President* Donald Trump is insane and doesn't care if we die

Donald Trump doesn't care how many Americans die of coronavirus, as long as the numbers don't make him look bad. Several times now, he has said that we need to cut back on testing so that the number of cases goes down. Any sane person knows that the more accurate the numbers are, the better handle we get on what's working and what isn't. But Donald Trump is merely interested in making the numbers go down, by lying about them if necessary.

Now, according to the Washington Post, Trump wants to have hospitals send their case counts and death counts not to the Centers for Disease Control, but to a company called TeleTracking Technologies. Trump has also signaled his desire to have The National Guard(!) "help" the hospitals count and deliver the numbers.

The White House claims that these changes remedy what they characterize as data flow problems, but I think that we know how Trump's mind works: he is embarrassed by the numbers being reported, and he wants them changed.

Among those paying attention, I think there is general agreement that Donald Trump is harming the United States in many ways. The Republicans in the Senate, however, protected him from removal by impeachment. I find myself afraid of the further damage Donald Trump will cause between now and next January, but there are really only two Constitutional remedies, neither of which will work without Republican cooperation.

Getting rid of a president is difficult, by design. Impeachment and the 25th Amendment of the Constitution set a high bar for removal. I would argue that there is ample reason to oust the president in either of these ways, but he has too many protectors in his party. I would love to see some third way to remove the president in the case of this sort of emergency, but we would have to exercise care. If it were easy to remove a president, the Republicans, as they are now, would be removing Democratic presidents the day after inauguration.

The mess we're in

I haven't blogged in a while because there's too much to blog about. Instead of rambling endlessly, one wants to narrow one's topic to keep things manageable. There are too many things happening, some hopeful, most just bad. One imagines that in the future anything could happen.

The problem with all this is coronavirus. Now that Donald Trump has let that genie out of the bottle (and shows no interest in putting it back in), it looks like we're in for a historic calamity that we can barely imagine. There will be reams of history written on this era.

Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem always prepared to implement whatever policy is the most cruel. Open up the economy. Get rid of Obamacare just as the millions of newly unemployed are losing the insurance administered by their former employers. Open the schools, which will become petri dishes for new infections.

The unemployment benefits that are covering the newly unemployed now are running out, and the Republicans are afraid that continuing them at the current level will make people less likely to want to work. Earth to Republicans: the job market has already shrunk so much because of the virus that there are no jobs to go back to. It's far from being a matter of laziness. I firmly believe that people are happiest when they're working and feeling useful. And yes, Republicans, that applies to groups that you think of as those people. And besides, even the people who will have jobs to go back to during the pandemic are rightfully afraid to return to their workplaces.

If unemployment benefits are not renewed, and the moratorium on evictions is also not renewed, families will become homeless and need to shelter (if they're lucky) in the homes of extended family, or (if they're unlucky) in homeless shelters. In either case, overcrowding will cause more illness.

Now, no matter who is in charge on January 20, 2021, we will be in a calamity. There is, perhaps (or perhaps not) a trade-off between a medical emergency and an economic emergency. At least, hypothetically, there was. Trump has shown that the attempt to save the economy by reopening too quickly has made the trade-off disappear. We will have both a medical disaster and an economic crash.

What were the other things that we might have talked about, had Trump not bungled coronavirus so badly?

Well, the other big news of late has been what appears to be a sea change in public opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement. The public has finally seen graphic evidence of the problems blacks have with the police. This could turn into an awakening like the sudden shift in attitudes on gay marriage. In other circumstances, when we're not all worried to death over whether we'll be able to stay well, stay employed, stay in our homes, there might be an opportunity for people to learn the trajectory of our history in relation to blacks that has continued, uninterrupted, since 1619. Will this opportunity for education be swept away by the disaster we're in?

The Republican Party's evolution into a kakistocracy (noun: rule by the worst and the stupidest) has led us to Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Betsy DeVos, et. al. There is evidence now in the polls that maybe the public has detected, to some degree, the problems with conservatism. The party that wants to shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub (and isn't that a pretty image from a party claiming to be pro-life?) is so far gone down this road that they cannot see that a big federal response to coronavirus is the proper solution, the proper role of government.

We might also be talking about proper punishments for the most corrupt administration in American history. But, mainly, we just hope to still be alive come election day.

When we said that Barack Obama had a big job ahead of him clearing up George W. Bush's mess, we did not foresee that a mess could be made in just four years that is so big that a good many of us won't live to see it cleaned up. Whether we will still have a Republic next year is touch and go.

Joe Biden is a brave man. His job will be a thankless one. Because it will be a nearly impossible one.