saturday, april 4 , 2020. the washington post EZ RE a1 9
S
eems like President Trump can get away with
saying and doing just about anything he wants.
The extent to which he has achieved that end is
demonstrated by the credit he is getting for his
handling of the coronavirus crisis. Tr ump, in truth, has
contributed more to the confusion and disruption
plaguing the country’s response to the pandemic than
any other public official in the land. Ye t he was able to
call in to “Fox & Friends” l ast Monday morning and
brag, “I’ve gotten great marks on what we’ve done with
respect to this. I’ve gotten great marks.” He happens to
be on to something. How did it come to this?
Because Trump is accomplishing what he set out to
do when he launched his presidential bid: bring down
the press in the public eye to the point where his word,
not ours, is believed.
Some of us could see it coming.
In February 2017, one month after his inauguration,
I wrote that there was more to Tr ump’s attacks on the
media than just demagogic assaults to manipulate
coverage. There was, I speculated, a more strategic
calculation at play. He regards us as rivals standing
between him and what he wants. He knew as a
candidate, and knows as president, that we are going
to watch and report relentlessly on what he does — or
fails to do.
“His aim,” I warned, “is to denigrate the work of the
media so that our reporting and analyses are summari-
ly dismissed by the public.” And regretfully, that goal is
being achieved.
Half the country approves of his handling of the
crisis, according to RealClearPolitics, and his overall
approval rating has been on the rise.
How else to explain Trump’s improved standing in
the face of irrefutable evidence of his failures in
leadership? When competence, mature judgment and
trustworthiness in the White House are most needed,
Trump is giving the nation untruths, wild exaggera-
tions and irresponsible declarations off the top of his
head. “Have the country opened up and raring to go by
Easter”?
How adrift is he from common sense?
He said at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on
Feb. 10, “Looks like by April... when it gets a little
warmer, [the coronavirus] miraculously goes away.”
As of noon on Friday, the United States had more
than 245,000 confirmed cases and the death toll
exceeded 6,000, more than the number of people who
died in the Sept. 11, 200 1, attacks. The numbers have
risen higher since.
Petty, impulsive, vindictive and completely out of
his depth, Trump is the narcissist who has made this
crisis all about himself.
And yet he’s riding high.
He is pulling it off by successfully disparaging the
one force in the country that can put the spotlight on
his presidential incompetence and hold him account-
able — the media.
His barrage against us has been steady and unre-
lenting: “among the most dishonest human beings on
earth,” “scum,” “the news is fake.” These are not
off-the-cuff invectives.
They are essential weapons in Trump’s arsenal. It’s
called branding.
Trump tipped his hand during a March 2016
campaign rally in Boca Raton, Fla., when he said, “You
have to brand people a certain way when they’re your
opponents.”
That’s what he was doing when he berated NBC’s
Peter Alexander in a rant over a coronavirus question,
calling him “a terrible reporter” and characterizing
Alexander’s question about hospital shortages and
possible fear among Americans as “a very bad signal
that you’re putting out to the American people.”
Trump was doing the same thing when he scolded
and insulted “ PBS NewsHour” c orrespondent Yamiche
Alcindor for asking him perfectly legitimate questions
about charges he had leveled on Sean Hannity’s Fox
News show.
To a well-grounded question in November 2018 by
CNN correspondent Abby Phillip, who, like Alcindor, i s
black, Tr ump responded, “What a stupid question...
but I watch you a lot. You ask a lot of stupid questions.”
There’s a point to his verbal bullying and abuses.
Trump aims to slime the media as unintelligent,
untrustworthy and undeserving of respect. He wants
his supporters to judge reporters as out of line if they
pursue questions that raise the possibility that
someone like him may be capable of moral corrup-
tion.
So, he belittles, and demeans, and searches for
chances to publicly put us in our place. He wants a
media that is as undemanding and agreeable as the
supplicants at Fox News.
