Abdication

David Graham wrote an excellent piece at The Atlantic yesterday (link here) with the title "Trump Has Abdicated in the Face of Disaster." The article focuses on how, with the number of new Covid-19 cases nearing 200,000 a day, Donald Trump has given up the fight and abandoned the field.

To give you some perspective, at the beginning of the month, the daily infection rate broke 100,000 per day, a new high. That has now nearly doubled in a little over two weeks. It's increasing exponentially.

Hospitals in some parts of the country are overwhelmed and patient beds are in corridors, chapels, lobbies, cafeterias, and more. Some hospitals even now have living patients in hospital beds in the morgue.

And Trump is nowhere to be seen on this. He's out of sight, tweeting increasingly bizarre conspiracy tales about the election.

It's obviously all he cares about — himself and his delusion that he won reelection. The fact that the daily death rate has passed 2,000 and is closing on the record once again is of no interest to him.

While Trump may be saying he won, it's obvious in his abandonment of the most important part of his presidency that he knows he's lost.

It also suggests that he's terrified of leaving the White House. If he wanted to demonstrate that he was truly presidential, he wouldn't even talk about the election. He'd be so busy trying to tackle the virus crisis.

But the only reason he wants to hold on to the presidency is because of the legal immunity it offers him. He doesn't care about the presidency and the country; he only cares about the protection if offers him.

By his abdication, he is demonstrating how unfit he always was for the presidency and that his defeat was the only solution to the mess in which we're currently mired.