Floundering

Assuming his most recent Washington Post column is any gauge, I think it’s fair to say that George Will doesn’t much care for President Trump:

Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.

The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump. By commuting Stone’s sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying. Because the pandemic prevents both presidential candidates from bouncing around the continent like popcorn in a skillet, the electorate can concentrate on other things, including Trump’s selection of friends such as Stone and Paul Manafort, dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel.

concluding:

This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.

I’m not as upset as Mr. Will because every presidential administration of recent memory has been a “gangster regime”. It has been a steady decline that has been going on for 30 years at least. As to his final plaint, sadly this isn’t the same nation as the one he recalls. How can it be when Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for NYT features that reject all of the values in which that nation believed?

I’ve complained before about the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic in the past, listing a number of steps that I think President Trump should have and could have done. I think he’s playing a strong hand badly.

Would doing those things have made the difference between the pandemic ending in May and what has actually happened? I doubt it. But they might have helped a little.