On a day when three former presidents stood on a stage in Atlanta to say goodbye to one of history’s most heroic soldiers in the eternal fight for equality, the current commander-in-chief used his principal weapon—Twitter—to whine and raise the absurd possibility of postponing November’s election like he was calling a rain-delay for democracy.
Trump’s dreams of wearing that title—commander-in-chief—are both ludicrous and dangerous. Every hour of every day he is a walking, talking, tweeting threat to the national and global security of the United States.
But there is an evidence-based way to measure his leadership skill, his ability as “a wartime president” taking on the coronavirus. Let’s look at the casualty numbers as of Friday with this Patton-pretender in the Oval Office:
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Americans infected by the virus: 4,635,886
Americans dead from the virus: 155,330
The disease is just one front in a two-front war. The other is the war against desperation, the hourly battle of millions of families to stay afloat, pay rent, a mortgage, buy enough food, maintain a piece of pride and dignity while they collect unemployment and try to hide their fear from their children. Let’s check that battle record:
Americans filing unemployment claims: 36 million
Americans collecting benefits: 25 million
Unemployment rate: 11.1 percent
That’s just a partial picture of the casualties the pretender-in-chief has left on the battlefield while he sulks in a parody of self-pity. The only thing he has in common with his idols like Patton and MacArthur is that both of those men were also aptly described by critics as “media whores.”
Actually, General Patton managed to predict a part of the problem caused by the ill-equipped Trump when the general said, “A loyal staff is more important than a brilliant one.” Sound familiar?
Look, George S. Patton was a brilliant military tactician, a brave man who was wounded in combat and who served his country all his life. Perhaps the biggest difference among many between him and the pretender-in-chief is that Patton felt loss when his troops fell on the field of battle, a place Trump has never himself experienced.
It is hard to find a time, a place or an occasion where Trump has spoken with any real awareness about those who lost their lives to a virus he ignored and lied about for weeks while it attacked America.
He behaves as if millions of Americans, jobless with dwindling hope for a future they now measure by a clock instead of a calendar, are invisible to him. And they are because Trump is a stranger to loss, who’s never had any emotional connection to an element of life that connects all of us to its reality and inevitability.
Loss, of course, has a ripple effect. The impact of the disease Trump ignored and the economy he has botched has hit whole families. The survivors—wives, husbands, sons, daughters and friends—carry a cargo of grief forever. He’s left a nation filled with fear, anxiety and an absence of paychecks.
Yet the pretender-in-chief does not grasp this because he is a badly damaged human being. And now, in the twilight of this accidental and tragic moment in our history, he reveals more and more each and every day who he really is and always has been.
A fraud. A race-baiter. A loudmouth. A self-absorbed and self-deluded mini-demagogue who uses the tools of division and deception to puff himself up in front of the mirror. And, perhaps more than anything, a coward who is afraid of eye-to-eye confrontation, a fraud who rants and pouts and pretends to be a leader as the noise of the rotor-blades of Marine One drown out his words while the lifeline of unemployment checks vanish as he golfs.
We are indeed a nation at war. Fighting a disease, a pandemic. Fighting to rescue a failing, falling economy. Fighting for the survival of the American worker and American families. Fighting without a president in our corner.
So three former presidents stood and embraced the memory and life of John Lewis, a career warrior against injustice, a man of courage and deep commitment in a daily battle where the incumbent president has been AWOL for life. It was almost as if there was an empty chair on the stage in Atlanta, placed there for an empty man who has failed to join any fight he didn’t try to fix.
