There are going to be multiple books written on the Trump response to the pandemic

He’s going to be roasted alive. It’ll be interesting to see comparisons between two presidents who were faced with catastrophic crises during their administrations: Hoover and the 1929 stock market crash, and Trump and the coronavirus pandemic. Trump is going to come off as far worse.

You can get an advance peek at how the world is going to see Trump in a long summary by the Washington Post, The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter. It’s grim. You won’t enjoy it.

A few excerpts:

Olivia Troye, a former Pence adviser and task force aide who resigned in the summer and campaigned against Trump’s reelection, said the nation’s trauma is a result of the president’s mismanagement of the crisis early on, and is being prolonged by his disinterest in it now.

“I would love to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not,” Troye said. “This is in keeping with everything he has been.” She added: “People are still dying every day. There’s thousands of cases every day and yet he won’t do the right thing. . . . To see a sitting president directly refuse to help during a crisis is just flabbergasting to me.”

Paul A. Offit, who is director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory council, said of Trump: “He’s a salesman, but this is something he can’t sell. So he just gave up. He gave up on trying to sell people something that was unsellable.”

Now he’s got a vaccine to sell, though, so he’s trying hard to take credit for it. Trump is not a scientist, but he is a popular politician, and there were things he could have done with his limited skill set, but didn’t.

Skepticism of masks became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. On April 3, when the CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks, Trump announced that he would not do so because he could not envision himself sitting behind the Resolute Desk with his face covered as he greeted visiting dignitaries. The president stressed that mask-wearing was “voluntary,” effectively permitting his legions of followers to disregard the CDC’s recommendation.

In the months that followed, Trump was only seen wearing a mask on rare occasions, instead following the advice of Stephen Miller, Johnny McEntee, Derek Lyons and other trusted aides to think of masks as a cultural wedge issue.

Pence covered his face with somewhat more regularity than the president, but after forgoing a mask during an April 28 visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he drew a public rebuke from the hospital’s leaders. Short then yelled at a hospital official over it, a person with knowledge of the visit said.

“What the Trump administration has managed to do is they accomplished — remarkably — a very high-tech solution, which is developing a vaccine, but they completely failed at the low-tech solution, which is masking and social distancing, and they put people at risk,” Offit said.

Just imagine if the president had told his 70 million MAGA cult followers to wear a mask, and had set an example by wearing one. It would have cost next to nothing, and was the simplest, cheapest way to slow the spread of the disease…but no. He didn’t like how he would look wearing one, and once he made a decision, his stubborn slow brain wouldn’t let him change. Neither would his ego.

In the early weeks, Pence was the frontman at daily coronavirus news conferences. He provided top-line updates, including case and death counts, before turning it over to Fauci, Birx and other health professionals. Short advised the vice president against detailing such dire statistics, but Pence insisted, believing he was obligated to share such facts with the public, according to another official with knowledge of these discussions.

Over time, however, Trump decided he wanted to be the face of the government’s response, so he took over Pence’s role at the briefings. A number of Republican senators privately counseled the president to let the doctors be out front, according to a senior Republican congressional official, but “Trump just couldn’t let someone else get all that attention.”

Trump’s performances were riddled with misinformation, contradictions and indecorous boasts, while also predicting miracles and promoting cure-all therapeutics. Trump often said he was trying to be a “cheerleader” for the country, and a senior administration official explained that the president has said he drew lessons from Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

“What he’s saying there is, ‘I’m going to will the economy to success through mass psychology. We’re going to tell the country things are going great and it’s going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy,’ ” this official said of Trump.

Then they let Scott Fucking Atlas dictate the science.

Scott Atlas found himself in Trump’s orbit the way so many do: through the television screen.

A neuroradiologist with no infectious-disease or public health background, Atlas joined the coronavirus response team in August as a special government employee, after a few senior Trump advisers — Kushner, McEntee and Hope Hicks — were impressed by his appearances on cable news.

Atlas began working out of Kushner’s office suite, and quickly scored a blue badge — the most coveted level of White House access — and a spot on the coronavirus task force. Though many were skeptical of him, the vice president’s team felt that if Atlas was going to be part of the virus response, then he needed to be a full-fledged member of the effort, said two people familiar with the decision.

Atlas pushed a controversial “herd immunity” strategy — of letting the virus spread freely among the young and healthy — and clashed with others on the task force, many of whom described him as combative and condescending. He lorded his seemingly unfettered access to the president over the group and, as one senior adviser said, “The science just got totally perverted with Scott in the room.”

Read the whole thing. It’s depressing, but like I said, there are going to be some great page turners coming out of this — a combination of true crime, bad science, and incompetent bumblers who don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

Chores done!

I got a lot of the menial tedious stuff done today.

✔ New fly stocks set up! This is something I have to do every week to maintain the flow of fly bodies to my hungry spiders.

