Last Friday, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, Donald Trump blasted away about the Grand Princess, the cruise ship that was currently circling a geographical point off the coast of San Francisco. Twenty-one of forty-six covid-19 tests had come back positive, and Trump was seriously reluctant to let the cruise ship dock in America. (It has since docked in Oakland.)
It was all about the numbers.
Taking these people off the ship and putting them in quarantine for two weeks would necessarily inflate the number of cases in the US, and Trump was against it.
He didn't like the way it looked.
Why should we have to take the PR hit? It wasn't our fault those people were at risk. We didn't make them sick. Or even potentially sick. (Thousands of those folks, passengers and crew, have not even been tested.)
The president was clearly afraid that letting them into the country, even directly into quarantine, would make the stock market spin further out of control. In the worst case, something like this might catapult the country into a recession.
And that would almost certainly hurt his reelection chances.
Because he's running, largely, on a great economy. And zillions of dollars of paper losses could prove fatal to his fantasy of being a two-term president.
In the meantime, Trump blames the Dems and the Fake News Media for blowing the coronavirus pandemic out of proportion. They're the ones who spooked the market, see? Perhaps they are also the folks who made Saudi Arabia cut oil prices, further driving stocks down.
At the CDC, our president made the point that anyone who wanted a covid-19 test could get one, a very shaky statement that Mike Pence will be striving mightily to convert into truth over the next week or so.
Bizarrely, Trump pronounced the virus test "perfect", just like the "letter" and the "transcript" (a reference, one imagines, to his impeachment-triggering Ukraine call). Really? Did the man think he was at a campaign rally? (To be fair, he was wearing a red Keep America Great cap.)
One of the men with Trump smiled with apparent embarrassment. Another guy just slowly turned away from the president, as if hoping to distance himself from that hyper-political idiot.
A day or so later, down in Florida, the president reached out to shake hands with adoring citizens, grabbing up in his sweaty meathooks whatever micro-fauna the first guy hosted on his flesh and delivering it to all the others down the line.
I want to wish everybody the best of luck...
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