Experiencing the miracle of America’s largely employer-based health care system, so revered by the likes of Joe Biden and others. The bills from my visit to the hospital two weeks ago have started rolling in. The price tag on an ambulance ride provided by our taxpayer-supported fire department? Close to $800. (First time I’ve ever used the service, by the way.) Based on the billing, this service appears to be at least partially outsourced – the bill was accompanied by a form that I had seven days to return if I wanted them to bill my insurance company. Glad I’m fully recovered and able to respond to my mail!

Meanwhile, I’m watching in horror as our child-president noodles around with this pandemic as if it were an H.O. scale train set. His recent advocacy for ingesting disinfectants is illustrative of almost everything that is wrong with this particular chief executive. Despite his lame gaslighting attempt at claiming that his comments were meant sarcastically, Trump was obviously proud of his idea, looking for validation from his medical specialists, and basically pathetically showboating like a five year old. He is owlishly grasping for imaginary miracle cures that will extract him from the tremendous mess he and his administration have created through a breathtaking combination of incompetence and an ideological commitment to the deconstruction of the administrative state.

I want to be clear about Trump – he is all of our worst tendencies, rolled up into a big, fat, greasy ball of slime. He is Little Lord Fauntleroy, born into privilege and yet always feeling slighted and resentful. And all you workers who voted for this shit bag, be advised: he’s never worked an honest day in his life. All that said, he’s just the hood ornament on the Cadillac of destruction that is the Republican party and the neoliberal tendency in American politics more generally. As the Majority Report’s Sam Seder recently pointed out, Trump didn’t just wake up in the middle of the night and insist that we have to disband the pandemic response team in the National Security Council. That idea was served up to him by John Bolton and others, the intellectual architects of the current crisis. Recall Mick Mulvaney’s critique of Meals on Wheels – the program is a failure because there are still hungry old people out there. Destruction of the pandemic response (really, anticipation) infrastructure is part of that same logic. Who wants a bunch of scientists hanging around waiting for something to do?

We need to get rid of Trump. But we also need to get rid of the party that created him. And we need to defeat the neoliberal governance movement that will survive Trump when he’s finally gone. As bad as our child clown fascist president may be, they are worse than him … and they, my friends, have got to go.

luv u,

jp