I’ve been in the process of porting to a new computer and am still not done but hopefully things are far enough along to start posting again.
I missed Trump’s latest press conference about the coronavirus. I guess he finally got religion and decided to push the use of wearing masks to help stop the spread of the virus. Or, the more likely scenario is that he and his advisors realized that as his numbers in the polls continue to drop, he needed to take this more seriously and this was his attempt to do that. As John Bolton and Mary Trump pointed out, everything he does is driven by election concerns.
If Trump were serious, he would have had Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx with him and given them the majority of ‘face time.’ (Or he wouldn’t have been photographed at a fund raiser hours later sans mask!) However, Trump can’t stand the thought of anyone else being the center of attention so Mr. ‘I live in a world of alternate facts’ was the primary briefer. If there are more of these briefings to address the coronavirus situations, they will be nothing more than thinly disguised Trump campaign ads. They will become ‘The Trump Show’.
When I thought about that yesterday, it made me think of the movie, The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey. If you remember the movie, Jim Carrey’s character lived almost his entire life in an artificial bubble equipped with thousands of hidden cameras so that people in the ‘real’ world could watch him live his life. Not to be a spoiler, but eventually Jim Carrey’s character figured out something was amiss and tried to figure out how to escape his bubble and get out into the real world.
Trump has lived his entire life in a bubble. His father’s business was already established and doing well when Trump was born. He never really wanted for anything due to the fact that his father worked his butt off to build his successful real estate empire. Donald Trump never had a ‘real’ job but started almost immediately working in his father’s real estate business. Further, when he started to go out on his own, Fred Trump, invested millions of dollars to help prop up Donald’s failed business ventures. Even the banks kept Donald Trump insulated from reality. When he was bleeding money due to his failed casino investments in Atlantic City, the banks put him on a $450,000/MONTH allowance. Reality??
Now that he is in the White House, he is surrounded by enablers, many of whose sole qualification for their jobs is ‘loyalty’ to Trump. Almost everyone who has found a spine and has stood up to Trump, questioned his judgement, or spoken truth to power, had found themselves booted out on the street. According to one recent article I read, the current count of people who have resigned, been fired or been reassigned in this administration is 415!! Trump came into the White House living in a bubble and he has done everything in his power while in that office to strengthen his bubble.
Once Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show figured out something was wrong, he did everything he could to break out of his bubble. Trump, on the other hand, enjoys living in his bubble. He loves being the center of attention with millions of people watching him on TV. Remember, he’s a TV reality star. He loves it!
Jim Carrey’s character was worried primarily about himself and his decisions didn’t really have any impact on people living in the real world. The danger we are faced with now is that we have Donald Trump, reality TV star, living in ‘Trump World’ who is making decisions that affect virtually everyone in the real world but he is insulated from the consequences of those decisions.
Trump lives in a COVID-19 bubble – he and everyone around him are tested frequently. That doesn’t happen for the rest of us. Trump is wealthy so if the economy tanks, he can ride it out. That could be problematic for a lot of people. Even if he causes a war, he can go hide in his bunker. Most of us don’t have such a luxury. The fact is he lives in a bubble and has no idea what life in the real world is like. And yet we all have to live with his decisions – he doesn’t.
The Trump Show – we can only hope that it gets cancelled for next season!
Another good article. People who voted for him have said “He will become presidential when he gets in office”. It is pretty evident that they didn’t have the skill of hiring anyone because they did not take his history of bankruptcies seriously.