On another planet

One friend on Facebook who normally stays genteel watched one of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences and then unloaded on him in a post:

Watching the daily Presidential press conference on the Corona virus. Sorry Trump fans but how pathetic can one be. So far its been me, me, me!! How great I am, how much I’ve done, previous administrations are responsible, Governor’s are totally responsible. Everyone but me is responsible!! Forget the 30,000 dead, 700,000 infected and continuing. Outrageous!! Sorry for venting on my few posts.

Most of the responses to his post were in agreement, but one of his friends responded with this:

He’s actually none of those things and he’s doing a great job he’s he is talking himself and the task force up a lot but only because this is his only chance to defend himself the media totally lies. They are blaming him for a delayed response to the handling of the virus when in fact Dr. Fauci said on Feb. 29th that there was no need to change our behavior. Dr. Birx also supported the White House response and timeline at the press conference the other day. No one has a crystal ball and no one knew how bad the virus would be our president took decisive action and he was a genius in partnering private and public partnerships to get all the PPE and ventilators and things that we need acted very quickly he does deserve a little credit and he’s been working really hard and it’s very unfair shouldn’t matter what your politics are we should all be coming together in this time of crisis.

This totally blows my mind. It’s like this person is on another planet, viewing a different president than I am.

Doing a great job? How could anyone possibly think Trump is “doing a great job?” What possible measure could one use that would reveal this to be great? We have topped 77,000 deaths now after Trump assured us it’s “going to be down to close to zero” and “it’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

No one knew how bad the virus could be? This sounds much like what Trump said himself: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.” However, the Obama administration crafted a 69-page pandemic playbook which the Trump administration promptly ignored. Trump also ignored intelligence warnings from as far back as November 2019 that warned of an imminent pandemic. Of course, he never reads his daily intelligence briefings and gets his news from the la-la land of Fox News. Out of all the people in the world, he should have better ability than almost anyone to get answers to his questions. If he ever had any.

You’ll also note that this person believes Trump is being treated unfairly by the media. Trunp – the bully – being picked on. And saying that Trump is working hard? When Trump spends some mornings doing nothing but sending dozens of rambling tweets?

It would be laughable if it weren’t so sad, but this is what passes for reality for Trump supporters. It’s what they’re spoon-fed by Fox News.

I have gamely tried to talk to these people, walking them through their assumptions in an effort to show them where they diverge from reality. It is like talking to a brick wall. They have their source of facts and anything differing from that are lies. Finding common ground was once a worthy goal but Fox has taken these folks so far off the reservation that there is little or no common ground left.

I keep hoping that one day I hit upon the perfect plan to gently walk them out of Crazytown but I worry that there is little to be done here. What will it take for them to see that their emperor has no clothes?