Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread #153
“Testing, testing; is this thing on?”

1/ “The heart of man,” Jeremiah laments, “is desperately wicked; who can understand it?”

2/This thread will attempt a dive into the unconscious of our irrational and conflicted leader. I’m wondering why Trump cannot face or deal with this reality: He cannot prosper, we cannot manage this pandemic,..

3/... and no one’s life can have any security until we develop and deploy a system of testing the population for the presence of the Coronavirus.

4/Trump won’t even delegate the process to people eager to develop a vaccine. He lies about testing, saying he has a beautiful test that anyone can have who wants it.

5/ But meantime he does not order people to make the test happen. Though it would be totally in Trump’s rational self-interest, he cannot do it.

6/ In my family, we would say that he is “having a psychology”. It’s nuts. Meanwhile, without testing, we will probably have 500,000 people be killed by the virus, one of whom could easily be me, and one of whom could easily be you, dear reader.

7/ Logically, it seems to me there are two explanations: (1) he doesn’t want to do it because he is an asset of Russia and Vlad doesn’t want him to do it....

8/... (2) he can’t do it because he is emotionally blocked from doing it. The first is certainly possible, but the second is more likely, so I’m going with that.

9/ Here’s a common nightmare that will help us understand his block. In my dream, I forget that I enrolled in a physics class, so I never attended it....

10/... But now, it’s the end of the semester and I have to go take the final, and I do not know a thing, and I am going to fail, and I will be revealed as a complete jerk.

11/ Had that dream too? Tests are big things. They are massive anxiety producers.

12/ Tests are all about judgment.

13/ Here are some things I and many others have noticed about our Commander in Chief: 1. We are forbidden to inquire into his transcripts, both at Fordham and at The Wharton School. Trump has threatened the schools with massive lawsuits if they release his transcripts...

14/..There’s something about those grades he doesn’t want anyone to see. 2. Trump has some disability that prevents him from reading easily (ADHD, Dyslexia?) He went to pretty good schools and came out singularly uninformed. I get that he could afford to hire other students...

15/.. to write his papers, and that the schools wanted Fred’s money so they were loathe to flunk him out; but in those days at most schools you had to take tests in the classroom, writing in a bluebook.

16/ 3. Here he was – handsome, young, athletic, and rich, famous among his classmates as a stud....

17/..And there were those tests, the arena of failure and frustration. Since he was not allowed to have anything wrong within, since he was discipled by Norman Vincent Peale, how could he admit he was in trouble?

18/ 4. He had been acting out since middle school & got sent off to a military high school in a dingy upstate town where his parents wouldn’t have to deal with him. Discipline at the school was supposed to straighten him out. Getting yelled at doesn’t make a disability go away.

19/He coped with all this by bullying and charming, by focusing on appearance, by splashing around a lot of money and being recklessly naughty.

20/That gave him standing and significance among his classmates, and the approval he could never gain sitting in that awful room and doing worse than all the other students.

21/ Now fast-forward to the last 20 years, to the failures and bankruptcies, the years of glitzy casinos that went belly up, then the financial rescue by Russian oligarchs leading to his subjugation to Vladimir Putin.

22/Now there’s a whole lot of stuff which, if revealed, would bring his whole life crashing down. Not to mention, that few things in life can be more terrifying than crossing Russian Mafiya Dons. So, he is under constant pressure requiring incessant lying to avoid ruin.

23/Trump’s impossible challenge is to keep it all under control. And what had been his earlier source of painful revelation? Those damn tests. The more he has to hide, the more toxic the idea of the test becomes.

24/ You really think this guy is going to get all invested in developing excellent tests? If he were not a malignant narcissist, he might delegate that task on the grounds that it would make him look better and help his re-election.

25/ But malignant narcissists can never delegate, can never acknowledge the existence of others.

26/ Worse, the idea that without tests hundreds of thousands of us will be killed by the virus is meaningless to him, because at the bedrock of malignant narcissism is sadism. Those hundreds of thousands of dead people mean nothing to Trump.

27/ Does all this mean we’re screwed? No, but it means we’re in lots of danger. I think this refusal to create and administer the tests is a dereliction of duty worthy of impeachment, but the GOP is too hopelessly depraved to allow that exercise in Constitutional health.

28/ In 6 months, we can defeat him and force his removal. Many of us may die needlessly. The GOP is a truly cruel monster. If you’re still in it, leave now. Leave now.

29/ Meantime we can prepare a plan for the testing that will enable the next administration to get it done, and then we can begin to emerge from this nightmare.