Trump to the nation's governors on a conference call yesterday:
"I haven’t heard about testing in weeks. We’ve tested more now than any nation in the world. We’ve got these great tests and we’re coming out with a faster one this week. I haven’t heard about testing being a problem."
To us and 50 state executives, in which way does that "wartime" commander-in-chief's bit of Adolfian Big Lying afflict us? Breathlessly or breathtakingly? I'm never quite sure which to write. At any rate, I am indeed 99 percent certain that liddle Donald was merely lying bigly, since his aptitude for such is truly big-balled.
Montana's Gov. Steve Bullock, however, evidently took Trump at his word — i.e., that the president wasn't really lying; he's just that ignorant — in that he "tried to stress the disparity [his state] faces in trying to mitigate the spread of the virus because of the lack of testing," reports the Times.
Side by side with Trump, Gov. Bullock is Louis Pasteur and the president is pre-surgical Aljernon. This proposition strikes me as so plausible, it cracks by 1 percent my otherwise 100 percent certainty of Trump having lied.
On the third hand, there is yet another way to assess the president's astounding remark. And that is the way in which White House propaganda specialist Hogan Gidley put it: "The governors praised President Trump’s leadership, assistance and quick action to address this national crisis."
Or, as Trump himself later put it in his typically objective, self-detached manner: "I think for the most part, they were saying, 'Thank you for doing a great job.'" Even though, for weeks, he has not "heard about testing being a problem," which, just shy of America's immediate, death-inducing lack of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, is America's biggest problem.
Hence the debate continues: Is Trump actually complex enough to be even two-dimensional? — at once a proficient liar of Hitlerian magnitude and but a house-mouse ignoramus?