After several months of failing to deal with Covid-19, alternatively dismissing it as a common cold, then blaming China, Trump finally announced a Manhattan Project-style effort to deliver a vaccine so we could all go to the beach without being afraid of dying. Amazingly, he borrowed the project’s name from the Star Trek universe.
Over the past three years, we’ve got used to a whole buffet table’s worth of word salad from Donald Trump – misspelt words, bewitched grammar, capitalisation, and syntax, mysterious or portmanteau word choices, random punctuation, and sentence fragments that go everywhere but to the usual usage conventions of subject, verb, object. We’ve been exposed to wild, over-extravagant self-praise and incessant repetition, as well as a kind of arrogance that has bordered on parody.
And remember, all this is less than six months since Donald Trump had praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the country he runs to the hilt for their effectiveness in dealing with Covid-19. And it is only a couple of months or so since Trump had heralded the two nations’ trade agreement that was supposed to put to bed the raging tariff and trade arguments that had consumed 2019.
In his various White House media events, the president first fell in love with the idea that summer temperatures would naturally vanquish the invisible foe. Then he embraced the old anti-malarial drug, hydroxy-chloroquine, following reports that one French doctor’s study had shown some possible benefits. Then it was on to truly bizarre public musings about kitchen and bathroom disinfectants and ultraviolet lights shoved into the human body somehow.
Presidential media events have recently included attacks on China, miscellaneous threats on all and sundry, and groundless accusations there had been a vast conspiracy, “Obamagate”, that dwarfed anything ever faced by any president since George Washington. This was somehow tied up in General Michael Flynn’s lying to the FBI and the new vice-president just after Flynn had been appointed national security adviser, and even before the Trump administration had actually taken office.
At one time, the first son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the callow youth of an “eminence grise” fixer for every difficult problem faced by the Trump administration, was the go-to guy to lead the country to victory over the vicious foe. Now another wheel has been added to this melange, or perhaps more likely, the dog’s breakfast of overlapping government efforts and committees. On Friday 15 May, at yet another one of those White House Rose Garden media and president taunt-each-other-events, Trump announced the formal launch of the “Warp Speed” project to focus like a laser beam on creating a vaccine against Covid-19. As he said, “We’re looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before.
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