Vectors of Pestilence

I went to medical school for exactly — hmmm, let me think — zero days, but even I know you shouldn’t drink bleach.

In fact, I barely scraped through ninth grade biology, but I did pretty well in history, and I do recall the last guy who told his followers to line up and drink poison. So Donald Trump should be excited that posterity is likely to remember him just as vividly.

This particular episode of the new TV miniseries version of Being There as scripted by Michael Haneke is merely the latest Trumpian absurdity that would be comic were it not so tragic. With 55,000 dead (a number that is surely undercounted) the US has now lost almost exactly as many lives to COVID-19 in the last three months as we lost in the whole of American involvement in the Vietnam war, which lasted roughly eleven years (and in which we finished a strong runner-up).

And this crisis is far from over, and that body count far from topped out.

Meanwhile, Trump is breaking records for self-praise and unearned credit-grabbing, as detailed in an astonishingly good piece of reportage by the Times, what it calls: “a display of presidential hubris and self-pity unlike anything historians say they have seen before.”

If there were ever a time tailor made for the 25th Amendment, this would seem to be it.