The Damn Narcissistic Sociopath

This time, the Washington Post buried the lede in this morning's article on the lack of a plan for fighting the coronavirus.  Many paragraphs deep we read this, under the header "Let This Wash Over":

During one task force meeting in the Situation Room last month, Trump turned to Fauci and challenged him.

It was the day the administration was adding Ireland and the United Kingdom to its travel restrictions, and Trump wanted to understand why talk of “herd immunity” — allowing the coronavirus to sweep a nation largely unchecked, with the belief that those who survived would then be immune — was such a bad idea.

“Why don’t we let this wash over the country?” Trump asked, according to two people familiar with his comments, a question other administration officials say he has raised repeatedly in the Oval Office.

Fauci initially seemed confused by the term “wash over” but became alarmed once he understood what Trump was asking.

“Mr. President, many people would die,” Fauci said.  (our emphasis)

"So what?!" the man with no conscience or empathy didn't say but was likely thinking.

Well, it would certainly fit his general profile. 

The New York Times this morning:

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen. 

Once again, apparently not:

• Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
• The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
• Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

It should not surprise anyone at this point that the damn narcissistic sociopath was repeatedly warned about the pandemic about to hit our country and placed his own interests above the lives of millions of Americans. Meanwhile, he's out there lying about what he knew and when he knew it, giving himself the best "marks" on his handling of the crisis and desperately trying to deflect, distract and avoid responsibility for his criminal negligence.  His overweening urge to "open the economy" (as if he has the power to do that unilaterally) against the advice of medical experts is continuing evidence of his narcissistic disregard for anyone but himself, as one who sees the economy as his make- or- break re- election insurance policy for avoiding prosecution and continued looting of the country.

But there's blood on his hands and it will never wash off.