I read that Trump takes the stockmarket’s plunging as a personal affront. He is doing his best to silence the public health community so neither he nor we will hear anything about corona virus from the people most competent to direct our country through this crisis.

I am left wondering which is worse for Trump? Hearing truths that make him uncomfortable or having a real grown-up tell him “No.” He deals with painful truths by trying to silence them or to conceal them in a fog of lies and rumors.. This is learned in Totalitarianism 101, of course, but these behaviors also coincide perfectly with the coping mechanisms that Trump learned as a child. 

Another coping mechanism left over from his childhood is “Don’t take NO for an answer!” Just he uses temper tantrums to make people give him his way, and he is a whiz at getting around prohibitions with the sneaky, amoral, antisocial tactics he learned from Roy Cohn, his mentor. He respects neither God nor man.

Not so with Mike Pence who is going to tell the corona virus to “halt in the name of the Lord and keep away from the Lord’s chosen people.” If that doesn’t work, he will lead the evangelicals in claiming that the corona virus, like HIV, is a plague sent by the Lord to rid our country of sinners. 

As for the views of scientists and experienced administrators, views that contradict the Regime’s placebos about the virus … “well, what do these over-rated elitists know? These experts were wrong about cigarettes, wrong about HIV, and now they are wrong about that virus. Moreover, they are trying to hurt the Economy with talk of “pandemic,” with talk of climate change and global warming, with talk of the minimum wage. They are enemies of prosperity, enemies of the white race, enemies of true religion, enemies of God!!”