America is flunking its cognitive assessment
We should be relieved that President Donald Trump claims he “aced” his cognitive assessment, including what he calls the “very hard” last five questions. Such as:
• Identifying the similarity between a train and a bicycle.
• Repeating the sentence: “The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room.”
• And naming at least 11 words beginning with the letter “F” in one minute.
Forgive me for finding fun and frivolity in our fearless first minister’s feeble self-flattery, for his felicitous finesse, fluid facility and firm familiarity with F-words, far from folly, are fully fitting, and fundamentally and fantastically fortuitous.
The real question is whether we, as a nation, could pass a cognitive assessment test. At the moment, we’re struggling with the national equivalent of distinguishing a lion from a rhinoceros: 17.8 million Americans are without jobs — but Trump is pushing to cut payroll taxes for those who already have jobs.
Unemployment assistance has held off a wave of evictions, foreclosures and mass hunger — but Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing to cut it.
Schools need new funds so that they can protect teachers and students from the virus if they reopen their doors — but Trump threatened to withhold money from schools if they don’t open.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are struggling to contain the virus and to get remedies to the public — but Trump seeks to phase out funding for both, as well as for testing and contact tracing, ABC News reports.
The federal government poured trillions of dollars into coronavirus recovery legislation, and tens of millions of Americans sheltered in their homes to limit the spread — only for the country to squander both by reopening too soon without following public health guidelines.
State and local governments are hemorrhaging cash as they fight the virus — but instead of providing them relief, congressional Republicans are focused on protecting private businesses from lawsuits if they make workers sick.
Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and others are gradually returning to normal after suppressing the virus - but the United States is setting records for new infections: Roughly 900 people are dying from the virus every day, and week-long testing delays make it near impossible to quarantine those infected and to trace their contacts.
Trump has stopped attending coronavirus task force meetings because he does not have the time, aides told The Washington Post - but he continued to play golf and to raise campaign money. (He apparently found time and will resume briefings Tuesday.)
Trump told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that the United States has the “number one low mortality rate” — then provided a chart that did not support the claim.
Trump said he was not seeking to discredit the government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci — then called him an “alarmist.”
Trump said Sunday that federal police have been mobilized in Portland, Ore., (against the wishes of state and local authorities) to “protect Federal property” from “anarchists and agitators” — nine days after Trump pardoned two men serving sentences for arson that burned 139 acres of federal property in Oregon in a case that inspired armed militias to seize federal land.
Trump’s secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, says the Portland operation is to stop “lawless” behavior — achieved by firing tear gas at nonviolent protesters and having unidentified officers throwing demonstrators into unmarked vans without charges.
Trump attributes a recent flareup in violence in U.S. cities to Democratic mayors — who have been running these same cities for decades. He promises to provide evidence that Democratic challenger Joe Biden proposes to “abolish” the police — then fails to provide the evidence. He says he won’t label Biden “senile” — then says Biden “doesn’t know he’s alive” and is “mentally shot.”
Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone seemed to say Saturday during a radio interview with an African American host that he couldn’t believe he was “arguing with this Negro” — then he told the New York Times that he didn’t say the “epitaph,” and that it wasn’t a slur anyway.
And one-time Trump fan Kanye West, now mounting his own quixotic presidential bid, held a campaign event Saturday at which he said Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves,” but rather had them “work for other white people.”
No, our national cognitive assessment is not promising. But now come the “very hard” last questions:
Will Republicans, in these final months before the election, find the elusive courage to disavow Trump’s madness?
Will the people reject him and his enablers in 106 days?
And, if Trump loses, will all Americans insist he do what he refused to commit to on Sunday: honor the will of the people?
If not, we will have earned ourselves a big, fat F.