Live and Let Die, Trump-Style – The New York Times

WASHINGTON This is not a good time for vampires.

Or bats.

Which is disorienting for me because, as a lifelong aficionado of vampires, I have a big collection of bat T-shirts, Victorian bat pins and vampire books and movies.

Once the imagery was hot: Batman with his bat signal; Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise slinking around New Orleans in Interview With the Vampire; Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood naked and drenched in blood on the cover of Rolling Stone; the Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson sensation in Twilight. (Their broken romance was a favorite subject of Donald Trumps early tweets.)

But now the bat is a global villain, sparking memes like, Whoever said one person cant change the world never ate an undercooked bat and rants like Bill Mahers denunciation of Chinese wet markets because eating bats is batty.

Vampires were conjured centuries ago in part as a response to plagues passed from animals to humans, when the afflicted turned to the supernatural to explain the many terrors.

According to Trump biographer Michael DAntonio, the presidents own grandfather, Friedrich, a German immigrant, might have died of the Spanish flu, contracted as he walked around Queens looking for real estate properties in 1918.

Many struck by the coronavirus describe the awful sensation of the virus receding during the day only to viciously strike once the sun sets. As Chris Cuomo put it, The beast comes at night.

David Axelrod wrote a Times Op-Ed with David Plouffe, advising Joe Biden, whom they dubbed the Man in the Basement, to juice up his campaign.

Trump is like a vampire! Axelrod told me, adding a salty expletive. Youve got to drive a stake right through his heart. Hes going to keep coming. Theres nothing he wont do. Even in this environment, you cant count on him losing.

Now the monstrous virus has invaded the Oval Office. Both the presidents valet and a Pence staffer, Katie Miller, the wife of the racist Stephen Miller, who looks like he hasnt seen daylight in decades, have succumbed. Yet just a few days ago Axios reported that the president and some top aides were questioning the high death toll.

Trump has always been fixated on numbers and perfectly willing to fake them his billions, his inaugural crowd, even the number of stories in Trump Tower and he knows the number of dead, now surpassing 77,500, could be the death knell of his campaign.

So he is despicably turning the dead into the undead, trying to figure out how to claim they werent lost.

His talent as an escape artist has run out because hes up against an even more amoral, vicious enemy. Microbes dont give a damn about Trumps fake narrative and suppression of the facts.

When the new Trump press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was asked Friday what the plan was for reopening, she replied that we must trust the president to open safely because he is relying on the data. Risible.

Trump is too much of a fake tough guy to wear a mask and Mike Pence is too much of a sycophant to the fake tough guy to wear a mask. It was apt that, as the maskless Trump toured a Honeywell factory making masks in Arizona, Guns N Roses cover of Live and Let Die was playing.

Trumps unmoored assertions add up to a horror story, from his failure on testing to his advice to inject bleach to encouraging rowdy protesters and impatient states to LIBERATE from the governments own guidelines to perpetrating the suicidal idea that we have to choose between public health and the economy when they are the same thing.

When Mike Pompeo tried to push the 2020 re-election line demonizing China, saying there is enormous evidence that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, even intelligence and senior officials pushed back. The man who is trusted to lead America beyond the plague, Anthony Fauci, dismissed it, reiterating with near certainty that the virus originated with a bat and jumped species.

Trump has sidelined the nonpareil Fauci and, no doubt consumed with jealousy and irritated by his honesty, would like to get rid of him. He barred the N.I.H. scientist from testifying before the House this month because the committee has every Trump hater who want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death.

Wallowing in petty insults, vindictiveness and p.r. piffle even in such a tragic season, the president tried to shut down the pandemic task force as the pandemic is still ravaging the country until alarmed associates intervened. The White House scuppered the safety guidelines the C.D.C. wanted to put out, for fear they would crimp the reopening.

Trump has been leaning into his son-in-law, the pallid nonentity. Jared is like Renfield, the zoophagous maniac in Bram Stokers Dracula who eats flies and deaths head moths and does the vampire kings bidding.

For two of the most urgent missions in American history, hunting for supplies and a vaccine, the president who is always accusing Joe Biden of nepotism relied on nepotism and favoritism. As The Times reported the other day, Jared bollixed up the desperate search for masks, gloves and ventilators this spring, heading a group of volunteers that prioritized tips from those with Trump connections, putting them on a VIP list, like a lead on N95 masks from a former Apprentice contestant who runs Women for Trump.

DAntonio says that Trump was always preoccupied with death. When he was young, he was convinced he would die before 40. The early death of his alcoholic older brother, Fred, was his formative experience. He regards every loss or humiliation as a small death.

Trumps campaign manager, Brad Parscale, compared their 2020 bid to the Death Star. (Parscale also modeled a Trump-Pence, Keep America Great! mask on Twitter. A pandemic is, most important, a branding opportunity.)

One of Trumps favorite songs is the morbid Peggy Lee ballad Is That All There Is?

Yet now that it is his duty to lead us out of the valley of death, Trump appears removed, shirking responsibility and deflecting blame. Hes the worlds worst empath. As the president tries to prematurely yank the country back to work, he seems less focused on the real suffering than reviving his precious stock market. Maybe Trump doesnt seem real to Trump, either.

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Live and Let Die, Trump-Style - The New York Times