Thread by @davidfrum

I made this point w @AriMelber tonight am still brooding on it:

So Trump has confirmed in his own voice that he was not self-deluded about COVID. He knew the danger - and still opted to do nothing and instead belittle the risk in public.

The question that then follows ...

What on earth did Trump expect to happen next?

I get the utility of the "lie your way out of it" approach to scandals and crimes.

But you can't cover up an epidemic!

So *why* was he so passive? Action might have saved him, even the appearance of action. Instead, nothing. Why?

This question I think casts light on Trump's habitual lying.

At some deep level of his psyche, he imagines that words can change reality.

He has no idea eg how to run a business. But if you keep saying your business is "tremendous," bankers lend you money you need not repay.

His hotels and resorts are 2nd-tier at best. But keep insisting they are "classy" - and people who don't know better may be duped to regard the Trump brand as somehow equivalent to Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons.

So when a virus materialized, Trump did the only thing he knew how to do: try to talk his way out of it.

He kept promising Americans the virus "would go away" as he once kept promising creditors that the check was in the mail. Maybe something would happen to save him!

Talk, talk, talk, never stop talking, refuse to be interrupted, overwhelm your creditors/customers/wives with words ... and so long as you kept talking uninterrupted, nothing too very bad could happen. Or so Trump had learned to believe.

Any true plan of action against the virus would have required Trump to cede control and attention to someone else, someone who possessed the expertise and competence Trump lacked. That course was truly radically intolerable to the narcissistic Trump.

So instead he chose the only course of action he had the know-how to execute: try to out-talk the virus.

He talked and talked and talked. He contradicted himself, he lied, he made false promises - but he ballooned himself over the landscape on a great gush of hot air

He felt safe so long as he floated up there, above the people who got sick on his watch, above the dead and dying, above the shuttered businesses, above the lost jobs, above the interrupted educations ... words words words, the only thing he knows how to produce.

He surely could see the air leaking from his balloon of blather. He could feel the basket slowly losing altitude, anticipate the shock of the crash ... and so he kept pumping more words, hoping if he could only stay above the tree-line until voting day, he might yet survive.

It was never a good plan. But any other plan was either intellectually impossible for Trump (do a good job) or psychically impossible (yield power and attention to someone who could do the good job Trump couldn't). So ... he yammered and trusted something would save him.

Maybe the virus would fall only on the blue states. Maybe sugar tablets would cure it. Maybe he could push enough people back to work to revive the economy without killing too many of them. Maybe Putin's vaccine would work. Talk talk talk, never pause.

And so here we are. The trick that more or less worked through so many bankruptcies and relaunches failed to work. Almost 200,000 Americans are dead. He's facing electoral defeat - and probably massive civil liability and criminal exposure post-defeat. Still ...

... all things considered, it was a pretty good run, wasn't it? When it's all over, what will be hard to explain will not be, "What went wrong?" but "How did such a transparent fraud dupe so many people? And how did the fraud continue even as everything crashed into ruin?"

Those are questions for the future. For now, the immediate problem is, how do we save from the wreckage a country where two-fifths of the population prefer to suffer death and disaster rather than admit a mistake?

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