by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It is now the conventional wisdom of Twitter that today’s the day. Today will be the “event” that pushes us into the rolling crisis of the COVID19 pandemic. It’s the day that will be up there with Dec. 7th and Sept. 11.
The reason is, we finally have a metric that the average person who is otherwise preoccupied with raising their kids and paying their mortgage can understand: the economy .
Or, more specifically — the stock market.
And that’s why Trump is so obsessed with the stock market, it’s a metric HE can understand.
And, really, what people on Twitter are probably thinking is if the stockmarket crashes in a big way today, that will be the event that causes Trump to switch gears and go from ignoring the crisis to exploiting it in order to consolidate power.
The thing I missed in all my thinking about this eventuality is that very thing — I didn’t think about Trump’s natural inclination to scare the shit out of people to political advantage. So, in the end, it may be Trump himself who causes the most damage.
He’s going to be the one who scares people about Asian people by calling COVID19 “Wuhan virus.” It will be he who whips his followers into a frenzy such that they start murdering liberals — and maybe even staging coups at the state level.
But also, some of that talk is the basic acceptance that Trump is probably going to flip out today or sometime soon. He’s going to go transactional with his insanity out of fear of losing the 2020 election.
I am very alarmed at the prospect of Trump / MAGA switching gears today and blaming Asians (and liberals) for all of this. That people like Hugh Hewitt are already laying the groundwork for that is pretty astonishing. MAGA really is a death cult. They really are prepared to get us all killed in the service of the Dear Leader.
It’s rather shocking, once you realize how obvious it is. Yikes!
