This week's Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers' column.
Michael Commane
When I heard of a cocooner who stays up until 3am and rises at midday, I quipped, maybe they are his regular hours.
For most of us, our daily routine has dramatically changed. In the time of Covid-19 I’m going to bed sometime after midnight and rising after 9am. Pre-Covid-19 I rose at 6.15am and was in bed for 10.15pm.
I find myself watching the White House press briefing, which is usually aired after 11pm Irish time.
I’m familiar with the main players, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, then there are Jerome Adams, Robert Redfield, Alex Azar and Steven Mnuchin.
The central figure is the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.
My adventure has moved from entertainment to horror. I have heard Donald Trump say extraordinary things. I’ve heard him behave in the sleaziest of fashions. I’ve heard him being rude.
Experts have been talking about flattening the curve. They have been using mathematical modelling. On one evening when either Dr Fauci or Dr Birx was talking about mathematically modelling, some moments later Donald Trump said he knew nothing about those sort of models but he did know other models. Imagine the crassness, the sleaze of that, as he was speaking to a nation that had been laid low by this deadly virus.
Remember, this is the President of the United States of America.
He has some refrains or responses that he seems to use most evenings.
One of his favourite ones is to tell the assembled journalists that when he became president the shelves were empty and that they had no ammunition. On one occasion he said that they now had so much ammunition ‘they did not know what to do with it’.
If a journalist asks the president a question he does not like, he will turn on the journalist, and jeeringly ask him, who his employer is.
He will then launch into a frenzy about fake news and that journalists are ‘a disgrace’. I have heard him tell a journalist that he did not have the sense to know what was going on. He told a CNN journalist that his network was fake news and that, he the journalist, did not have the brains he was born with.
He is particularly nasty and rude to women journalists. He patronisingly told a CBS journalist ‘to relax and keep your voice down’. When her colleague, Paula Reid asked him what he had done during February to stem the pandemic, he shouted back, that he had done loads and then resorted to insulting her and calling her fake.
He becomes energised when he is insulting people and calling them derogatory names. At one briefing he said: ‘If Sleepy Joe becomes president you would no longer own the country.’ He then went on to list off the countries, including Japan, Iran, North Korea, who would be in charge in Washington.
It’s likely he will be reelected in November. Last week, on a far-right radio station, a caller was unbelievably comparing Trump to Churchill.
However outlandish he is, he has an extraordinary ability to give credence to the daftest of ideas. He can tempt you to think that there might be something in what he is saying. He is able to sow questioning seeds inside one’s head.
Remember, he was the author of the birther movement that questioned the citizenship of President Obama.
A friend colleague of mine, who met him, assures me that he has something charismatic about him.
Obviously the man has something.
1 comment:
It was the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression which followed it which gave rise to the basic economic environment which allowed for the rise of Hitler in Germany.
Marx famously said that history repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The more I see Trump, the clearer the farce becomes. But this is a farce which will lead to untold suffering and death.
Yet, unlike Marx, I do not believe in inevitable currents in history. Even as societies (and individual members of the same), we have agency, must take responsibility. I hope that the USA will accept this responsibility in November and vote Trump out.
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