Too Small for the Job

I was not a fan of 'W' as President. However, when tested by something few other world leaders or Presidents had to deal with during their tenure, he rose to the occasion and acted presidentially. He offered sober direction, provided leadership to *all* Americans, and swallowed his partisan leanings in favor of the common good as we rebuilt and came together after 9/11. He did, eventually, show his stripes when he fabricated a war with the middle east when none was warranted, but during the 9/11 crisis, he provided leadership and guidance.
45 has also been called to serve with an equally serious and testing event. His response so far has been to deflect, lie, and blame others. He specifically takes no responsibility for anything that has happened on his watch. The buck does NOT stop with him, but with some underling below him or somehow with a President that hasn't been in office in over 3 years and who specifically set up an organization to deal with just this sort of crisis, which 45 dismantled/fired.
Rather than calming words of succor for all Americans, his sense of leadership is to save the rich and the corporations and let the average American die. He has dragged his feet and looked for the chances to enrich himself. His petty grudges with individual state leadership have led him to act in vicious, dangerous ways that further harms the average American. It is hard not to come to the conclusion that he *wants* this pandemic to spread and kill as many people as possible, especially as it is strongly in those states he can't carry come November.
Even when other world leaders have been dealing with the same issue and shown what needs to be done to resolve it in the best and fastest ways possible, 45 has refused to follow that example. It is like he can't act presidentially even when shown a blueprint for success. He doesn't understand empathy, doesn't get the nuances of job, and can only understand fear, anger, and happiness. Which is probably why he likes authoritarian dictators so much; they use the emotions he understands in ways he understands them to lead. To him, they are good leaders because he can understand them. He doesn't get more subtle uses of power, moral leadership, doing what is right even when it is harder or he has less to gain from it.
All leaders are tasked with something big during their tenure. Most rise to the occasion. Some keep an even keel. And a few fail. Poor, overwhelmed Trump has proven incapable of leadership on his best days. Now that a true crisis has called on him to act, he has proven too small for the job.

Self-Isolation

I have been taking immune-suppressing medication for almost 25 years. For the first ten years, I saw a slow decline in my body's ability to fight infections. Then, that decline increased over the next five years. For the last almost ten years it has been fairly stable at, I'm guessing, between 60% and 75% of where it was pre-medications.

So, because of that, I have been practicing self-isolation for a long time. I don't go out to concerts, movies, or other large gatherings nearly as often as I used to. I ask my friends and family to stay away if they are sick or think they might be contagious. I wash my hands regularly. I clean the things I touch regularly (like keyboards, screens, pc mouse, telephones, etc.). Basically, I do most of the requirements for COVID-19 already because I have a weakened immune system. And my immune system isn't, really, all that bad; there are people with HIV/AIDS, who take cancer drugs, etc. who have it worse than I do.

As of this writing, I haven't actually left the house at all most days and haven't gone farther than my property line in 25 days. But that started before and will continue long after the current pandemic. It's just what I feel I have to do in order to stay healthy since so few people are conscious of just how sick or contagious they may be. I'm hopeful that this pandemic will teach people that they may be contagious without having symptoms of an illness, or may harm people if they don't stay at home when they do have symptoms, and that they should stay home and use those sick days their company provides. I'm hopeful that companies will start to realize they need to provide all workers with some amount of paid sick days to use going forward.

The end result being that I am amused when I read my friends and family being bored, having cabin fever, with the whole self-isolation deal we all must survive now. I've been practicing it for 15 years now! I play video games, so there's a big time sink. I like to both read and write, so there's more time. I enjoy movies and TV, so there's more time. When I'm feeling healthy enough, I like to ride my stationary bicycle. I play with the cats. I clean. I make meals. I play roleplaying games, including gamemastering for them (which takes a lot of preparation time). I've been exclusively working from home for over ten years now. If my wife doesn't remind me (or, rather, FORCE me) to leave the house every now and then, I can find that I haven't left it in literally months. It's just the way I'm built to stay as healthy as I can be.

