The poisoned fruits of a sociopathic president

This is how a sociopathic president governs:

The U.S. had just 245 confirmed cases of coronavirus when President Trump stepped to the mic at CDC headquarters on March 6 to proclaim that "anybody who wants a test gets a test" for coronavirus. Four days later, Vice President Mike Pence promised 4 million coronavirus tests would be available by that week’s end.

Six weeks later, because of test kit supply shortages that doctors and public health experts have been shouting about, the U.S. crossed that 4 million test threshold only yesterday….

[WH aides finally] announced plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up manufacture of swabs, reagents and other test kit supplies and grant governors access to federal labs to run tests.

Though Hanlon's Razor — "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" — is a truth that lives in axiomatic certitude, and unquestionably applies to Trump, in his clinically abnormal case there was more than just malice in play. His incurable sociopathy rendered him psychopathically indifferent to what nurses, doctors, public health experts and state governors had been shouting about for weeks.

Only his reelection to the now ethically vacant White House has occupied his life-long privileged mind. Purely out of self-interested political concerns has he bounced from states-are-own-their-own to my authority-is-total and now back to states-are-on-their-own. He's done such a wretched job of sparing lives by aggressively confronting covid-19, he seems to have settled on the pandemic's final solution: Let governors take the blame.

Because this crisis is at once not at all about him and yet altogether about him. He has habitually dumped responsibility for this awful age of black death on governors, Democrats, "Biden/Obama," the media, hospitals, China, the WHO and General Motors. Meanwhile, as he whined yesterday, past reports about ventilator shortages and current reports about testing-supply shortages — which have taken the lives of thousands — have been written for only one purpose: "To get" him.

Turns out, the solipsistically diseased are rather lucky, in that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy speculates that they might only possess a deficit "in the capacity to attribute minds to others." Trump's mental condition is far more severe. To his mind, he's the only human entity in the entire cosmos who is favored with a firm, beautiful existence. And whatever threatens it is never his doing. Nor would he care if, in indisputable fact, it was.  

Comments

[Anne J]

Trump is nothing without enablers and scapegoats. There isn't a dose of reality strong enough to penetrate his "me me me" bubble.

[Peter G]

I have been experimenting with twitter. Not trying to build a following or anything like that. I have found that dropping pithy tweets, as they must perforce be, into just the right timeline, can get a lot more effect. So last week I dropped a tweet into Andrew Sullivan's timeline. This was a simple observation that Hanlon's Razor had long been a guiding principal of my career as an engineer. But that I had never considered what malice and stupidity might accomplish harnessed together. And before you know it the hearts and retweets were piling up, including one by Andrew himself.

There is a certain amount of art to this Twitter thing. Supporting the views of the Tweeter whose timeline you wish to harness seems helpful.

[Peter G]

I figure he is about a week away from emulating the defense of mafia don, Vincent 'the Chin' Gigante and wandering around the White House grounds in his bathrobe.

[Freesia]

Lord there's a vision. Eww.

[Marc McKenzie]

What makes you think he isn't doing that _now_?