Trump Unmasked as the Anti-Zorro
Let’s face it: Trump is the one American who is protected from the Coronavirus by the Secret Service and their testing everybody who comes close to him. He is also tested every day. So he is also the only American who doesn’t need to wear a mask to prevent spreading the Coronavirus asymptomatically. Well, hopefully the Vice President is also protected like this. But in the Tulsa rally, he was face to face with a hundred cheering Trumpites who were not wearing masks, which has to violate Secret Service guidelines. We are not allowed to know his full medical condition, but his obvious overweight would give him a tough time if he caught the virus. Trump still talks as if the mask is to protect him, not to protect others. If Trump and VP Pence both end up intubated, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, would take over!
It is now day 6 since the Tulsa infectionfest, and symptoms usually show up in 5 days. So, clearly, VP Pence did not catch anything, but the President did not appear at the briefing today.
The joke that I was preparing a month ago, was the Trump was not wearing a mask, lest people recognize him as the thief that stole $3 trillion for the rich, calling it a “middle class tax cut”.
So we have to examine where else the mask appears in our collective memory. I now want to refer to Trump: The Anti-Zorro, Who Steals from the Poor and Gives to the Rich. As Anti-Zorro, he cannot wear a mask. Zorro’s slash-slash-slash horizontal signature is anti’d by Trump’s vertical slash-slash-slash-… Zorro’s horse, Tornado, is replicated by Trump’s loyal golf cart, whose name has not been revealed.
Another approach to understanding Trump’s aversion to setting an example was emphasized by the SNL replay last week from the seventy’s of Carly Simon singing “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you”. Trump spent 15 minutes of his infection-costly Tulsa Rally with a fashion show about his silk tie which was too valuable to spill a drop of water on, and his patent leather shoes which were too slippery to walk down a wet ramp from his speech. I think Trump should own up to inventing the “Trump Shuffle”, which will enthusiastically be adopted by his devotees, who would also have followed his mask wearing lead, had he adopted it.
Trump actually spends a lot of time perfecting his “orange tan” and his combover, so of course he would be very vain about covering his handsome puss with a mask, which would also mess up his combover. He IS the person who Carly was singing about. He makes everything about him, even the most deadly pandemic of the last hundred years. Oh, it turns out that Pete Seeger once lived in Trump’s public housing project in Queens, and wrote some lyrics about how blacks were systematically excluded from the project. Trump and his father were fined for this practice.
Finally, Trump wearing a mask would create a contrary image to his Campaign Posture of: See No Virus, Hear No Virus, and Speak No Virus. That is why Trump could not show up at the Task Force Briefing today, or any other day. In the interview with Hannity yesterday, Trump immediately changed the subject to the preservation of statues. Trump also dodged his protecting the 70 or so Confederate statues, and only talked about statues of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Jesus.
At least we have the image of Trump washing his hands of the virus.
So, Trump signed an order today protecting Confederate Statues. Actually, Trump has a golf course and resort in Florida, where he could move all of the statues for historic preservation. It would apparently be a big attraction for his “core” in the Southern states. When I was at a Physics Conference in Moscow once, I strolled over to a park where the Russians had stored all of the statues from the Stalin Era.
The penalty for defacing a statue is 10 years. Yet Trump has spent much time tearing down all of the progress gained under President Obama, highlighted by the Affordable Care Act, which Trump attacked with a suit before the Supreme Court last night. This started with the Birther Movement, long before Trump ran for President.
We now know why Trump wants to protect unpopular statues. Trump is conducting a July 3rd fireworks show at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial by Gutzon Borglum in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It has the sculptures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Trump has imagined himself being added to the Monument. Seriously.