Basically, I'm hoping this pandemic tells the world that we should be cognizant of and compassionate toward those who can't protect themselves from disease AND STAY HOME when we are sick. When you have the least bit of illness coming on, you should assume you are contagious and do what you have to in order to keep from making others sick. And businesses should encourage this behavior with time off and other policies -- the fewer people who are sick, the more productive they are. But Americans are taught to gut it out, to work through it, that if you aren't working 60+ hours a week, you are somehow doing less than you should be. The rest of the world has figured out that all this mentality means is a quick trip to the morgue, but Western culture insists on it. I'm hoping that changes.

There's Always One

America is the asshole. There's always one. We have, for too long, taken it for granted that we are somehow better, more capable, and a guiding light to the world. However, over the course of the last 30 years or so, we have lost that. We have let internal squabbles, strife, and partisanship take over. Now that a true world crisis is here, America is not only NOT leading, but we are also one of the best examples of what NOT to do!

America once led from the moral high ground. We always did what was morally right. Republicans introduced and got passed legislation to clean the air and water, both sides worked on social reinforcements, we all agreed that if we thought of the general people first, the rest would fall into place.

That started to change during Reagan's tenure. We started to shift the tax burden from the rich, who could afford it without it affecting their purchasing power, to the middle and lower classes, who felt the pinch. We started to roll back laws that protected people from businesses and from the government. We started to give everything to an elite few who, in turn, gave enough as was required to keep that tap flowing and to turn off all other taps.

Republicans stopped being interested in governing about 30 years ago. They became obsessed with power and money. Instead of governing and providing direction and a fiscally conservative long-term plan for the country and its people, they became singularly focused on gerrymandering, court-stacking, and taking as much money away from government assistance programs as possible. They especially targetted unions (which, while they have both good and bad points to them, were one of the primary reasons for the middle-class's constantly rising income level) and education (because if the masses were dumber, they wouldn't recognize nor fight the "elite's" more sinister power grabs).

This all culminated in the current Idiot in Chief, President Trump. What's funny is that he isn't even really the problem. He's a symptom of it. It is the succession of Newt Gingrinch to John Boehner to Mitch McConnell that is the problem. It is not having term limits which is the problem.

I have said before that the President is like the steering wheel of a car, Congress is the engine, and the Supreme Court is the brakes. The President sets the tone and direction for the country, Congress enacts laws to push the country in that direction, and the Supreme Court stops the laws that are not constitutional or that are flawed. Because the Republicans have been packing lower courts and gerrymandering for so long, they now have an over 90% incumbency rate in Congress, so the same people are always there, always furthering the party's goals while the President packs the courts with as many life-time appointments as he can. In addition, since Trump is so stupid, he is surrounded by people who can convince him to do nearly anything... so he has been openly racist, sexist, and money-hungry since entering office.

It's all biting back now, however. The world is in crisis and America is woefully underprepared for it. Trump canceled America's best hope at having a swift response when he allowed the pandemic response team, set up by Obama, to be fired and the office to be removed. He has systematically taken money from the CDC, FEMA, and other groups that could have stepped up and helped. He is consistently not paying any attention to what his experts tell him and consistently making the problem worse.

His only real contribution so far is to prop up the stock market... which is doing next to nothing to solve the problem. He is talking with business leaders and buying stock in their companies, a clear violation of emoluments, and then giving the wrong people tax breaks because he (or someone close to him) believes that, contrary to hundreds of years of evidence to the contrary, tax breaks will incentivize businesses to be better, to do what is needed, and to pass the savings on to the people. It hasn't happened yet.

Luckily, some in America ARE stepping up. Some smart people are no longer paying attention to President Idiot and are taking the reins and giving people real advice. Some of the more moderate oligarchs are putting money into places that will actually help. Businesses see that having the country collapse is bad for business, and are stepping in to do the exact opposite of what Trump says for the good of the country.

My hope is that people will see the current sham of a party that the Trump and the Republicans have become for what they are and will vote these idiots out of office in November. We need Republicans who, like in the past, wanted to help and govern the people from a place of fiscal conservatism but see that the people are the most important part. We need to see wholesale turnover in Congress on the Republican side so that the two sides of our bicameral system will start talking to each other again, start working together to get some progressive ideas and some conservative ideas passed. We need Congress to start looking out for ALL of the people again, instead of the wealthiest 1,000.

I just wish that a worldwide pandemic wasn't what was needed to wake people up. Now that it is here, let's hope that they learn from the issues and press for better leadership tomorrow.