This is an excerpt from our latest book Mind-Blowing Synchronicities
November 7, 2020
Election Day was probably much different back in the days when families gathered around the radio in the living room to hear the results. But in the second decade of the 21st century, it was a blow by blow visual count of a vote in this state or that or how one candidate was lunging ahead and another was lagging behind. And in 2020, it was also about the losers hurling accusations about election fraud months before the election took place.
So, in the election of 2020, the stakes were high. Under Trump, the country had been locked inside a blender jammed in fast forward. Norms were shattered, the president was a pathological liar and narcissist, and people became divided. In the midst of all this bedlam, Covid appeared.
“Oops,” it seemed to say. “You idiots always need an enemy to fight against and argue about. So now it’s me. Where’d I come from? Am I a Chinese plot? And yeah, what about the mask and vaccine issues? Some of you scream, ‘It’s my body!’ Or: ‘It’s a conspiracy to control and watch us!’ And you refused vaccines. And many of you died.”
In the midst of this chaotic tragedy – when Dr. Deborah Birx was the administration’s corona virus coordinator- Trump tried to act like an expert. If you saw this Covid briefing, it’s probably stuck in your head. “The disinfectant says it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?’
Trump’s orange head is turned to his right, addressing the man who had just spoken – Bill Bryan, Under Secretary for Science and Technology at DHS. Google the You Tube video. It’s jarring.
Birx sat at the edge of the stage during all this, one hand covering her face. If she had spoken out then, if she’d interrupted to correct Trump, to make it clear that no one should inject or ingest any kind of disinfectant, if she’d defied him right then, the pandemic in the U.S. might have turned out differently. And Birx would have been fired in an episode worthy of The Apprentice. Instead, she wrote a book about it that was published in 2022.
Confronted with a force more powerful than he was, Trump just spouted bullshit and promised that by April of 2020, Covid would be history. That didn’t happen.
Dr. Fauci, the White House chief medical advisor, was also at that briefing about disinfectants. He looked appalled and disgusted. He later came out and warned the public not to use disinfectants against Covid. He was the sane voice during the pandemic but was attacked repeatedly through Fox News and the right wing media. He and his family received death threats as did election workers and others after the January 6 insurrection.
This is how trump operates. He believes he’s smarter than the experts, still a handsome stud, and that he’s going to save the country from – well, all those immigrants. Never mind that his wife is an immigrant, that most of us in this country are immigrants or descended from immigrants. He also boasts about how rich he is- and never mind that he has declared bankruptcy numerous times. Just about everything that comes out of trump’s mouth is a lie. You get the idea here.
Trump is the archetypal trickster.