Trump, with Republican help, has neutered Con-
gress. Tr y as he might, however, he can’t make us
cower.
Trump didn’t create the coronavirus. But he sure as
hell has contributed to the country’s woes by playing
down the threat and fumbling the federal response —
all the while blaming state and local governments,
local hospitals and the media for the chaos he helped
cause.
Ratings be damned. If anything, now’s the time to
double down on coverage, and tell the public all it
needs to know about this public health and economic
calamity.
The public won’t get the truth from Trump.
[email protected]Colbert i. KingTrump’s attacks
on the media
pay off
BY KATE COHENALBANY, N.Y.T
he first virtual gathering that anyone
in my family thought to organize was
Shabbat. My dad suggested it, I
jumped on the idea, and my big sister
offered to “host” t he “meeting.” The thing is,
we are not a religious family. Although we
used to have “Shabbat dinner” when I was a
kid, only one of us still does, and only
sometimes. But there we were on Friday,
across six Zoom windows from four states:
nine adults, six teenagers, one 4-year-old and
three sets of candles.
Did the global pandemic suddenly make
believers out of us? Now would indeed be the
perfect time to pledge fealty to a capricious,
plague-wielding, Old Te stament god. But I
can’t make myself believe. When I read the
Jesuit priest James Martin’s recent New York
Times speculation, “Where Is God in a Pan-
demic?,” I felt as though I was reading a long
and learned piece on why we hadn’t heard a
peep from Superman.
God? No.
But religion? Maybe a little.
Every day, my calendar app notifies me that
I have no events. Or I have an event, but it
turns out it’s a woodwind rehearsal I forgot to
toss in my calendar’s virtual trash bin. I sigh
and click to delete. The app dutifully double-
checks: Do you really want to cancel “This and
all future events”? I mean, no. But yes.
Time stretches out, unmarked, unshaped
and, therefore, incomprehensible. Gone are
the rehearsals that made Sundays Sunday, the
town board meetings that made Wednesdays
Wednesday. Dates that never change have
changed; events that always happen won’t.
The NBA playoffs, the Eurovision Song Con-
test, college graduations. Wimbledon has
been canceled for the first time since World
War II. D on’t worry: The 2020 Summer
Olympics will still happen — in 2021.
If the only certainties in life are death and
taxes, and Ta x Day has been moved, what does
that leave us with?
Don’t answer that.
I never realized how much these markers
meant to me. How much I love the school
calendar (three different ones for three differ-
ent kids) and the awards show calendar and
(who knew?) even the tennis calendar! How I
love to look forward to things! How I crave
dates that can’t be deleted!
That’s where religion comes in. To me, it
makes perfect sense that Easter was the
moment the president chose for our national
reemergence. “Easter is a very special day for
many reasons,” he said, and I would argue
calendric permanence is one of them. Easter
seems as though it moves around each year,
but actually it never budges. (Officially it’s the
first Sunday after the first full moon after the
vernal equinox.) The president’s promise can
be retracted (thank goodness), but not the
holiday. The parades can be canceled, but not
St. Patrick’s Day.
The same goes for the sabbath. Jews have
been officially resting on the seventh day for
thousands of years; that’s not going to change
just because... we’re resting on all six
previous days, too. Lighting those candles
made Friday Friday, e ven if none of us believed
a supreme being was actually listening, even if
we lifted martini glasses for the prayer over
the wine, even if my father added an extra
blessing for Purell and no one except my big
sister remembered to move on to the bread
part.
We don’t need religion, but, as the crisis
reminds us, we still need certain things that
religion can provide. We need ways to express
gratitude, to face death, to comfort ourselves.
We need community and ritual and dates that
can’t e asily be deleted. I may “hide” t he Jewish
calendar so that it doesn’t show up on my app
or in my life, but I cannot change or cancel it.
It will always be there.
