Trump’s big coronavirus giveaway in Tulsa: Open thread

Moogue: I’m not sure why we should even care whether Trump is suffering from some kind of dementia. He was already evil, good at showmanship, but utterly incompetent at higher executive function, decades ago. Dementia doesn’t much change that equation.

If he does suffer from dementia, good for him. There’s very few people I’d wish that awful condition on; he makes the cut.

@ shadowplay

He is in one of the three positions on the entire planet that can initiate a nuclear exchange with no other person’s input needed

Well theoretically the US uses the “two man rule”. The order for any strike must be verified by the Sec Def (and there’s an order of succession in case the president and/or Sec Def are incapacitated.)

Strictly speaking the Sec Def has no authority to veto a strike. Their role is merely to confirm the order is coming from the president. In practice though, withholding that verification could hold up a launch order.

And of course the President merely gives the order; it’s military commanders who have the actual capability to physically initiate a launch. Whether they would refuse to do so is of course something we can merely speculate about.

It’s ironic though that the procedure was put in place to stop the military going on a frolic of their own without regards to the National Command Authority; and now we can only hope that the military would be the ones stopping the President doing something stupid.

Well – the retaliatory options are written in a 75 page folder, and Trump doesn’t like to read … so there’s an extra (accidental) safeguard in this particular case.

Makes me feel sorry for whichever target is on the top of the first page though.

Edit: Oops, that were to Alan. Hadn’t seen your comment, Ohlmann.

@Alan Robertshaw
Or he’ll call for one on a fictional country he invented, like Nambia.

@Ohlmann

I think the point of Numerobis is that Trump have proven unfit to have access to nuclear strikes even when he wasn’t senile,

Not trying to pick on you as I don’t speak French so I don’t know if this is a false friend thing, but “senile” means something different than “dementia”. For one thing people can get dementia in their 30s, and also dementia is hardly a normal process of aging like stiff joints or normal forgetfulness. Also, it’s pretty shitty to assume that somebody is automatically incompetent because they’re aging, like calling them “senile” implies.

Numerobis, if Trump’s starting point is being evil and incompetent then there’s not any wiggle room for decreasing brain function or a possible side dose of paranoia. Pointing out that Trump is, in fact, already a gigantic asshole doesn’t make the point that you think.

Alan, why should we trust the military brass to do the right thing?

If you had a test for mental fitness to be POTUS, you’d need to be very careful to design it to be resistant to abuse. Say, for example, you have the candidate examined by three independent specialists. They could all be bribed, or threatened. You could slip each of them $100M, and probably still turn a profit within four to eight years.

Not that I’m against testing each candidate’s ability. It’s wild that someone applying to manage a McDonald’s franchise, say, probably faces a more rigorous test of their ability than either Trump or Biden do. One of the “revelations” in Bolton’s book is that Trump was unsure whether Finland is a country, and we see almost weekly evidence that his grasp of the mechanics of government would probably merit a failing grade in a civics class. Forget dementia: I’d like to see political candidates everywhere face a written test of their knowledge relevant to the job, and Gary “what is Aleppo” Johnson would fail this as much as someone with dementia. It’s just that this would inevitably be gamed.

@Moggie

Trump was unsure whether Finland is a country

It was not great to hear that Trump maybe thought he was in Russia when he was in Helsinki. I seem to remember some jokes about how Finland is apparently going to Putin in some sort of future Molotov–Ribbentrop thingie.

That’s going to be a wall of redactions, if it ever does get released.

It really doesn’t matter if it’s “karma” for Trump doing the same thing to other people. When it becomes a meme, it becomes difficult to tell what the ultimate intent behind it is. The same thing happened to the Drumpf meme; John Oliver used it as a parody of Trump asking why Jon Stewart changed his name from John Leibowitz, but outside that context it just sounds racist as hell. And ultimately it’s a distraction from the actually bad things about Trump.

There was a whole thing earlier in this very thread about whether Warhammer 40k is glorifying fascism. Not everybody pays attention to the lore as much as the cool fascist troopers. Though, I also agree that it’s not specifically a problem with Warhammer 40k, because if we’re going to talk about depicting authoritarians as cool even when the story says they’re evil, that’s a running theme in the vast majority of sci-fi and fantasy.

@Moogue : it’s more that age can mess with your abilities in a lot of way who aren’t dementia, so I am unwilling to call it dementia. My grandmother had a lot of trouble concentrating or making mentally taxing tasks for several year before her death, and clearly wasn’t under dementia. She was still well enough to deal with herself and somewhat important responsabilities like upkeeping a house, but I would not have agreed with her being a president.

That being said, what I wrote was with the intent that senility isn’t regular aging, but the term for when someone have particulary salient aging problems. If there is a better term for that, I am open.

@AIP : that’s in no small part true, but I believe W40K to be worse than the other in that regard, and I also believe it’s important to keep gradations here. Dune certainly glorify a kind of fascist-like leader, but do so while still insisting heavily that the Empire of Arrakis isn’t efficient at all and that their Glorious Leader was more or less winging it even despite having an almost perfect vision of the future.

@Naglfar:

Which is probably why he and his supporters are spending so much time on it, while his critics have mostly moved on to mocking his walk of shame after the rally. In the same way that Boris Johnson & co spent ages ranting about the threat to statues of Churchill when basically nobody was proposing to take them down, it helps distract from the real problems.

You say it distracts from the real issues, but you forget two salient facts.

1) If Trump did focus on the real issues, he might get himself elected to a second term. Even just hammering the racism in a more careful, dog whistling manner might be enough to pick up more voters, while allowing the people who just care about tax cuts and business subsidies just enough cover to convince themselves they aren’t racists electing a monster. But even his diehard supporters have a hard time convincing themselves to get riled up over a guy who rants “I can too drink water.”
2) Trump is currently in power now, and he may always be a scatterbrained idiot, but he has smart, insidious people in his cabinet. This throws them off their game, and that is very important. Because in several crucial Supreme Court decisions, civil rights were saved, not because the entire court agreed to protect them, but because someone in the Justice department or EPA or Department of Education did not cross their ts and dot their is correctly.

In any case, it is immaterial. Because his opponents are not making a big deal that he can’t drink or walk. Not mostly, at any rate. They are talking about people dying in the streets. He is the one obsessed with proving he isn’t old. Maybe it’s because he can’t prove he actually cares about Black people, or because he can’t keep focused about Covid-19 long enough to do anything. It doesn’t matter. Saying “I can too drink” while people are dying is a losing argument. Let him make it.