04 May Is Germaphobia Trump’s Achilles Heel?
President Trump is a self-professed ‘germaphobe’—defined as “a person with extreme fear of germs…”.
He said so before he was even inaugurated—when he was early in the process of pointing out the ludicrous nature of the ‘golden showers’ dossier—i.e., he was noting that when he was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants, he warned everyone in his entourage that there are cameras everywhere…and so he wouldn’t have cavorted with Moscow prostitutes under any circumstances; plus he is a known germaphobe…and so he wouldn’t engage in something so obviously un-hygienic as was inferred by the ‘golden showers’ narrative.
The Russia collusion hoax based on the bogus dossier obviously did not take Trump down. But Trump’s admitted germaphobia may in fact be his Achilles heel of vulnerability in resolving the coronavirus crisis and surviving as a successful President.
America’s survival as a free country is in a very practical way hanging on the speed and breadth of economic re-opening and recovery. But what is holding back the pace and breadth of reopening is continued fear of the coronavirus—which is in a circular sort of way propped up by the very dramatic actions taken by the Trump administration to lockdown the country as the best means of combatting the virus.
Stated another way, the American people are having trouble shedding their fear by this very simple but logical reasoning: “if the US government and US national health authorities engineered a national lockdown as the necessary remedy and scared the rest of the world into following suit into a global lockdown, Covid-19 MUST be extremely serious, perhaps even more serious than the government is willing to publicly admit. And if that’s the case, we should re-open very slowly.”
Under this reasoning, so long as President Trump remains committed to the rightness of the initial diagnosis by Fauci/Birx and the rightness of the actions taken on their recommendations, the national fear will not subside quickly. And so long as the fear continues, leftist officeholders around the country will be able to piggyback onto that fear and justify extended lockdowns or simply justify moving very slowly and cautiously in re-opening the economy.
Case in point: Oregon’s leftist Governor has extended the state’s lockdown until July 6th—and this is in a state of 4 million people with around 100 coronavirus deaths. How can she get away with this? Oregonians are so far not willing to engage in civil disobedience on a scale to force her hand. And President Trump, whether he realizes it or not, has rendered himself largely impotent to pressure her, so long as she professes concern about the health safety of the people of Oregon. Even if President Trump tries the financial hardball of conditioning various bailout funds on re-opening, she’ll have the moral high ground to push back—how dare you condition government help on exposing our people to such an admittedly dangerous disease too soon?
Back to Trump’s germaphobia.
We made the case nearly two weeks ago that President Trump needed to admit the federal government overreacted. Since then, data continues to pile up in support of that point.
President Trump surely knows this, and so we have assumed his unwillingness to admit the overreaction was either out of bizarre loyalty to Fauci/Birx/Gates, or a political calculation that he simply can’t risk admitting a ‘mistake’ of this magnitude by his administration in this election year. (We think such a political calculation would itself be a mistake, as the American people—not the MSM, but the people—would be quick to forgive him as the recipient of well-meaning but wrong advice from health ‘experts’. And he wouldn’t even have to ‘admit’ or dwell on the original mistake; he could just focus on the reality that intervening data has shown that whether the medical advice was right or wrong at the outset, we now know enough to not stay ‘stuck on stupid’.)
But here is where being a germaphobe may be Trump’s undoing. He may in fact NOT trust the data that shows the risk was overstated; he may really believe the lockdown saved hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of lives; he may really believe pouring billions into an “Operation Warp Speed” for an iffy vaccine is the only real answer to putting the coronavirus crisis behind America.
That’s certainly the way he is behaving, most recently in the Fox News townhall at the Lincoln Memorial.
If that’s what President Trump really believes, America is in serious, serious danger. Because the left is always going to be the left; their objective is to destroy the American economy and way of life as a way to make America embrace godless collectivism in some form. So they have never cared whether the lockdown was well-grounded medically; they only care that it lasts and lasts and lasts until economic death and destruction and depression have been achieved. If Trump helps move toward that goal because he’s too afraid of the virus himself, then great, that just allows the left to stay out of the spotlight of criticism and suspicion.
We don’t know how to make a germaphobe into less of a germaphobe, or into a ‘non-germaphobe’—which is what most Americans are. About all that can be hoped is that Trump’s instincts for self-preservation as a President and his love for America will finally suppress ‘virus fear’ as the driver of his thinking.
Or maybe just apply a dose of truth and logic:
The Fauci/Birx predictive models were clearly wrong; the initial diagnosis of the lethality of COVID-19 was clearly wrong; the prescription of a national lockdown as the right remedy was clearly wrong. Intervening data proves all this. THEREFORE, the continued lockdown of America—anywhere and everywhere—must be lifted, immediately.
Mr. President, you can be a germaphobe in your private life. But America as a whole isn’t a germaphobe, and doesn’t want to be. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Let’s get re-opened, NOW.
Eric Georgatos and wife Debbie operate the America, Can We Talk? media platform, with 4 day a week video podcasting by Debbie, and weekly written commentary, all centered around the importance and value of preserving America under her founding ideals.