The Chris Moeller Archives

A great super genius, and other things we've learned

1. We’ve learned that there is no bottom to the level of brazen grifting by the president. In the middle of a global pandemic, the Trump brand pushes an untested drug called hydroxychloroquine, and then, surprise of surprises, the New York Times uncovers that Trump family trusts hold a financial interest in the company that produces it. Is there more? We don’t know because he won’t release a copy of his tax returns. We already saw the targeted bailout effort for his hotels and FEMA spending millions of our dollars to protect them. Then there’s the politicized system of reward and punish for states that would or would not support him with their electoral college votes. The shovel found a new bottom, but there will come still another.

The drug he’s recklessly touting comes with the possible side effects of blindness and heart attack, and there’s no evidence that it helps COVID-19 patients. Antimalarial drugs can cause what doctors call cardiac toxicity. At first, Trump called the drug’s potential benefits a “rumor,” then, during the same daily press carnival, he switched his phrasing, alluding to an alleged “study.” In making his case, he falsely claimed that nobody with lupus has been infected with the virus. Trump’s own adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has urged caution, but Trump even talked over the doctor’s rational skepticism at the daily briefing-- to the reporter, “You don’t have to ask the question.” Trump can play his normal game here, which is to choose a side, take credit if he turns out to be correct, and deny he ever said anything of the kind if he’s wrong. He has contacted the prime minister of India, where his little “gift from heaven” is manufactured, to add more to the 29 million doses he says the government will distribute. Cha-ching!

2. The president’s virulent vanity and abysmal mental and emotional health has the ability to teach laypersons a thing or two about abnormal psychology. He’s capable of plastering over none of his limitations. He makes decisions about any given subject based on how it makes him feel about himself. He dismantled the global pandemic response system because it was begun by President Obama, who once teased him at the dais of a black-tie dinner. When he thought the threat of the pandemic was being overblown, he denied it as a “hoax”-- and yes, he certainly did. Through flattery and fear, his advisers forced their way onto the bloody battlefield of his epic internal struggle, and now that he understands the predicament better, he can see himself in the role of an important president.

He berates reporters whose questions reinforce his feelings of inadequacy and his drowning fears for the office he holds, but then he clears much of the room at his briefings and misses the team because he needs that performance. Paranoid people need enemies as friends, which is why ABC News reporter Jon Karl says that Trump praises him to his friends before blasting him in front of the cameras. The virus is depriving him of his only respite from his paralysis-- his “Hitler Youth”-inspired campaign rallies. He was mentally incapable of reading the actual threat level when an intelligence report warned him about this crisis on January 24th.The story he was being told didn’t fit his delusional belief system, so like other bad news, it was “fake news.”

He can only default to himself. That is the malignant narcissist. The virus is a reality he can’t conquer with his comedy roast-style verbal barrages. He went from dismissing the threat as a “hoax” to claiming-- and possibly believing-- that he was the first person to use the term “pandemic” to describe it. Of course, he also believes he was the first person to discover Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. “Did you now this?” When he discovers a tidbit like this, in his mind, he’s the first to discover it. He’s lying to himself before he lies to us. If that makes you feel better about being lied to incessantly.

When he visited the Center for Disease Control several weeks ago, he was astonished by how much he was capable of learning. “You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Maybe. But we’d miss his magical powers at our disposal-- to have the virus “totally under control” because it’s only “one person coming in from China,” to resurrect the country just in time for Easter Sunday services, to instantly erase the ventilator shortage, to deliver the miracle cure. We’d be left with only the guidance of medical experts.

3. The leadership of our military is a shitshow. The Captain Brett Crozier matter affirms it. The commander of a naval aircraft carrier was fired for supposedly going outside the chain of command to demand help for himself and his fellow seamen after a massive outbreak of COVID-19 on their ship in the Pacific. Crozier left the boat to a stirring round of applause and support from his colleagues (caught on viral video), as the sailors chanted “Captain/Crozier.” The numbskull Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, called Crozier “naïve” and “stupid” to the same crew over a loudspeaker, and now Modly is resigning from his position under pressure. At least 173 crew members have tested positive for the virus.

What year is this? What is this chain of command? It seems like a toxic work environment to me, the still-surviving “command and control” model. Recruiting and retention suck in our armed forces, by their own reports. Enlistees get treated like garbage under some strange definition of “character building.” The industry has proven to protect a staggeringly-large number of sexual predators. Is there any call for individual talent or skill specialization? Accommodating natural human idiosyncrasy? Their commander-in-chief is impulsive, thin-skinned, and resents expertise. We’re not a serious nation and our military reflects that.

4. This country is completely at the mercy of immigrant labor. While the president continues to promote his wall-- the one porous enough to allow 40,000 people to step off of airplanes direct from China since he implemented his travel ban on China, migrants are providing the vital labor at hospitals and farmlands and doing it as the most vulnerable people we have. Possibly 60 to 75 percent of the 400,000-some agricultural workers in California are undocumented migrants. They continue to work side-by-side as most of us stay home. We think we have enough food in this country. For now we do.

Seventeen percent of the American health-care workforce was not born in the United States, 1 in 5 pharmacists and 1 in 3 physicians. At least 27,000 health care workers came here as undocumented children. Their status is currently in the hands of the Supreme Court. J-1 visa restrictions keep these health care workers dependent on their employer to stay in the country.

According to a profile at the Intercept, a physician named Shantanu Singh in Huntington, West Virginia, is given a hospital schedule with 15 days off in a row. Does he go to New York City and volunteer during those days at hospitals? He can’t. He was born in India, and it’s illegal for him to travel to another area and work even as a volunteer. He has an “exchange visitor,” J-1 visa-- one employer. Green cards are allotted by country and three-quarters of skilled workers waiting for green cards are from India. That’s 700,000 people. According to a policy brief, 200,000 of them will likely die of old age before getting one. Meanwhile, American-born doctors now of old age are being asked out of retirement to help combat the virus, some of them not respiratory disease specialists at all, but urologists and orthopedic surgeons-- different specialists. (A former Cardinals baseball player named Mark Hamilton is getting rushed to graduation by a couple months at Hofstra’s medical school in New York.) What’s worse is that family members of these immigrants that contract the virus can be deported back.

5. Remember back in February when Iowa was a national laughingstock for not being able to conduct an election? See Wisconsin.

posted by CM @ 5:58 PM