Before we open the shebeen for our seventh week of self-quarantine, here’s a little something to brighten your morning: the great Brendan Gleeson and his son, Fergus, setting to music the fine words of Jem Casey, the Poet of the Pick, as first transcribed in the novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien, and adapting the words. And I think we’ll all agree that the poem has one quality to it.

Permanence.

Now to the business at hand. Three reporters at The New York Times donned safety gear and proceeded to dissect 260,000 words worth of transcript from the now-semi-defunct Five O’Clock Follies, looking for patterns in the chaos. What they returned with was startling. I mean, we all sensed how off-the-trolley his narcissism was, but to see the cold figures is stunning.

By far the most recurring utterances from Mr. Trump in the briefings are self-congratulations, roughly 600 of them, which are often predicated on exaggerations and falsehoods. He does credit others (more than 360 times) for their work, but he also blames others (more than 110 times) for inadequacies in the state and federal response. Mr. Trump’s attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity (about 160 instances) amount to only a quarter of the number of times he complimented himself or a top member of his team.

(And do try to survive the accompanying graphic, which looks like a time-lapse video of a spreading fungus.)



Moreover, the Times team managed to quantify the president*’s utter lack of empathy. This heretofore was considered to be a number too small to be calculated by conventional means.

And he has mentioned the coronavirus’s staggering toll — nearly 50,000 Americans dead as of April 26, and hundreds of thousands of others sick — only fleetingly. There has always been someone or something else to deflect blame for the various breakdowns in the government’s response. But Mr. Trump’s targets have shifted over the last several weeks, showing a clear but disorderly progression of his message as he struggled to focus attention elsewhere.

50,000 dead? Sorry for your trouble, pal. I have to go kick Jim Acosta now. Also there’s a Kaitlan Collins outbreak demanding my attention. And another week of this begins.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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