About a week ago, President Trump added Dr. Scott Atlas to the Coronavirus Task Force. Dr. Atlas is not an epidemiologist or public health expert. His main qualification, far as I can tell, is that he was a Fox News fixture who agreed with the president regarding almost everything Covid-related.
As the months of the Trump presidency pass, what strikes me most vividly is the imperviousness of the man and his base to any kind of disconfirmation. He and his base absolutely refuse to acknowledge when he's been wrong, even when it's startlingly, absurdly clear. Dr. Atlas has been carefully vetted. He will not be telling the president that he is wrong.
I'm a sports handicapper. I am, in a good year, correct 58 to 60 percent of the time. That means 40 percent of the time I am dead wrong, provably incorrect. In the most overpowering, magical years of my life, I have been publicly wrong a third of the time. And, on rare but real occasions, I've had seasons where I was wrong more often than I was right. There's no escaping my wrongness. My partners know when I'm wrong. They and I have email records. The public usually has known when I'm wrong, either through public contests or published records with monitors. The sports books I use have permanent records of the results. I can't just invent a different reality. I have been forced to confront my numerous mistakes and bad judgements every day of every season for 40 professional years and 10 years preceding that.
What must it be like, I wonder, to go through life pretending to be an expert in all things, and to be able to ignore or jettison all disconfirming evidence? Eventually, one might come to believe in one's omniscience. Living life in the service of propping up one's omniscience would be an adventure. That kind of modus operandi would require periodic wholesale roster changes in both the public and private personnel surrounding you. People who became aware of your errors would have to be discarded. Disconfirming voices would have to be shifted out of one's auditory range.
I mention all of this because the Republican National Convention has begun. Who will the Republicans trot before the cameras? A parade of B-list sycophants and Trump family members doesn't really impress. Sycophants rarely do. Realistically, the roster for an average Celebrity Apprentice season would have higher Q ratings than whoever the GOP sends to the podiums. More high profile, successful Republicans spoke at the Democratic convention than will speak at the Republican. What will the GOP do for ratings? Recruit a bunch of Fox News celebrities?
Hammering home the idea that Covid-19 is on the run and all is well in America should make for a very curious and tone deaf Republican presentation, sort of like broadcasting a cruise on a Scientology sea org. Out of touch with the outside world because that's become both the mission and the means to stay in charge.
With the announcement that President Trump will more or less be hosting all four days of the convention, things have gotten increasingly curious. It suggests at least three distinct things. First, the roster of GOP standard bearers is a bit thin. Second, Trump doesn't really trust anyone else to keep the backbone of the themes intact for multiple nights. He doesn't trust anyone else's salesmanship. Third, one of the probable reasons for the thin Republican speaking roster is that people don't want to tie themselves to the president. They are willing to cede the limelight to the Trump family because if the convention is perceived as an absurd bust, it's largely on the Trumps.
Thus, the president is going to put in multiple shifts. How can someone who was so absolutely wrong about something of crucial importance step onto a stage night after night and fake that he did a good job? How can you say (as Trump did on February 26),"You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero" or (on February 28), "It's going to disappear," and then say, with a straight face, that everything is going according to plan? How do you do that? A hundred years from now, improv troupes will be training with the scene, "You were president, and you said the virus would disappear. Now it's six months later, and 180,000 are dead. Go with it!"
If the GOP had any honor, we'd see a seppuku convention finale. Instead, we'll get a political party on roller skates flailing as they try to put lipstick on flying pigs. Sixty million Americans will be duly impressed.
Loyalty to a party is one thing. Loyalty to a circus is another. All that clown makeup, those safety net pardons, the brutal stench from piles of pachyderm excrement; it's all a bit much. Living under the orange big top is for those either too blind to find their way out or those paid extremely well to follow the elephants with a shovel.
Bob Dietz
August 24, 2020
