A day after shaking hands with healthcare execs, Trump calls for “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

Despite being exposed to the coronavirus during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Brazillian officials last weekend, Donald Trump spent yesterday shaking hands, patting backs and touching the microphone at the White House lectern at least 31 times, according to The Washington Post.

All of that made the tweet that he sent this morning all the more…ironic? Hypocritical? Inexplicable? All of the above?

It was apparently a phrase that he finally picked up on after attending a meeting at the White House on the virus with officials from state and local governments on the frontlines of the health crisis — a meeting that he was careful to twice remind people that he was attending after false reports that he would spend yet another weekend playing golf at one of his resorts circulated on social media earlier in the day.

Trump fired America’s pandemic response team. Demand he reassemble it to confront the coronavirus pandemic immediately!

While the suspicions that Trump would be golfing yet again proved to be unfounded, the worsening spread of the pandemic and the ensuing economic travails and panic hoarding of essential goods seemed to be far from his mind earlier in the morning when he attempted a spin that would have surely earned him high marks from Olympic scorers had he been able to stick the landing.

In the face of a week of stock market gyrations that brought the major indexes into bear territory and largely erased most of the gains made during the course of his administration, Trump — seeing his boasts of a strong economy that he was counting on using as his primary ticket to reelection slowly circling the drain — bragged about the market’s rebound yesterday.

In Trump’s mind, history began in October of 2008 when the market last rebounded by a larger percentage.

Oddly, he fails to mention that the markets had to halt trading twice this week because of failsafe mechanisms that click in when the panicked selling begins a freefall and that the indices are all still well below where they were last week.

The all-caps tweet displays the empathy-free president’s true concerns about the coronavirus epidemic that the world is waiting to see whether he himself would fall victim to after his documented exposure to an infected contact.

After weeks of downplaying concerns about a virus that he said would go away as the weather got warmer and that he had done everything necessary to combat the spread of in the United States, Trump was forced to confront the rude intrusion of reality into his carefully constructed fantasy world as his performance as chief executive was found sorely lacking and markets responded accordingly.

Naturally, Trump would jump on the market rebound — which financial analysts largely attribute to stimulus efforts by nations around the world who slashed interest rates and bought up government bonds as well as the congressional efforts to pass a coronavirus relief bill yesterday — as a positive result of his efforts. Yet in truth, it only demonstrates his single-minded focus on the political fallout from his administration’s inept response to the health emergency and its effect on his campaign.

America deserves so much better.

As we await the results of the COVID-19 test that the president finally agreed to last night, America finally has had a chance to see how the president performs when he’s faced with a crisis that he can’t bully or sue into submission. Hopefully, the glimpse of his total inability to deal with the crisis will finally open the eyes of some of his true believers and lead to a resounding defeat at the polls in November, if irony doesn’t overtake him before then.

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Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.