America's salvation: pure crapola

Two days after Trump announced on Twitter that his television bullshit sessions were "not worth the effort," and 10 days after announcing that the nation's coronavirus testing capability was "fully sufficient to begin opening up the country," he revealed in another bullshit session a "blueprint" for the nation's imminent testing capability — in the next month, roughly 8 million tests.

To cite that figure I had to consult the morning news, since Trump's underlying strategy is to drown worried Americans in obfuscation and a flood of essentially insignificant but seemingly impressive numbers. Thus yesterday his sidekick in charge of dazzling befuddlement, Mike Pence, was there to throw around a multitude of Very Impressive Numbers — so many, in fact, it was impossible to discern the precise number of tests to be performed over the next month, or so the administration says.

The point of the president and vice president's thank-God-we-have-Trump blizzard of numbers was less about progress on testing than reopening the economy, which, in Trump's narcissistic mind, serves the nation's most vital interest: his reelection. He hopes he can bamboozle voters with the same sort of empty yet grandiose-seeming pronunciamentos — such as 8 million tests by the end of May — that he so regularly unloaded in 2016.

And empty indeed was yesterday's announcement. "A group of experts convened by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics," reports the Times, "has called for five million tests a day by early June, ramping up to 20 million per day by late July" (my emphasis).

Ah, but that's from a center for ethics, you say — a concern as foreign to Trump as Larry Flynt's interest in stamping out pornography. Hence we turn to the materialistic. Says Noble laureate in economics, Paul Romer: "The federal government should test every American once every two weeks to reestablish national confidence and jump-start the economy."

A bit of a discrepancy, don't ya think? Trump's 8 million tests by the end of May versus Romer's 660 million tests. But not to worry. To really save American lives and safely regenerate the economy, Trump possesses a bottomless bag of bullshit.

Comments

[Peter G]

The economic repercussions are kind of inescapable now regardless of how many tests are performed unless nearly universal daily testing on almost everybody is available. And it won't be any time soon. Economists debate which will be the more significant factors is getting the economy back to functionality at anything resembling pre-covid. There are both demand and supply shocks. But the thing many seem to be ignoring is that most small businesses that consumers might want to visit are quite marginal and can't survive on less than fifty percent of their previous customer base. Some can't survive a ten percent drop over the long term. The term before public confidence returns will be long.