Everything is fucked. All of us are on house arrest. There is never enough strawberry cream cheese to make it through these trying times. (Seriously, who is buying all the fucking strawberry cream cheese?) And the President of the United States is so fucking slow that despite coronavirus ravaging the globe, it took him seeing a morgue truck in New York to finally take this thing seriously.
And. He’s. Being. Applauded. For. This.
I know something about applauding basic behavior. My son is two. We clap for everything he does. We clap so much that when he does something he claps for himself. The difference here is my son is FUCKING TWO! He’s a toddler! All of his undershirts still snap in the crotch. Unless America has accepted that Trump is on the same level as a child who gets applause for pooping in the pot then I think it’s OK to raise the bar a bit for a man who’s the President of the United States.
On Tuesday during a press briefing, the president struck the tone that someone should have when addressing the nation about a life-threatening illness that has everyone shook. But The Week claims that the change in Trump actually happened Sunday after a meeting with his medical advisers Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx in which he finally agreed that the world is fucked up right now and Trump’s dumb ass idea to open America up on Easter was insane. He extended the social distancing mandate to April 30 after Fauci and Birx showed him a chart that forecasted some 2 million people dying if he didn’t.
“We made it very clear to him that if we pulled back on what we were doing and didn’t extend them, there would be more avoidable suffering and avoidable death,” Fauci told Time magazine. “It was a pretty clear decision on his part.”
“Ultimately, Mr. Trump was convinced by the numbers and reports about refrigerator trucks being used to hold the bodies of people who have died of the virus at Elmhurst Hospital in New York City,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
But it wasn’t just the doctors’ graphs of deaths; in fact, Jonathan Swan reports at Axios that news reports showing coronavirus devastation worked on him.
“Scenes out of New York, including bleak hospital images played on Fox News, struck a nerve” with Trump, and while Fauci and Birx’s “stats left a dramatic impression on Trump,” the “New York scenes on TV had personalized the situation” and “it was a very short meeting.”
During Tuesday’s press briefing, Trump kept mentioning “makeshift morgue trucks at Elmhurst Hospital, in his native Queens, at Tuesday’s briefing,” reports The Week.
And this is months after Trump knew of the coronavirus. This is weeks after hundreds of people died from the devastating disease. Thank God for the morgue trucks and news crews because the president is finally taking this seriously, but applauding him for picking up his toys is embarrassing even if that’s the best he can do.