Trump's Republic Of Mendacity

Trump is has been spending the 4th of July holiday with his divisive hate politics and doing what he does best: lying. Biden... hides out, hoping Trump keeps destroying himself and that no one pays any attention to him or his record. This may not be a great idea, since Trump will through tens of millions of dollars at him as we get closer to November. But instead of these two clowns, imagine if Bernie were a candidate. U like either of them, he's all about problem solving and policy solutions, sometimes grand-- like eliminating poverty-- and sometimes more mundane-- like making airlines behave so we're not taking our lives into our hands by getting on one. This is the letter he sent to the head of the Department of Transportation on Friday:

Basically he wants the government-- not the greed-driven airline companies (especially not American Airlines, the greediest ofthem all and the least concerned about the health of their customers)-- to require face masks for passengers and crew, to limit the capacity of flights (reasonable social distancing) and more cleaning during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Louis Menand, over at the New Yorker had some fantastic insights into what Señor Trumpanzee has been up to. "Today," he wrote yesterday, "is the two hundred and forty-fourth anniversary of our declaration of independence from Britain, and we find ourselves living in a republic of mendacity. The falsehoods never stop. No occasion is too minor. 'Pres. Obama destroyed the lobster and fishing industry in Maine. Now it’s back, bigger and better than anyone ever thought possible. Enjoy your lobstering and fishing! Make lots of money!' So tweeted the President on June 24th. As the Boston Globe and other news organizations have reported, the tweet is a lobster fib. Not that President Obama needs to get credit for it-- climate change, driving the lobsters north, was probably the reason-- but, in 2016, the last year of the Obama Administration, the Maine lobster catch was the biggest in history, a hundred and thirty-two million pounds. Since then, it has fallen by thirty-two million pounds, largely because of the Trump Administration’s trade war with China, which caused certain American agricultural exports, including lobsters, to be hit with a thirty-five-per-cent tariff. China is not in a trade war with Canada, however, and Canadian lobster harvesters have stepped into the market. Over all, the value of the fishing catch in Maine, all species included, has dropped from seven hundred and thirty-three million dollars in 2016 (also a record) to six hundred and seventy-three million in 2019.

If lobstering is (or may be) “back,” it is because of a recent White House directive to extend funds from the cares Act-- the pandemic bailout-- to the lobster industry, which had previously been left off the list of most-favored businesses. Observers note that a Maine Senate race is under way. The Republican standing for reëlection is Susan Collins. Senator Collins has become the kind of senator the Republicans need. She stages a mini-drama of conscience before every controversial vote, and then ends up voting, most of the time, with her party. The Republicans want to keep her in office. As always, the Administration is directing its attention and taxpayer-funded largesse to whatever pays politically. How else would it operate? It has no other principles to guide it.

Lobster fishing is a niche industry. About fifteen thousand people in Maine make their living harvesting lobsters. And the lobster tweet is a relatively benign lie, more in the braggadocio category. But why insist on lying? Why lie even when the truth-- “We looked strongly into extending the cares Act to Maine’s beautiful lobstermen!”-- does the job perfectly well?

Speculation about this began on January 21, 2017, and it has not abated. One theory that has a certain elegance and simplicity is that Trump is a nitwit. Most of the time, he has no idea what he is talking about, and so he does what he has done all his life: he says whatever makes him look best. The kindest interpretation is that this is just good salesmanship. You always hype the product, and, in this case, the product is him. He is not exaggerating the truth-- he is not even lying, technically-- because he doesn’t know what the truth is. He assumes that the biggest whopper is the safest bet. Someone else can clean up the mess.

And the thing is, there always is someone else. It’s not hard to understand Trump. It is hard to understand the people in his Administration who enable the blather and the misinformation, who spin-cycle it to bleach out the most offensive or dangerous implications, and who parrot it dutifully. For the first two years of Trump’s Presidency, some of these people were known as “the adults in the room.” To an admittedly remote observer, those people looked indistinguishable from opportunists willing to suppress their opinions in the hopes of becoming Presidential puppet masters. They were dreaming. All of them have departed with their reputations scarred.

No one will die because of Trump’s lobster tweet. But the stuff he makes up about the coronavirus is killing people. Those at risk are not limited to the small band who showed up in Tulsa. They are people in nursing homes and veterans’ hospitals; people with diabetes and heart conditions; people on Native American lands; people who will lose their jobs if they do not show up for work in spite of the danger to their health; people who may not think about Donald Trump from one end of the year to the next but who live in states whose governors, for fear of White House vilification, have adopted a policy of pandemic bravado, as though by putting on a big hat you can face down a pathogen.

Now those states are being ripped apart, and that is likely to restart the spread of the virus in states that have successfully flattened their curves. If that happens, the whole spring shutdown, with its economic pain unevenly distributed-- as everything in the United States now is unevenly distributed-- will have been wasted. The United States has a higher coronavirus mortality rate than Brazil. A quarter of the world’s covid-19 deaths have already happened here, in a country that has 4.25 per cent of the world’s population. And we are not nearly finished.

What is appalling is that this was predictable. A man who is incapable of not making things up about the crowd size at his Inauguration is not going to start suddenly caring about the science when he is confronted with a disease that he knows nothing about. He’s going to do what he has always done.

When Trump said, on March 6th, that he did not want sick passengers on a cruise ship brought ashore because it would raise the number of cases in the U.S., making him look bad, it was clear where this was headed. Republican senators knew it; Republican governors knew it; Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar knew it. But they let Trump dominate the Administration’s airtime on the pandemic and, when they finally talked him off the stage, they allowed him to put on a display of petulance that continues to suck up most of the coverage, and to undercut any governor who tried to shoulder a responsibility he has washed his hands of.

The federal government is not supposed to work this way. Its officials are not supposed to punt because the head of state is not up to the job. They are supposed to put aside political interests to attend to the public welfare. It is not as though there has been much leadership on the Democratic side, either. Congress gave the Administration a trillion dollars, with virtually no strings attached, to hand out as it saw fit, and it sent nearly $1.4 billion of it to dead people.

It is to the credit of the press that, even with silly tweets like the lobster fib, it holds Trump to account-- not that this has the slightest effect on him or the sanitation crew that cleans up after him. But the press cannot set guidelines, or distribute face masks, or perform testing, or do contact tracing. The public looks to government, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, to insure its “Safety and Happiness.” We can guess what he would make of the current one.