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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — As Florida became a global epicenter of the coronavirus, Gov. Ron DeSantis held one meeting this month with his top public health official, Scott Rivkees, according to the governor's schedule. His health department has sidelined scientists, halting briefings last month with disease specialists and telling the experts there was not sufficient personnel from the state to continue participating.
"I never received information about what happened with my ideas or results," said Thomas Hladish, a University of Florida research scientist whose regular calls with the health department ended June 29. "But I did hear the governor say the models were wrong about everything."
DeSantis (R) this month traveled to Miami to hold a roundtable with South Florida mayors, whose region was struggling as a novel coronavirus hot spot. But the Republican mayor of Hialeah was shut out, weeks after saying the governor "hasn't done much" for a city disproportionately affected by the virus.
As the virus spread out of control in Florida, decision-making became increasingly shaped by politics and divorced from scientific evidence, according to interviews with 64 current and former state and administration officials, health administrators, epidemiologists, political operatives and hospital executives. The crisis in Florida, these observers say, has revealed the shortcomings of a response built on shifting metrics, influenced by a small group of advisers and tethered at every stage to the Trump administration, which has no unified plan for addressing the national health emergency but has pushed for states to reopen.
DeSantis relies primarily on the advice of his wife, Casey, a former television reporter and host, and his chief of staff, Shane Strum, a former hospital executive, according to Republican political operatives, including a former member of his administration.
I don’t mean the failures you may be thinking of, which are legion. I mean that as Trump supporters contemplate the unsettling prospect of future change, they can’t help but realize, even if unconsciously, that Trump hasn’t delivered on the most basic change he promised, which was to arrest and reverse the deep and fundamental social changes so many conservatives find so troubling.
That was the heart of “Make America Great Again”: the idea that we could revert to some point in the past, unwind the clock to when things were great. Keep in mind that for many conservatives, nearly all the social developments of the past few decades have ranged from objectionable to horrific. Kids don’t respect their elders, fewer people are going to church, women demand equality, gay people can get married, everyone’s talking about racism, and when you go down to your local supermarket, you hear people speaking a bunch of different languages.
And guess what: Donald Trump couldn’t do a thing about any of it.
He’s been president for four years, and no reversal of history has taken place. Young people are still driving you nuts, that rap music is everywhere you go, and you aren’t given the respect you think you deserve. This is the most anti-immigrant administration in a century, and yet the country is still full of immigrants.
It turned out that these are deep and fundamental changes, changes any one president can’t control.
Look at the campaign Trump is running, all about how chaos is overtaking the streets. Yes, it’s exactly what Fox News viewers have been warned about every night for years. But whatever you think is happening (even if your view is distorted and exaggerated), it’s happening while Trump is president, not because some permissive Democrat is letting the hooligans run wild. Surely even some of Trump’s supporters are aware of the irony.
In the end, that may be the most frightening thing for them: not that a Democratic president would bring distressing change to America but that the change will come no matter who is president. If America is going to become unrecognizable to conservatives, it won’t be because we pass universal health care or raise the minimum wage. It’ll be because time will continue to move forward.
The question of how Donald Trump ever got elected president has stumped some of the nation’s deeper thinkers. Jennifer Mercieca has a compelling answer in “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”
Spoiler alert: Trump is not, in fact, a genius. He’s a sophisticated con man who used the tools of rhetoric to pick the pockets of the American body politic. He double-talked his way to power. He buried his opponents with an avalanche of gibberish. He convinced more than 60 million Americans that the barnyard odor of his bombast was actually the pungent aroma of pure truth.
How did that happen? This book shows us by dissecting his demagogic language with a particularly precise scalpel. In doing so, it deserves a place alongside George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and Harry G. Frankfurt’s “On Bulls---.” It’s a brilliant dissertation on Trump’s patented brand of balderdash. That makes it one of the most important political books of this perilous summer.
“Political language,” wrote Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” As Trump batters our country with his lies, which pummel us like the pellets of a ceaseless freak hailstorm, the falsehoods fly so fast and thick that we barely have a chance to examine them. How do they work? Why do they work?
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