The single biggest threat we’re facing right now
In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when Donald Trump repeatedly mocked the way Puerto Ricans pronounce the name of their own territory, by any sane standards anywhere that ought to have been the whole ballgame right there. That ought to have been the effective end of the Donald Trump presidency. The rest should have been just a case of waiting for his term to end or his impeachment trial to begin.
Not that there was anything unusual about the child rapist Trump sneering down from the superior comfort and safety and power of the presidency, mocking a country prostrated by devastation and poverty, a country reeling with the horror of death and tragedy. No, that was just business as usual in the Trump White House of 2017, and three years later we continue to allow ourselves to endure six impossibly asinine, destructive, gaslighting, intolerant, infantile and ignorant things before breakfast every day from this president. It has become a kind of wearying status quo, what Trump apologists refer to as “Trump being Trump.”
But lives were lost in Puerto Rico and it was and remains Trump’s fault. We are not dealing with a man with charming eccentricities, we are dealing with a psychopath, a narcissist, a man with an Idi Amin-sized ego who will lash out and kill people who fail to adequately appease that ego.
America has just passed the 100,000 mark in identified COVID-19 cases. America is riding the steepest curve in the world right now, one that is seeing its number of cases double every three or four days. That means in 12 to 16 days — that is, right around Easter — America will have at least a million coronavirus sufferers.
Meanwhile the child rapist just attacked Washington Governor Jay Inslee and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for not being appreciative enough of him during the coronavirus crisis. “I think they should be appreciative,” Trump said during his daily White House briefing. Then in a staggering example of egomaniacal l’etat c’est moi Trump added, “When they’re not appreciative to me, they are not appreciative to the army corps. They are not appreciative to FEMA. It’s not right. If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”
In other words, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope you’re sitting down for this, Donald Trump just threatened to murder tens of thousands of — Russians? Iraqis? North Koreans? No. — American citizens — because the governors of their state demonstrated substandard zeal when worshipping at the altar of this child rapist, because Jay Inslee and Gretchen Whitmer weren’t nice to him.
This is behavior that is simply beyond the pale of acceptability from anyone in power with a duty of care to their constituents, let alone the president of the United States. It’s conduct so egregious that anyone in any other similar situation would be immediately and ignominiously and summarily terminated for doing the same thing.
Meanwhile the child rapist, in an irresponsible lack of self-awareness and absent prudent social distancing, continues to range his smiling and nodding sycophants behind him at his press conferences. Every broadcaster on every station in America should be loudly, repeatedly and incessantly screaming for his resignation. We are not pawns to be sacrificed in a gambit in service to this child rapist’s ego, we are human beings. Our biggest viral threat right now is Donald Trump and the people who continue to tolerate and even promote this ignorant, self-dealing, narcissistic abortion of a regime. Donald Trump and his anti-science, hate-filled, criminal pirate ship must go. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.