“Please answer me quite frankly. Are you absolutely convinced it’s plague?”
“You’re stating the problem wrongly. It’s not a question of the term I use; it’s a question of time.”
“Your view, I take it,” the Prefect put in, “is this. Even if it isn’t plague, the prophylactic measures enjoined by law for coping with a state of plague should be put into force immediately?”
“If you insist on my having a ‘view,’ that conveys it accurately enough.”
The doctors confabulated. Richard was their spokesman:
“It comes to this. We are to take the responsibility of acting as though the epidemic were plague.”
This way of putting it met with general approval.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Rieux said, “how you phrase it. My point is that we should not act as if there were no likelihood that half the population would be wiped out; for then it would be.”
—Albert Camus, The Plague (Vintage International) (pp. 50–51). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It matters not whether Trump’s behavior is intentionally malevolent or incidentally malicious; whether he is clinically or colloquially insane; whether his narcissism is unprecedented or typical of autocrats. It is not a question of what terms we use.
The nation’s governors, career bureaucrats (long-serving, long-suffering, overwhelmingly competent), and others have been hard at work, trying to minimize the effects of COVID-19. The way they have stepped up and are doing their jobs in the face of the unnatural disaster occupying the White House—who wasted time with the profligacy he has shown in every aspect of his shameful life—cannot be overpraised. They are all acting as though the person in charge is wholly incapable of doing the right thing. They need not say it out loud.*
Thankfully, recovering Republicans like George Conway and Rick Wilson are saying it out loud. The ever deferential mainstream media at long last are sort of saying it out loud. “It” is this: Trump cares only about himself; Trump lies like the rest of us breathe; Trump is nasty to anyone who does not do his bidding; Trump’s ego is cosmic while his curiosity is micron-thin; Trump’s attention span is measured in milliseconds; Trump lives in the everlasting present available only to those who are super-rich or pseudo-super-rich; Trump’s ignorance is on a par with his unearned certitude; the chronologically 73-year-old Trump possesses deep antiwisdom, the smart-alecky “street smarts” of someone who got it from the movies and who would not last a week on real streets; and so on.
“It” encompasses a lot of fetid stuff. And it has been there from the very beginning. And it will be an eternal mystery how anyone missed it, it was so huge.
__________
*Some of them cannot even say objectively true non-Trump-centric things out loud and stay where they can do some good (such is the petty petulance of the man-boy up top).
Another recovering Republican, Max Boot, utters the really unspeakable—in the headline writer’s summary of his column: “This wouldn’t have happened if Hilary Clinton had won.”
Some journalists are (finally) calling on their colleagues to stop covering Trump’s lie- and attack-filled press briefings live. Don’t hold your breath.
I have seen it suggested that DJT is in effect replacing his Nuremberg rallies with these press briefings. A pale substitute (from his point of view), but probably more deadly (from ours).