn from our mistakes, or become a better country.

And voting for Biden isn’t going to change any of that.  Really, voting for anybody to be a part of this government, even Bernie Sanders, will have a limited chance of changing it to be anything other than a cudgel in the hands of the capitalist elite.  Though of course I would rather have a Bernie presidency, or a Howie Hawkins presidency, than a Trump Presidency or a Biden presidency.  I don’t want to discourage people from voting, it’s important, but it isn’t going to be enough to defeat Trumpism. 

The Liberals, driven by their support of capitalism at all costs, actually followed the same playbook this election cycle as the Centrist liberals did in the 1920 and 30s in Germany, siding with the capitalist class in fighting against the Socialists and Communists in favor of centrists, while cautiously keeping the fascists at arm’s length, treating them as a parliamentary force that could be defeated through elections.  The American Left lost access to the public sphere of debate in the corporate media with the Liberals kicking the Green Party off the ballot in many states, and working together to defeat Bernie Sanders to prevent him from getting the nomination. 

The main reason that I think that Trump really has COVID, is that before it hit, and more specifically, before it hit him, Trump was all lined up to potentially win the presidency by a slim margin, or failing that, institute fascism through street violence by his fascist supporters like the ProudBoys, the KKK, Identity Europa, and the other fascist groups that saw a surge of activity following Trump’s 2016 election.

Without the pandemic, it might have worked.  Qanon would have pushed their NeoNazi antisemetic conspiracy theories.  When he first got into office, he talked about the “coming storm.”  People familiar with the history of WW2 should have immediately recognized that what he was talking about was the same storm that the Nazis talked about in the Wiemar Republic, for which the “Storm Troopers” of the SS derive their name.  Qanon talks about “the coming storm” where all sorts of celebrities and rich and powerful people will be rounded up and killed. 

It’s really important to recognize that the argument that Qanon is making is the same argument that was made by Hitler made about Jews.  He used an old anti-semetic trope that Jewish people steal christian children and use their blood for Satanic rituals to give themselves magical powers. 

Qanon says the same thing, but says that the elites are primarily stealing children for sex trafficking, but that the sex trafficking ring is actually a front for a secret Satanic cult that steals christian children and uses their blood in rituals to give themselves magical powers. And the people that Qanon keeps pointing to as ring leaders are mostly Jewish.  Hmm.  Must be a coincidence.  Or Qanon is a Nazi recruiting front, just as the German Newspaper “The Storm” was in the 1930s.

The Fascist right-wing thrive on conspiracy theories.  Let’s not muddy the waters with our own made up bullshit.  Let’s be truthful.

Let’s remember the words of Carl Sagan, “if it can be destroyed by the Truth, it deserves to be destroyed.”

If there is anybody that deserves to be destroyed by the Truth, it’s the Liar in Chief.