✔ Backlog of old fly bottles scrubbed and in the autoclave! My least favorite chore. It’s disgusting, my sink fills up with dead flies and huge quantities of pupal shells.

✔ My dirty glassware bucket is completely empty! Huzzah!

✔ I scrubbed up 7 old spider cages, all spider poop and cobwebs fly husks removed with soap and water, and a follow-up wipe-down with alcohol. Now drying overnight.

✔ The big job: repairing and cleaning up the wooden frames the spiders live on. These are just made with 1/4″ dowels and bamboo strips, held together with hot glue (everything in my lab is held together with either or both hot glue and duct tape). Early in this semester, I think I overcompensated with maintaining humidity, and mold grew freely, and the wood warped, popping some of the hot glue joints. Now fixed! Everything was scrubbed down with water and an alcohol wipe.

✔ Washed up a bunch of spider vials.

✔ Ick, scrubbed out the lab sink, which was covered with a thick layer of soggy scraps of chitin. Bonus: while tidying up part of the lab, I found my long lost devil ducky! Maybe future sink scrubbings will be a little happier.

I didn’t transfer spiders to new cages yet–I decided to let the cages and frames dry overnight. No one wants to move into a damp house, after all.

So tomorrow:

  • Remove fly bottles from autoclave & put them away.
  • Move 7 adult spiders from their old filthy cages, move to fresh shiny cages.
  • Scrub old filthy cages, so I can give another 7 spiders a nice clean cage the next day.

Later this week, after they’ve all had a chance to build brand new cobwebs, everyone gets fed. Once everyone is in new homes, it’ll be time for a major lab cleanup — I have old fish tank stuff that just has to go bye-bye.

Time to make my getaway

I have a plan, a good plan, for today. I’m escaping to my lab for a good chunk of the day to do mindless, mundane stuff. It’ll be fun.

Let’s see…first on my list is to make more flies. Then I’m going to scrub out a backlog of fly bottles and get them into the autoclave. Then I have to start rotating spider cages — I have to wash a half dozen cages and do some repair of frames, move a half dozen spiders from old stinky poopy cages to the new shiny clean ones, so I can wash those cages tomorrow and shuffle around some more spiders. I’ll also do some general tidying up before feeding all the baby spiders and coming home.

So there you have it, the glamorous scientific life. At least it’s all stuff one can do during a pandemic.

I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the Evil Emperor Zurg sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance!

I feel safer in this pandemic and economic meltdown now that Mike Pence has announced the name we must use when addressing members of the Space Force.

This is just such silly-bonkers. There is no space force, except as a line item on a budget that will be funneled off to defense contractors. They’re not guarding us against anything. I hope the Democrats just erase this nonsense off the spreadsheet as soon as they take office (they probably won’t, they love defense contractors, too.)

I do have to wonder what that streak of light on Earth in the bottom left of their logo is. Is that the Guardians launching missiles from Earth at some target in space, or the Guardians bombing some target from orbit?

How much do I despise this man?

The leader of the obstructionist party, the science-denying party, the “let them get COVID & die” party, the party that undermines every attempt to control the pandemic, has rushed to the front of the line to get vaccinated. Him and Rupert Murdoch, even as his networks preach conspiracy theories and denialism.

Every EMT and nurse and doctor who has been risking all to be in the front line of helping people against this disease, and every public school teacher who has been told by their government to get in there and teach potential disease carriers, ought to be infuriated.

Oh, I forgot…the chickenshit party, the draft-dodging coward party, the party of flag-wavers who shoo the cannon-fodder forward.

Also, he’s not working to get relief to the people. His is the party that’s going to whine about the deficit and how they can’t possibly help with college debt relief, or send out emergency aid checks, or make health care available for all, while shoveling cash into the pockets of bankers and lawyers as fast as they can.

In case you were wondering, no, I haven’t been vaccinated, and there isn’t even a whisper on the university email lists about it, yet I’m going back into the student labs in about a month. We did get a video thank you card instead of a bonus, or a raise (no, that’s not happening, the Republicans in the state legislature will make sure of that), or a vaccination.

Yay.

Wait, this is about tradcaths?

I almost didn’t watch this video because, well, look at the thumbnail. It’s about Lawrence Krauss? No thank you very much. But it’s not about Krauss at all, so it’s OK!

It’s actually all about these wacky Traditional Catholics with more money than sense who cunningly put together a movie, a real movie/documentary, with real scientists cleverly questioned to make statements they could splice together to imply that they supported geocentrism. So it’s about how some kooks fooled Lawrence Krauss!

The highlight for me, though, is when the creators are in a conference with Michael Voris, the whirlpool guy. And best of all, they go to a flat earth conference to tell everyone there that they were nuts to believe the Earth was flat, but they were exactly right to claim that the sun orbits around the Earth. Even fanatical Catholic science deniers laugh at flat-earthers!

Anyway, recommended — there’s also useful information about how pseudoscientists manipulate the truth to support their delusions.