What a Time to Be Alive!!!
What a Time to Be Alive!!!
Let's bask in the entertainment value of what is happening right now.
I feel FIRED UP.
Say what you want about everything happening right now, but the past few days have indisputably brought a new crazy amped-up energy to what was previously just a dreary slog through hell. The hits just keep on coming!
In the past 24 hours, we have been treated to:
Donald Trump saying that getting COVID means he has now been to COVID “school,” adding, “this is the real school. This isn’t the ‘let’s read the book’ school.” (I guess he means “school of hard knocks,” but, like, he knows that “read the book” is like 75 percent of “real school,” right?)
Donald Trump’s doctors revealing that—surprise!—his condition has been worse than they previously let on, but also saying that he could be discharged as early as today? Definitely makes sense.
Donald Trump forcing his poor Secret Service agents to clamber into a hermetically sealed car with him so he could leave the hospital where he is being treated for a deadly infectious disease and wave to the scattered crowds of MAGA freaks showing him love outside Walter Reed. He apparently did this because he was whining about leaving the hospital permanently and the doctors gave him a dangerous little car trip instead, as a treat.
Donald Trump doing this shit (I’m not necessarily making any “connections,” but I will say in a purely general sense that being jammed full of steroids tends to make people extremely hopped up and perhaps start doing some questionable things):
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany announcing that she, too, has contracted COVID, making her, by some estimates, the 12th person connected to the White House to get the virus. Womp womp!
The Trump campaign just throwing this one out there:
This:
I mean….what a time to be alive, and in the world, with a functioning brain and a beating heart. Our current predicament is broadly terrible, and you can of course go the “national security implications” and “ship of state” blah blah blah route, which knock yourself out if you want to, but I would rather just try and bask in the entertainment value of the entire White House and Republican Party facing the consequence of their actions.
Some of that is because, once you stop doing that, you have to think about the Supreme Court (ugh) and Uber trying to destroy labor rights in the sleaziest way possible (oy) and the possibly stolen election (auggggh) and New York City going backwards on COVID (starts breathing into paper bag) and the White House press corps politely telling McEnany to get well after she directly exposed them all to COVID (what the fuck!!!) and the fact that people like this:
are going to be running large chunks of our politics if Joe Biden wins (starts googling “rockets that can launch me out of this atmosphere”) and then I start spiraling and contemplating the end of the earth and I need to go to my happy place—
And then I think again about a blitzed-out Donald Trump screaming “SPACE FORCE VOTE” online, and at least we have that. Who knows what lies ahead? Maybe it’s Donald Trump strapped into a Hannibal Lecter mask at the next debate, hopped up on whatever horse pills they’re now using for his treatment, barking at some woman about the casino business when her question was actually about the environment. All I’m saying is let’s be optimistic where we can these days.
Update, 2:43 p.m. ET: LMAO OK then. He is so high!!!!
Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: OK I couldn’t just leave it there—I now feel crazier than ever! “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” What. “We have developed some really great drugs.” WHAT. “I feel better than I did 20 years ago.” WHAAAT. We’re gonna watch this man visibly suppressing feverish coughs on camera while he goes into pill-popper monologues about the mobsters he knew in 1982 and tells everyone that he beat COVID with his mind powers. They’ll cart him into the debate against Biden and halfway through he’ll start talking to the wall instead of the audience. He’s gonna go on a “Touch the President” tour through swing states, just vibing with his people. Buckle the fuck UP everyone.
Update, 7:58 p.m. ET: Trump is now back at the White House, where he ostentatiously removed his mask in front of the cameras even though, you may have heard, he still has an infectious disease coursing through his veins. He was clearly trying to project an image of invulnerability, and boy did it work! Check out how great he looks:
Our boy is in peak physical condition! He definitely didn’t immediately double over and start huffing through an oxygen mask the moment the White House doors closed. He won’t call into Sean Hannity while audibly struggling to breathe and yelling about how he’s NEVER FELT SO GOOD and no, he’s not still high off the meds, why are you asking??? He’s not going to stagger throughout the West Wing spraying sweat and saliva everywhere as he fights to stay upright. He told COVID to get lost and COVID listened! God bless the president!
Update, 8:03 p.m. ET: as;ldfkjas;dlkfjzs.adjfa;sldkjfa;slkdfas I got nothing
Update, 8:06 p.m. ET: He says “maybe I’m immune!” in this video. Yeah that is definitely what’s happening.
EAT A CHICKEN PARMIGIANA. VOTE!
Fuck the throat-clearing. I have never actually believed in karma, or as my dad referred to it this weekend, "poetic justice," but EXHIBIT FUCKING A, B, C, D.... I don't have the energy to discern the complicated moral questions my personal feelings are raising because that was unfortunately depleted throughout the last six months of a pandemic that the president* chose to coverup and then downplay and then affirmatively act to falsify the positivity rates in children in an effort to aid his reelection. But talk about fucking karma.
It's not just that the president* got COVID and it's not just that MANY other GOP members got COVID. It's that they got COVID a month out from an election that hinges on the public's perception of the admin's handling of the very disease that has now effectively ended any campaign activities to spin the handling of that disease. It's that the superspreader event that caused this outbreak is tied to a Rose Garden event related to the OTHER defining issue of the election, which is the GOP's unlawful and immoral attempt to shove a Supreme Court justice into a lifetime appointment less than a month before the election that might hinge on that same Court's determination.
AND. AND. Not one, but TWO GOP senators ON THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE, which is tasked with actually getting that judicial nominee into place within a month of the election, got COVID at that same event.
Whether this is karma or poetic justice or my raging schadenfreude, it is impossible to not feel unsettlingly kind of okay with this. It is literally payback in the narrowest and most specific sense. I should say that I don't want any of these assholes to die, and that's not throat-clearing. I want them to face justice and live with the consequences for ALL of this.