What Happens When Your President is the Most Dangerous Idiot in the World

I don't think any thinking person would have predicted Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus crisis would be appropriate. For those of us who've never exactly had high expectations of our Idiot-in-Chief, we were, sadly, not surprised.

On Wednesday, February 26th, Trump made his second-ever White House briefing room appearance to discuss the US response to the coronavirus problem. He spent nearly the entire time contradicting the information put forth by his own experts. 

In what could only charitably be called a "briefing," the President repeatedly said there were only 15 people in the United States that had contracted this particular strain of coronavirus (COVID-19). At the time of his press conference and this writing, there were actually 60 confirmed cases. Normally one to exaggerate numbers, it's unknown why Trump thinks the number is so much lower than reality.

He also seemed to think the novel coronavirus was a type of flu (it isn't), that an outbreak in the US isn't inevitable (the CDC says it is), and that a vaccine will be available quickly (it'll be at least 12–18 months).

No one should be surprised by all of this. Ignoring experts in favor of spouting complete nonsense is Trump's superpower. He's done it before with climate change, Syria, Russian election interference, and even toilets of all things (okay, so maybe he didn't have experts advising him on the whole toilet thing). History will show that Trump got a lot more wrong than he got right.

Some things matter more than others, however. His pathetic attempt at downplaying a potential coronavirus outbreak is one of the things that matter more.

In a Tweet where he actually misspelled "coronavirus," Trump blamed the media and Democrats (those villains!) for blowing concerns out of proportion. His concern about the stock market's performance is so obvious we don't even need insider reports about how furious he is about the subject.

Trump seems to think it's a good idea to appoint notoriously anti-science crazy person Mike Pence to lead the charge against COVID-19. Not only does Pence lack the type of medical background one would hope a coronavirus czar would have, but the last time Pence tried to manage an epidemic things didn't go so well.

Apparently, health officials and scientists - i.e., people who actually know what they're doing - have to clear any statements they want to make through Pence before public release. So that's great.

All of the above would be bad enough but now we have reports that there's another whistleblower - this one unrelated to the Ukraine fiasco that really should have cost Trump his job. This time, the whistleblower claims that more than a dozen federal workers were sent to help Americans who had been evacuated from Wuhan, China, and were quarantined for possible exposure to coronavirus.

These federal workers lacked training and personal protective gear when dealing with the quarantined people and were permitted to move freely from and to the military base with the quarantined area. At least one stayed in a local hotel while conducting their work and took a commercial flight home.

When the whistleblower - who is said to be an expert in her field with decades of relevant experience - tried to raise concerns about this, she was reassigned and threatened with termination.

Sound familiar?

It's not outside the realm of possibility that the events the whistleblower is reporting are responsible for the coronavirus case in Solano County, CA, which previously had baffled experts as being of "unknown origin."

The President appears to be both incompetent and dangerous. He either has a lack of understanding of basic scientific knowledge or knowingly contradicts easily verified facts in the hope of bolstering the rich or "owning the libs."

Probably, both of those things are true.

The amount of damage this President has done to our country is mind-boggling. Every day seems to bring new atrocities, so much so that it's easy to become blind to it. This Los Angeles Times article has a good (partial) list of (what should be objectively) awful things Trump has done over the last few years, including denying climate change, alienating foreign friends and cozying up to foreign enemies, appealing to white nationalists, and shrugging off the death of a journalist at the hands of his Saudi buddies.

Yes, he's an idiot. But he's the most dangerous idiot in the world.

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The COVID-19 situation may well fizzle out before reaching catastrophic proportions in the United States. The people who are worried about it may well be wrong, and things may turn out to be as rosy as the President has already decided they are.

I hope that's the way things go down. I hope, despite the bungling of this crisis, it all turns out okay. I hope Trump and Pence don't get any more people killed.

Either way, there's no excuse for the President of the most powerful country in the world to constantly act in such a childish, self-centered, and ignorant way. Trump's "handling" of the coronavirus situation is a microcosm of how he's "handled" almost every major issue since he took office.

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As of this writing, there are 249 days until the Presidential election, and 327 days until Inauguration Day 2021.

Not that anyone's counting.

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Cecil Adkins is a writer and recovering retail manager. He lives in Huntington, WV with his wife, two kids, and so many dogs and cats he doesn't even remember the total number. He's on Twitter @ceciladkins. Click here for updates on his work and a FREE short story set in the ARCHETYPES UNIVERSE (launching 2020!)