"Reckless Endangerment" Is NOT Normal, It's a Crime
“Reckless Endangerment” Is NOT Normal, It’s a Crime
By Bernard Weiner
When the president of the United States encourages citizens to experiment by shooting-up with bleach and ingesting ultra-violet light rays and downing a cocktail of Lysol and anti-malaria pills — this is not normal. These are clear signs of an unstable, sociopathic mind, whose staggering ignorance, gross incompetence, and pathological lying are doing major damage to our Constitution, our democratic institutions, and to the very lives of our citizens.
(By the way, whatever happened to the 25th amendment?)
Clearly, this sorry excuse for a competent, feeling human being — damaged goods from childhood on — is undergoing an enormous amount of stress these days, as is obvious from his increased irritability, meanness, and all-around looniness.
It makes sense. Wouldn’t you be a tad nervous about your behavior if you were largely responsible for the avoidable deaths of 50,000+ fellow citizens and for nearly a million other Americans who’ve caught the corona virus? Add to that a crashed economy — the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s — with one out of every five workers out of a job.
Trump’s plummeting polls point to him being frog-marched out of the Oval Office in January, along with a goodly number of his sycophantic GOP cohort in Congress.
In addition to facing charges of “reckless endangerment,” Trump realizes that he also could face a massive number of “wrongful death” civil suits stemming from his thorough botch of the coronavirus pandemic. One can easily foresee many relatives, with legal “standing,” eager to sue the pants off Trump because of his do-nothing approach during the first few months of the coronavirus disaster. (This was when Trump — lying though his teeth — insisted that the situation was “in control,” a Democratic “hoax” that would “miraculously disappear” in a few days, nothing to see here, just move along.)
What was Trump’s response to the unfolding economic and national-security catastrophe? The commander-in-chief effectively went MIA. The self-proclaimed “stable genius” demonstrated his unfitness for any leadership role every time he opened his mouth. Quickly, the confirmed case-total soared beyond a million virus victims nationwide, and a death count two weeks later of 56,000 Americans.
Even with those numbers staring the polity in the face, Trump continued to pretend that there were beautiful escape hatches he could pull out of his hat — or, more likely, from a lower orifice of his body — which would balance out the truth of the constant bad news. The master of self-delusion.
So, nobody was all that surprised when he dove down into his brain’s magical-thinking pool and plugged for Clorox and Lysol as anti-coronavirus cleansing agents.
(Say, whatever happened to the 25th amendment?)
Since Trump supposedly can’t be indicted while he’s president (how about testing this assertion?), he realizes that he has to remain president or he’ll likely be living in a federal prison. Given his demonstrated preference for authoritarian rule, we can anticipate that he will do anything, legal or illegal, in his desperation to remain in the Oval Office.
Remember: Trump is a wounded animal in a corner; he’s dangerous. Conceivably, he might start a war, or attempt to cancel the November election because of the coronavirus pandemic
Stranger things are occurring all around us. (Which reminds me: Whatever happened to the 25th amendment?)#
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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D, was co-editor of The Crisis Papers website (2002-2018). He taught at Western Washington, San Diego State, and San Francisco State Universities, and was a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades. He’s the author of the just-released memoir, “Little Man Clapping” (Transformation Press).
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