Our Quote of the Day comes from New York Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan:
“Trump is incapable of admitting error, numb to any form of empathy, narcissistic even in a communal crisis, and immune to any kind of realism. He simply cannot tell anyone bad news. And he cannot keep a story straight, which is essential for public health. His only means of communication is deceptive salesmanship. He defunded the federal body designed to tackle such emergencies, and his Cabinet is packed with incompetence, corruption, and fealty. He cannot summon trust among at least half the country, and he has willfully destroyed confidence in the public institutions we desperately need to get through this.
In this, he is a typical man-at-the-bar pontificator, or shock-jock tweeter, whose strange theories are matched only by his own refusal to be tested for the virus, even though we now know he has been exposed. He is in charge of public health but can still blithely say something completely untrue… Rather than concede a failure, Trump will always lie. He is utterly unfit to be president, and always has been. We had a chance to remove him from office before a catastrophe struck, but the Senate kept him in power. This is their responsibility too.
…we have to grapple with the fact that we are on our own. Trump is singularly incapable of addressing this credibly or effectively, with anything like the right mix of realism and hope the crisis demands.”
And:
“He is immune to data, resistant to any facts that might suggest his own administration’s failure, and his prime-time address was deeply unsettling and off-kilter. We have been so, so lucky to have avoided a major crisis for the last three years, but our luck has now run out. We can rarely halt a plague, but we can manage one with the least human collateral damage. It seems to me that we may be headed, instead, for another 1918, mitigated only by antibiotics to deal with the bacterial infections that a century ago piggybacked on viral infections and multiplied the victims.
… At some point, reality was bound to step in, of course, and it’s been quite amazing how long we have been able to postpone it. But this is now as real as it gets. And it is just the beginning.”
Go to the link to read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.