According to Trump, before he was elected, the United States military, which was fighting wars in two countries, confronting foreign navies on the high seas, launching drone attacks willy-nilly, and had soldiers stationed in more than 100 outposts around the world, had no ammunition. In the Rose Garden on March 30, Trump said, "I'll never forget the day when a general came and said, 'Sir' — my first week in office — 'we have no ammunition.'"
This article first appeared in Salon.
On Oct. 9 of last year, he told the same story: "When I took over our military, we didn't have ammunition. I was told by a top general — maybe the top of them all — 'Sir, I'm sorry. Sir, we don't have ammunition.' I said, 'I'll never let another president have that happen to him or her.' We didn't have ammunition."
But now that Trump is in charge, according to him, "We have so much ammunition. You wouldn't believe it, how much ammunition we have."
Before Trump, we had no supplies of any kind: "The shelves were bare," he has told us over and over at his coronavirus briefings. The shelves he's referring to are those of the national stockpile of emergency medical equipment, the same shelves we've seen in photographs of a warehouse stacked with pallets filled with medical equipment, all of which has been there for years. But according to Trump, before he came along "the shelves were empty."
Fuhgettaboutit it when it comes to testing for the coronavirus. "We took over a dead, barren system," Trump told "Fox & Friends" on March 30. "We inherited a broken test." The "broken" test was created in February of this year by Trump's Centers for Disease Control.
At his briefing on April 18, Trump said, "I inherited broken junk. Just as they did with ventilators where we had virtually none, and the hospitals were empty."
But not to worry, he reassured us at his briefing on Wednesday, when it comes to testing now, "We're doing it at a level that's never been done before. We've got ventilators like you've never seen before."
There is so much about Trump like we've never seen before.
We have never seen hospitals so crowded that patients in their beds are lined up in hallways outside emergency rooms and intensive care units because those rooms are full. We have never seen refrigerated trucks lined up behind hospitals to carry away bodies from overloaded morgues. We have never seen doctors standing mute in the White House while a president of the United States stood before television cameras and advocated bringing ultraviolet light "inside the body," and injecting patients with disinfectants like isopropyl alcohol and bleach, medical "experiments" that were carried out on Jews by Nazi doctors in places like Dachau and Buchenwald.
Before Trump, we have never seen 26.5 million people apply for unemployment benefits in just five weeks. Before Trump, we have never seen 50,000 Americans perish from a virus for which the United States government was singularly unprepared.
Before Trump, we have never seen a president who wakes up every day at 5 a.m. and obsessively watches television and sends out dozens of tweets all morning and waits until noon to descend from his living quarters to go to work in the West Wing. We have never seen a president who told more than 16,000 lies in his first three years in office, an average of nearly 15 a day.
Before Trump, we have never seen a president change the color of his aerosol-sprayed hair three times in three days, from yellow to gray and back to yellow again.
Before Trump, we have never seen an election when people may have to risk becoming infected with the coronavirus to go to the polls, the way voters did in Wisconsin two weeks ago.
Before Trump, Republicans suppressed Democratic votes with ID requirements and closed polls and registration purges. Before Trump, we have never seen tens of thousands prevented from voting because they're dead and buried in the ground.
Has Trump decided to use the coronavirus to win in November?
It sure looks that way. The tip-off came with Trump's wild swing between Wednesday and Thursday over opening businesses in Georgia. On Wednesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was a genius for allowing businesses like massage parlors and nail salons to open on Friday, with restaurants and bars opening on Monday. But less than 24 hours later, Trump had changed his mind.
"I wasn't happy with Brian Kemp. I wasn't at all happy," Trump announced from the podium at the Thursday briefing. What had happened overnight to sour Trump on "liberating" Georgia? "Trump's sudden shift came only after top health advisers reviewed the plan more closely and persuaded the president that Kemp was risking further spread of the virus by moving too quickly," the Associated Press reported on Friday.
That same morning, the New York Times published a front page story with another clue right there in the title: "No Rallies and No Golf, Just the TV to Rankle Him: Feeling Alone, President stews Over Image." Buried in the story was the news that among the few calls a frustrated Trump agrees to take as he molders away in the White House are from his campaign manager, Brad Parscale. After Trump has heard the bad news about the coronavirus from his medical experts at his daily press briefing, what do Trump and Parscale discuss? "The latest polling data," the Times reports.
Bingo. At six o'clock he's hearing that the body count has hit 50,000. At nine, he's hearing how far he is behind Biden in the key swing states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio. If he's running behind now, with 50,000 dead, what's it going to look like in October or November when the number tops 100,000?
Trump is balancing the grim news from his medical experts against the equally grim news from his campaign manager. When the choice is between dead people or his reelection, it's an easy call. He is going to let it rip. His poll numbers are already so bad, he doesn't have anything to lose. What's another 50,000 to 100,000 dead compared to four more years of profiteering from the White House?
But the key to Trump's plan is who dies. Watch the way he plays the game as the rest of the states make plans to reopen. He's seen the facts and figures that social distancing works. He knows opening the economy will cost lives. He's going to be very, very careful with states he expects to carry, but narrowly, like Georgia. The states that are a lock for Trump, or the states he doesn't stand a chance in? Let them rip. Get the dying out of the way now. Maybe by the fall the coronavirus infection numbers will go down, maybe not.
The number of those killed won't go down, but Trump doesn't give a shit. He's not the president of the United States. He's the president of the Confederate States of MAGA. All he wants to do is win. If they're not Trump's voters, let 'em die
