Washington

I see from my private incarceration at home, where I have languished for weeks, that the New York Times is accusing President Trump of wasting as much six weeks before taking action against the coronavirus. For weeks I have been dutifully washing my hands and even taken extra care to wash my feet while Mr. Trump and most of the White House staff were dawdling. What were they doing wasting time?

Did the White House’s dilatory behavior have something to do with impeachment? Was that somewhat of a distraction to the Assistant Presidents in the West Wing? There were in the Times’s report only two, very fleeting mentions of impeachment. Otherwise it was just business as usual in Washington, with the White House ducking subpoenas and the Congress thinking up ever more fanciful charges against the President. Is the House of Representatives still consumed with Russian collusion? How about the big fat American professor at Cambridge, Stefan Halper, or about poor Carter Page? Is Congressman Adam Schiff still coming up with whistleblowers of impeccable integrity, and is he engaging in his usual heavy-handed tactics with the Republican opposition?

On December 18, 2019, the House of Representatives drafted a bill of impeachment. On January 16, the House submitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Weeks passed. Sen. Chuck Schumer had things to add. Congressman Schiff pounced on offbeat rumors. Finally, on February 5, the Senate acquitted the president. Did all this hurly-burly distract the president and his aides in any way? I should think it did.

If anyone dawdled, it was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. She allowed the likes of Schiff to conjure up conspiracies that were so far-fetched that his constituents should vote him out of office this November 3 or secede from the Union. Then, when the House settled on its bill of impeachment, Nancy sat on the bill for four weeks, refusing to send it on until January 16, and Democrats in the Senate still were not satisfied that there should be an impeachment vote. Only when Senate Leader Mitch McConnell ended this nonsensical travesty and put it to a vote was some sort of order restored.

In the meantime, what was happening? Well, the coronavirus, we now know, was spreading throughout the world in early 2020 with little action being taken by anyone. Did any of the aforementioned misbehavior by the Democrats have anything to do with the president’s action or inaction? I think it did. He now claims to have taken action on January 31 to end flights into America from China. Had he not taken action, it seems likely that thousands of more Chinese people would have arrived here and brought the infection with them.

Yet still the Democrats are going to hold President Trump accountable for taking no action. The Times has found a memo from Peter Navarro of the White House staff that the Times in its prolix style that is sprawled across three pages says President Trump should have read. The Times story is filled with information about the impending debacle. It mentions dozens of people. Yet, as I have said it mentions the impeachment only once in it three-page story. It charges the president with denying he read Navarro. The president says he is innocent. Just as he said he was innocent of colluding with the Russians, with the Ukrainians, and all the other fanciful figures that populated charges against him these last three years.

Donald Trump has now passed Richard Nixon as the most-maligned American president in modern times. His enemies have been calling him names since about the time he came down the escalator at Trump Tower. They have called him a racist. They have called him Hitler. Interestingly, they have not called him Stalin. That is probably because so many of his enemies are conflicted by Stalin. What do they say? How about: He made the kulaks run on time? No, no, that would be confusing Stalin with Mussolini. When the president stopped the inbound flights from China, Joe Biden called him a racist and also a xenophobe. Joe did not know what that last word meant, but he called the president a xenophobe anyway.

Of course, Mr. Trump is the duly elected president of the United States. He is not only the most-slandered man to enter the White House, but he is also the only man ever to have both the CIA and the FBI plotting against him. On November 3, it will all be over.