As an atheist, I believe we can get all we
need without God, and I have tried to make
that true for my k ids. They d idn’t g row up with
Shabbat; their holy day is International Pizza
Day. (Officially, it’s the Saturday closest to
Feb. 9 that my p arents can make it.) But it took
15 years of determined indoctrination to etch
that date into the family calendar.
Normally, I reject the ready-made comforts
that religion offers. I don’t like the list of
ingredients, and I prefer to live from scratch.
But these aren’t normal times.
So I said yes when my big sister invited us
over for a virtual Passover Seder. Passover, to
my way of thinking, is a holiday that cele-
brates the deadly plagues wielded by a capri-
cious Old Te stament god who doesn’t exist. It
begins on the 15th of Nisan every year. This
year, I’m really looking forward to it.Kate Cohen is a writer in Albany, NY.God? No.
Religion?
Maybe a little.
drawing boardB Y HORSEY FOR THE SEATTLE TIMESB Y DAVE GRANLUNDB Y SHENEMANB Y SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNEW
e are at war with an invisible enemy, and
it goes without saying that even in an
invisible war, guns must certainly be
essential.
Better imagery failing us, this is a war. (Is “war”
the best metaphor for such a time? To o bad; we
cannot stop by the metaphor store, which was
shuttered the first week of March, and all the other,
better metaphors will have to wait.) Donald Trump
is a wartime president, and he has deemed gun
shops essential to remain open at this time. Hurrah,
hurrah, pack your picnics, m’lads, and we’ll have the
enemy in retreat by Easter or some later date to be
determined!
Quickly, everyone, let us buy 17 firearms and ask
no further questions. Just let that invisible enemy
try to come anywhere near me, and whatever
happened to the loser at the Battle of Austerlitz will
happen to it. It o nly thinks it is invisible; I am armedwith my S econd Amendment rights in one hand and
my total ignorance of medical science in the other.
What could be more necessary than a gun? It is
not just in this war against this invisible enemy that
they are vital. What supply on the home front could
be more essential at t his time?
Consider first: Guns con-
tain so much fiber, I think!
And then, of course, they are
so useful for sanitizing surfac-
es. Fire one repeatedly at a
countertop and it will free it
of virus! There is nothing a
virus fears or understands better than a firearm.
If your sourdough is not starting fast enough, it is
good to have a sourdough starter pistol handy.
It is so much fun watching guns nest and play
along the branches of a tree just outside your
window. Or plant one in a pot and you can enjoy,each day, c oming back to see whether it has sprouted
yet. Maybe it will be an avocado! This will help to
feed your family.
If you have a good old-fashioned 10-shooter to
protect yourself, who needs a mask? Someone who
understands the process by
which a virus is transmitted?
No, I was trying to be rhetori-
cal.
Stock up on guns in case
you run out of toilet paper;
maybe you can frighten your
toilet into sprouting a bidet.
Make i t pitch in to the effort! Do not forget: We a re at
war. We have an invisible enemy to fight, and we
need all the weapons we can muster to bolster the
heroes of this war effort.
Sorry that we are not the kind of society t hat views
caring for others as a valuable and high calling,worthy of being applauded at ballparks, which is
why we now are tangled in this impenetrable
metaphor where doctors are a kind of soldier and
people simply doing ill-compensated service jobs to
feed their families are on the front lines. The
language shop, as I said, is closed. But you can buy a
gun.
I suppose it is just barely possible that you might
be purchasing a gun out of a costly and elaborate
delusion that if your house is bristling with weapon-
ry, this will stave off chaos, somehow, rather than
stoking it. Maybe purchasing a firearm is, in fact, not
essential, and the only thing you can be certain that
having a gun in the house will do is increase the risk
that the people in the house will die from gun
violence.
But do not let such a thought tempt you to falter!
Logic is too costly a risk. This is a war!
Twitter: @petridishesalexandra PetriOf course guns are essential! We are at war with this virus!
Just let that invisible enemy try
to come anywhere near me.