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The only bright spot in Trump's Soviet-style COVID-19 strategy is that it's not working
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/10/07/trump-covid-19-soviet-style-disinformation-health-risks-column/5896600002/Tom Nichols Opinion columnist (Nichols is a Never-Trumper Republican)
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Trump is like a fading Soviet leader
But I saw something else. I had a flashback to my early career studying the old Soviet Union, and in Trump I saw the fading Soviet leaders who climbed to the top of Lenin’s tomb, gamely waving and putting on a brave face as their health and grip on power slipped away from them. Trump was Leonid Brezhnev or Konstantin Chernenko, but this time struggling to take in the muggy night breeze in Washington instead of the frigid and polluted air of Moscow.
And this Washington version of the old Kremlin is the pathetic station to which the United States has been reduced in the waning days of Trump’s misrule. We have a paranoid leader who will do anything to hold on to power, including squashing any talk of allowing his second in command to act in his stead even for a day. (Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush allowed such temporary transfers for health reasons.) The White House is now a bunker, administered by a cult of personality whose disciples treat the boss’ health as a secret, while the favored television networks of the state air cheery obfuscations about the president’s strength and selfless devotion to country.
Meanwhile, the president’s medical team sounds like the doctors from the Soviet Ministry of Health. They are all very honored, they made sure to tell us, to be on the great leader’s medical team. The president is a “phenomenal patient,” and we must all do our part to keep up the happy talk. You could hear the echoes of the old USSR as Physician to the President Sean Conley gave his reports under the watchful eye of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“Comrades. The president is a strong man, and he has a slight flu, as many of us do here in Moscow. The Central Clinical Hospital here in the Kremlin has the best care in our nation, and he is receiving drugs developed by our scientists that are available nowhere else in the world. His fever and the condition of his lungs are, as I am sure you understand, a matter of state security, and we will not be discussing them. The president is attending to matters of state even in his suite, and indeed, we have cautioned his aide, Comrade Meadows, to stop trying to give him yet more work!”
But I saw something else. I had a flashback to my early career studying the old Soviet Union, and in Trump I saw the fading Soviet leaders who climbed to the top of Lenin’s tomb, gamely waving and putting on a brave face as their health and grip on power slipped away from them. Trump was Leonid Brezhnev or Konstantin Chernenko, but this time struggling to take in the muggy night breeze in Washington instead of the frigid and polluted air of Moscow.
And this Washington version of the old Kremlin is the pathetic station to which the United States has been reduced in the waning days of Trump’s misrule. We have a paranoid leader who will do anything to hold on to power, including squashing any talk of allowing his second in command to act in his stead even for a day. (Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush allowed such temporary transfers for health reasons.) The White House is now a bunker, administered by a cult of personality whose disciples treat the boss’ health as a secret, while the favored television networks of the state air cheery obfuscations about the president’s strength and selfless devotion to country.
Meanwhile, the president’s medical team sounds like the doctors from the Soviet Ministry of Health. They are all very honored, they made sure to tell us, to be on the great leader’s medical team. The president is a “phenomenal patient,” and we must all do our part to keep up the happy talk. You could hear the echoes of the old USSR as Physician to the President Sean Conley gave his reports under the watchful eye of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“Comrades. The president is a strong man, and he has a slight flu, as many of us do here in Moscow. The Central Clinical Hospital here in the Kremlin has the best care in our nation, and he is receiving drugs developed by our scientists that are available nowhere else in the world. His fever and the condition of his lungs are, as I am sure you understand, a matter of state security, and we will not be discussing them. The president is attending to matters of state even in his suite, and indeed, we have cautioned his aide, Comrade Meadows, to stop trying to give him yet more work!”
