With 23,000 Americans dead and millions without a paycheck, President Donald Trump dimmed the lights in the White House briefing room, fired up a misleading propaganda video and boiled over.
In
one of the most unchained presidential tantrums ever captured on
television, Trump's Monday display flouted every notion of calm
leadership by the commander in chief in a crisis.
He
claimed powers never envisioned by the Constitution and insisted his
"authority is total" to order states and cities to get moving again to
break out of the frozen economy. His warning came as two blocs of
Eastern and Western hot-spot states banded together in an implied
challenge to his vow to get people back to work soon, setting off a
brewing confrontation over the power of the federal government.
During the news conference, Trump moaned that the press was not giving him credit because "everything we did was right" in the coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately it has come to this: we must separate between what the White House says and what it does and judge them separately. Trump rages about reopening the economy quickly but then reluctantly listens to his medical advisers and extends the shutdown.
ReplyDeleteThe question really is: when will Dr Fauci, now a celebrity and therefore a rival for public attention, get fired?
So let me get this straight: Global pandemics befall us roughly once a century, and when one all of a sudden comes upon us, your suggested solution to the crisis is to fire the person who has served for the last 36 years in the role responsible for responding to such crises? (And presumably your reason is that he's apparently irritated the country's most eminently irritable citizen?)
ReplyDeleteMaybe this would be a good mussar opportunity for you to exercise the ol' "Step back..."-test -- a measure of whether you're able impartially to weigh your words on their own merits lekhora.