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This Easy Essay was written shortly after President Trump

  ~ still pretending to be President ~ 

delivered his National Address to the Nation about the Pandemic Virus.

 

“I’ll Be Damned! . . .”

By LeRoy Chatfield

Not to worry, I know the score!

I am 85-years old and understand full well that some day I will die and  perhaps that  some day  will  arrive sooner than I hoped for.  Who of us can predict the day or the hour of our death? Yes,  everyone has to die and I suppose thc coronavirus is as good – or as bad  a something – as anything else to die from. 

But yesterday when I read that before Trump agreed to give his 10-minute national address to the nation to tell us what his administration was going to do to prortcct  us from the pandemic virus, he insisted that Jared Kushner – his dimwit son-in-law – had to approve the plan  and  write his speech.

Jared Kushner?  Spare me! Spare us!

 Just as you would expect,  Kushner wrote a 10-minute speech for his father-in-law that was self-congratulatory, misleading,  over-promising, fact-challenged and confusing  even to the point of being contradictory. And for whatever  reason – perhaps he was just pissed off about being badgered to do something he really did not want to do  – the president adopted a disinterested, bored and peevish sounding monotone voice to spit out the words of his presidential address delivered from the iconic White House Oval Office.

I was stunned!  I felt like someone I barely knew had just given me the finger and expected me to respond in kind. It was a public relations disaster!  Apparently the national audience felt so too because the stock market – Trump’s personal barometer of approval – went to hell!

What to do now?  Jared again to the rescue!   Change the venue, change the subject!

Two days later Trump was escorted  to the White House Rose Garden to serve as a Master of Ceremonies to introduce selected corporate CEO’s to the National Press Corps so that each in turn could say a few words about their serious resolve to help the president defeat the pandemic virus now sweeping across our nation infecting and killing Americans. 

And to show this time the president really meant business he  issued a National Emergency Declaration that would free  up billions – yes, maybe even tens of billions of dollars – that could be used to buck up the economy that, even as I  write this,  is being dangerously undermined by the pandemic virus.   Just the mention of untold billions of dollars that might soon be released was  financial music for the Captains of Wall Street and they showed  instant appreciation by arranging for stocks to close higher  that day – the public relations fix was in.

(Alas, Trump  scored big, until he didn’t!  On the following Monday, when the Stock Market next opened, it closed down 3,000 points!)

(Back to the Rose Garden)).

 At the conclusion of the  event, a reporter had the nerve to ask Trump whether he took any responsibility for the lag in the coronavirus testing?

A NASTY question, he said, but immediately answered: “I don’t take responsibility at all!

 You did not misread what I wrote:  “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

 Think about it!  If a duly elected president of the United States takes no responsibility for what happens in his/her administration, whose responsibility is it?  Who is in charge?  Jared?

In the 1940s, President Harry Truman  defined presidential leadership for the nation  by pointing to a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read:  “The Buck Stops Here”.

Every subsequent U.S. president  –  all eleven of them –  Eisenhower; Kennedy; Johnson; Nixon; Ford; Carter; Reagan; H.W. Bush; Clinton; W.Bush; and Obama  accepted Truman’s definition of presidential leadership.

  I dare say, “The Buck Stops Here” has become an historical  part of our nation’s secular scripture.

Trump says otherwise – “I don’t take responsibility at all!”

 OK! I am going to die, fine!  But I’ll be damned if I am going to die from something that Trump’s nitwit son-in-law has anything to do with. I don’t wish for much but this is one humiliation bridge I refuse to cross!

Dear Reader: should I fail to survive this plague I am counting on you to   create for me some serious distance and a bit of obituary-cover from the Trump family grifters.   

I don’t ask much. For example, you might say something like:

“ In his old age – for the sake of his children, grandchildren, friends, neighbors, and colleagues –  he resisted  as best   he could, and tried to warn all who would listen about of the dangers of our nation’s sudden drift to fascism because it  undermines our shared belief that in our democracy,  no person is above the law, and contradicts our nation’s founding ideals   that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, including  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

 Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Compiled/Published by LeRoy Chatfield
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