Die For Him Granpa by Nancy Ohanian



Frank Bruni's question-- Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone? in his Monday column seemed cheeky-- until you read it. He started by reminding his readers of how George W. Bush and Barack Obama demonstrated leadership in pulling the country together, the former after 9/11 and the latter after the Newtown murder of 28 children and teachers. Then he asked "Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it? It passed me by, maybe because it never happened. In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with."

Americans are dying by the thousands, and he gloats about what a huge, rapt television audience he has. They’re confronting financial ruin and not sure how they’ll continue to pay for food and shelter, and he reprimands governors for not treating him with adequate adulation.



He’s not rising to the challenge before him, not even a millimeter. He’s shriveling into nothingness.



...In the Washington Post a few days ago, Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is “a vast, trackless wasteland.” Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts of ego all along the horizon.



When the direness of this global health crisis began to be apparent, I was braced for the falsehoods and misinformation that are Trump’s trademarks. I was girded for the incompetence that defines an administration with such contempt for proper procedure and for true expertise.



But what has taken me by surprise and torn me up inside are the aloofness, arrogance, pettiness, meanness, narcissism and solipsism that persist in Trump-- that flourish in him-- even during a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that demands something nobler. Under normal circumstances, these traits are galling. Under the current ones, they’re gutting.



“I don’t take responsibility at all.” “Did you know I was number one on Facebook?” To bother with just one of those sentences while a nation trembles is disgusting. To bother with both, as Trump did, is perverse.



...And while I’m not looking to Trump for any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he’s thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect I’ll be doing that forever.

Politico's David Siders and Elana Schneider wrote that the party seems to have found a rallying cry: Different people are looking for different things from Trump. Surely, though, the Democratic Party is looking for ways to kick the shit out of him with his own actions and words and inactions. Yesterday,'s David Siders and Elana Schneider wrote that the party seems to have found a rallying cry: Trump tanked the economy ... even if "framing a coherent economic argument that all the party’s factions can rally around is proving thorny." Yep... the ole problem of a tent too big coming to mean nothing at all. They wrote that "It’s already become a source of friction within the Democratic Party, even as some major Democratic outside groups begin pummeling Trump for the economic fallout of the pandemic. It‘s a message Democrats plan to amplify in coming months, long after the immediate health effects of the crisis subside."

The left flank is increasing pressure on Joe Biden, the party’s likely nominee, to adopt more progressive economic policies. Activists accuse Trump of prioritizing corporate America over low-wage workers, while many moderate Democrats are leery of drawing such distinctions, training their criticism of Trump solely on his initial mishandling of the pandemic.



“This is not just about saying, ‘Trump is not doing a good job,’” said Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a prominent supporter of Bernie Sanders, who remains in the presidential race. “That is absolutely a piece of it, but it's also about, what are you going to do? What is your vision? … We should be talking about a payroll guarantee, like a bold pay payroll guarantee program, we should be talking about canceling student debt. I mean, these are the things that, they're not just progressive priorities anymore, they are going to be desperate needs for the survival and the recovery of our people in our economy.”



Jayapal added that Biden, should he become the nominee, will “absolutely” come under pressure from progressives to reconsider those policies ideas in light of the crisis.

Democratic establishment SuperPACs, stinking of corruption and conservatism-- Priorities USA, American Bridge, PACRONYM and Biden's Win the West-- are highlighting unemployment statistics alongside coronavirus deaths, and Trump's inadequate response to the pandemic.

“Democrats, ever since before 2016, haven’t really had an economic profile. People couldn’t name what the Democratic economics was, and it was a major reason why Trump won in 2016,” said Celinda Lake, a leading Democratic strategist and pollster who works with Biden’s presidential campaign but was not speaking for Biden or his advisers.



In the coronavirus response, she said, “there’s a real opportunity to define … what is a people-centered economy, what is an economy that works for everyone, and we should be leaning into this.”



Robert Reich, the Clinton-era Labor secretary, said the crisis presents Biden with a unique opportunity to make policy changes that he might otherwise have difficulty explaining.



“Even if he wants to be perceived as cautious and prudent on issues like income support and health care, the pandemic gives him more room for being bold than he had before the pandemic,” Reich said. “A national trauma such as we are experiencing and definitely will experience over the next month or two enables a politician … to say, in effect, ‘I’ve now seen what the country needs in a way that the country has also experienced, and therefore I’m modifying the position.’”



While the general election is still seven months away, the effect on the electorate is likely to endure after weeks of deaths, stay-at-home orders, job losses and business closures.



“When we come out of this, millions of Americans will have a very different experience of what happened than they had at any time in their lifetimes before,” Reich said. “It’s almost like going through the Great Depression or World War II in the sense that the direct experience of a traumatic event changes attitudes towards government and public policy, sometimes in profound ways.”



In response to criticism from Democrats, Trump’s campaign has highlighted the relief measures he has signed into law, while accusing Biden of “sniping from the sidelines.” The president has suggested the economy will be moving again before the general election, and direct payments to millions of Americans-- even if late arriving-- could benefit him in November.



But the economic damage from the pandemic has already proved severe, and it is widely expected to worsen this month. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Friday for an expansion of the $2 trillion relief package Trump signed, including more money for small businesses and more direct payments to Americans.



Barry Goodman, a Democratic National Committee member and bundler for Biden, said Democrats should clobber Trump for his hesitance to embrace public health measures detrimental to the stock market, saying that “his infatuation with the stock market and keeping the economy running and humming … he believed that over the science.”



“He ended up tanking the economy worse than it ever could have been tanked,” Goodman said.