Thread by @hilzoy

1/ I want to flag one piece of this (no, not the absurdity of putting the author of Dow 3600 in charge of your predictions.)

34 days of pandemic: Inside Trump’s desperate attempts to reopen America washingtonpost.com/politics/34-da…

2/ It's this: "So determined was Trump to extinguish the deadly virus that he repeatedly embraced fantasy cure-alls and tuned out both the reality that the first wave has yet to significantly recede and the possibility of a potentially worse second wave in the fall."

3/ Normally, when you're determined to accomplish something, you figure out what you need to do to make it happen, and then you do those things.

You do not embrace fantasies or deny realities.

4/ Imagine analogies: "So determined was I to make money that I ignored the obvious signs that my investment manager was a crook, including FBI agents carting stuff out of his office. 'That just shows that even the government works with him!', I told myself."

5/ Or: "So determined was I not to get COVID-19 that I convinced myself that nothing as tiny as a virus could harm great big me, and that spending time in enclosed spaces crammed with visibly ill people would only make me stronger."

6/ This is exactly what Trump is doing, according to the article. I flag it because I think that this is as close as he gets to trying to do something.

The idea that he might have to buckle down and do his job in order to "extinguish the deadly virus" does not occur to him.

7/ I think he genuinely has no idea that there are problems that no amount of spin will fix, and no idea that being President involves more than all those fun rallies.

8/ There are days when I really wish that some enterprising journalist would run Piaget tests on Trump to try to find out whether he has mastered object permanence.

Personally, I have my doubts.