rashbre central: Live and Let Lie

Saturday 9 May 2020

Live and Let Lie


There's an irony in Trump's choice of Live and Let Die as a campaign song, while he's using the pandemic as campaign material. Now he's talking about dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national response.

Having said that one day, the next he'd changed his mind. He told reporters that he had no idea how “popular” the coronavirus task force was, a curious form of words for a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined and still running at 2000 per day.

But the man who tours an N95 mask factory wearing safety goggles instead of a Covid-19 mask defines himself as out of step.

It all amounts to nothing for the Republicans whose devotion to Trump is so strong that it has not faltered even in the face of the President’s reality-defying response to as he portrays it the 'Chinese virus' pandemic.

The US numbers are still going up, as Wednesday showed 2600, Thursday 2700 deaths. That's more than the World Trade Centre's 2606. Yet Trump's message is “I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent, and to a large extent, as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. Will some people be badly affected? Yes.”

Trump is money motivated, even more than power. He may be clueless but now he is panicking about his re-election and only listening to the voices inside his tiny brain. More a case of Lie and Let die as he hate-tweets his way out of another inconvenient jam.

It's thirty years on from his ghosted memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” in which Trump bragged about the sheer, addictive effectiveness of lying—his host writer snuck it through by calling it “hyperbole”—in service of his goals.

That's where he acknowledged, “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

2 comments:

Nikki - Notes of Life said...

Did you see the clip of him at his desk surrounded by medical people. He thought they were going to back him up, but a nurse said no, actually, they hadn't got anywhere near enough gear. As per usual, he overroad what she said pretty much calling her a liar. His usual kind of crap.

rashbre said...

Yep - Awful!