Donald Trump is bored: He wants to move on from this pandemic just as it hits swing states – Salon

In March, after months of ignoring the looming threat of the novel coronavirus, Donald Trump decided to recast himself in a new role, declaring he was now a "wartime president,"clearly imagining himself in the mold of FDR or, more likely, as Bill Pullman's presidential character in the 1996 film "Independence Day."

This was a total joke from the beginning, as Trump's behavior wasn't hard to predict. As a sociopath andnarcissist, Trump would enjoya stint play-acting as president while doing nothing. Butwhen it began to dawn onhim that waging war is like, hardwork, he would just drift away, letting the "war" effort fail.

Unsurprisingly, that is what exactly happened. As Heather Digby Partonexplainsin her Wednesday column for Salon, what has "become clear in the last few days is that the Trump administration hasmade a decision" to give up any semblance of trying to flatten the curve, stop the spreador do anything meaningful to defeat the coronavirus.

Instead, Parton writes, Trump and his advisers "have apparently decided to let the virus 'wash over the country'as Trumpwanted to do from the beginning."

The ostensible reason for pressuring states to "reopen" and for maybe-kinda-sorta winding downthe federal coronavirus task force which, despite the presence of incompetent Trump flunkies, still had some value thanks to actual medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx is that the coronavirus is behind us and the focus needs to be on restartingthe economy. (At least for now, Trump has apparently backed away from his threat to ditch the task force permanently.)

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Trump made that clear in his press conference Tuesday, tellingreporters,"We can't keep our country closed for the next fiveyears" (which exactly no one was proposing).

When asked about all the people whowill die as part of this "reopening,"Trump implied that Americans will be happy to die for his cause, because they're "warriors."

Trump has clearly talked himself into the beliefthat the economy will come roaring back to life as soon as lockdown restrictionsare lifted, which is utterly ludicrous.Between the certain further spread of the virus itself and the existing damage to the economy, things aren't getting better anytime soon.

The timing of this decision is distinctly odd, because while the curve of new cases is finally going down in blue states that took aggressive measures, like New York and California, the virus is startingto explode across the rest of country which is to say areas that Trump needs to win if he wants to be re-elected (which is clearly the only thing he cares about). This graph from the New York Times gives a sobering glimpse ofhow the confidence and security felt by many denizens of TrumpLandiais about to go up in smoke.

As Greg Sargent laid out inthe Washington Post on Monday, some of the swing states and districts that Trump needs to win in 2020 have seen the sharpest incline of cases. Trump's "reopening" strategy dependsheavily on the assumption that the virus would remainconcentrated in heavily Democratic cities and stateshe was never going to winanyway. So it seems like political suicide to abandon thefight right when the voters he most needs will see their regions hit hard.

It's tempting to imagine that Trump is motivated by some clever political strategy or by any strategy at all in making this move now. Butit's probably just that he's gettingbored withthis whole coronavirus crisis and, now that things are getting really hard, he's ready to abandon it and move on. That's exactly what he did during his entire career in the real estatebusiness and in his marriages abandoning one failed venture after another the second things turned rocky. Now he's doing it to the entire country.

The turning point was almost certainly April 23, the fateful day whenTrump, in one of his endless propaganda dumps disguised as"press briefings,"mused aloud about curing COVID-19 by injecting household disinfectants into the human body, framing this as a brilliant possibility that somehow had never occurred to medical science. Unless you've been in total seclusion as well as lockdown, you probably experienced the explosion of embarrassingcoverage, complete with late night jokes about bleach-drinking and press releases from companies like Lysol advising Americans not to inject their products, because they will kill you.

No matter how desperatelyTrump and his allies tried to spin it, there was no way to pretending that Trump hadn't madewhat may have been the stupidest public utterance of any American president in history or anyone else, really. Which is saying something in a TV landscape full of real housewives, people who agree to marry someone they've never met in personand the first host of "The Apprentice."(Oh, wait.)

Humiliated, Trump announced he was curtailing the daily briefings, whining on Twitter that they weren't "worth the time & effort" even though as he so frequently likes to say he got"record ratings."

Many folks, including me, predicted that this tantrum wouldn't last, because Trump is a terminal narcissist who lives for attention. Indeed, as the New York Times reported on the same day as Lysolgate, the daily briefings which featured Trump talking for hours, spending most of his time in combative exchanges with journalists, whichhe clearly felt he was "winning" were pretty much the only thing Trump was actuallydoing. The rest of his time was largely spent watching TV to hear people talking about him, tweetingand ranting on the phone to whoever would listen about how he wants more flattering coverage.

Sure enough, Trump's media boycott was abandoned as swiftly as it was begun, and he's been giving near-daily press conferences, although he has largely abandoned the pretense and trappings of an official White Housebriefing. It's clear that his humiliation at being exposed as an epicdumbass is still bothering him.He whined, somewhat mysteriously, that female reporterswho asking him questions about his coronavirus response aren't "Donna Reed, I can tell you that."

It's clearthe only value Trump has ever seenin the coronavirus task force was about using it as a pretext to hijack thedaily briefings for a spectacle of self-aggrandizement. In psychological terms, the briefings, formerly a source of gratifying narcissistic supply for Trump, are now associated in his mind with narcissistic injury. Trump doesn't value American lives, only his own ego. Now that the task force no longer serves his ego, he's lost interest.

Trump has apparently decided that he can now simply declare victory over the virus andwill that into reality through sheerstrength of personality. On Sunday, in his typical style that is as ridiculous as it is grandiose, he tweetedout this pseudo-biblical nonsense:

The notion that America "rose,"in the past tense, from the "great and powerful Plague" is silly. With lockdown restrictions ending and cases continuing to rise, it's morelike the plague is just getting started.

But Trump doesn't care. The illusion that he's a wartime leader shepherding a scared nation through this crisis was pretty well shattered when everyone startedmaking fun of him for suggesting that pumping ultraviolet light or household cleaning productsinto the lungs just mightbe a miracle cure. He misses his rallies and longsto get backto what he really enjoys, which is bashing Democrats and racist trolling.

People are dying, hospitals in many parts of the country are about to face what New York City just went through, and unemployment is soaring. But Donald Trump is bored and unhappy. This coronavirus TV show isn't any fun for him anymore, and he wants to move on. So he's abandoning even the pretense that he ever cared about American lives.

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Donald Trump is bored: He wants to move on from this pandemic just as it hits swing states - Salon