Trump's School Gamble

Donald Trump has always been one to make the big gamble.  It's why he started out with an inherited fortune and went bankrupt six time.  It's why his "university" and steak company and winery were failures, why his diplomatic efforts with North Korea and Iran were such total disasters, and it's why he ended up in deep debt to the Russians.

But in a way, of course, what Donald Trump does is not gambling, because his whole life has taught him that he never has to pay a price for his failure.  He always has found a way to climb back out of the muck, and in a society that values money and celebrity more than anything, he has always been a winner, even though he always loses.

Now, Trump is taking another gamble that may be the biggest one of all, in absolute confidence that as always, he will never pay a price.  Trump pretty well sees that unless the economy doesn't mount some significant signs of a comeback before election day, he is doomed, and will soon be trading in the Oval Office for a six foot by nine foot "office" which he will share with a 280 pound rapist.

We all know that Trump is the most solipsistic person anyone has ever seen.  The descriptions we see of malignant narcissm fit him so well, but don't seem to adequately reach his mental state, in which, as far as I can tell, he does not even recognize the existence of any person outside of himself, let alone care about them.  So any amount of damage he does to others is insignificant compared to the least gain to himself.  It's as if you or I had to kill off a character in a movie in order to save ourselves; of course trading nothing for our own lives would be a good deal.

Well, now we come to the gamble that Trump is now taking; trading the lives of others for his own survival.  Here is what I believe Trump is up to.  The major way he can goose the economy at this point is to allow all of the kids' parents to go back to work, and here is his vision for how that will play out.

Let's say that Trump succeeds in getting schools to reopen across the country this fall.  Say most schools open right after labor day, which would be September 8th.  Now, of course, not everyone who is going to become infected at school will do so the first day; lets say that it will take three weeks for infections to really take hold.  That would take us to the end of September.  We also know that hospitalizations, the first sign that something is really wrong, lag by about three weeks behind infection, which would bring us to about October 21st.  And the beginning of the spike in deaths from Coronavirus lags behind that by about two weeks.  That brings us to November 4th- the day after the election.

Trump, who always has a delusional belief that, as the smartest man in the world, everything he does is a brilliant strategy beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals, would gladly adopt this plan, with complete confidence that he will once more pull off the great con.  In carrying out the plan, he will milk all of the economic benefits of ramping up the economy in the months before the election, while the deaths of children and the inevitable utter societal collapse will not happen until after it is too late to change the country's fate.  And this is his real plan to win re-election.

Let me be clear: This is not merely a cynical election ploy; it is committing mass murder in order to remain in political power.  It is a crime against humanity, exactly the same as the the slaughter in Rwanda, or the behavior of Assad in Syria, or the Nazi death camps or the Stalinist purges.  It will in one move place him in the category of the worst monsters in history.

And Trump is absolutely confident that, like everything else in his life, he will get away with it and emerge the winner.

This time, he will be wrong.  I don't believe that the American people, as degraded and propagandized as they are, will be willing to trade thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dead children for a temporary bump in the stock market.  Listen carefully through the fall mists in Washington DC this year, and you may just hear the tumbrels rolling through the streets.