Hi Jason,

Except for this: “I don’t think Trump is mentally ill.” Your points are well made, especially this:

“He royally f*cked up containment and mitigation measures are failing;”

Trump is a flaming headcase (lives in his own reality) but sadly that may be the least threat he poses to our country and to the health, safety and well-being of all Americans.

The cost of shutting down the economy for longer than a month or two is substantially more than the cost of letting the hospitals and the healthcare system getting overwhelmed and overrun. The reason why the stock market is precipitously dropping every day and the Fed is going all-in is because things are much, much worse than they are revealing to us. They must have crunched the numbers, and the states cannot afford the future unemployment payments, the pension funds cannot afford the market to crash 70-90%, the federal government cannot afford to bet more than than a $2T stimulus (10% of the economy).

In every war, there are casualties. I believe that Trump has decided to sacrifice the elderly and the healthcare workers in this war. He royally f*cked up containment and mitigation measures are failing; they aren’t even being followed by the American people and many also don’t want to follow them. A lot of the things they do in Asia cannot be done here because people care a lot more about freedom to do whatever they want without consequences than the good of the collective. My mom could very well die from this, but this is the country we live in, for better or for worse.

The best thing is to lock down for a month, then protect the vulnerable and get people back to work and protect jobs. Unemployment is already nearing 30%. This is unprecedented. The worse case if we overextend the lockdown isn’t like 2008, it’s like Venezuela. […]

I forgot about his businesses losing money. Plus they shut down Mar a largo last week too. I just read Trump is listening to Jared Kushner now and not Dr. Fauci anymore.

Protecting Life Is More Important Than ‘The Economy’

The “wartime” president already wants to surrender:

Trump began talking privately late last week about reopening the nation, despite the swiftly rising number of coronavirus cases and against the advice of health professionals, because he’s worried about the economic damage from an extended shutdown, according to people familiar with his thinking.

The government has the means to lessen the severity of economic contraction through its own spending to support workers and businesses through this shutdown, but it cannot raise victims of the outbreak from the dead. Putting “the economy” ahead of protecting the lives of Americans who are most at risk of serious illness and death is an awful idea, and it has to be rejected. […] Daniel Larison, TAC writer, Mar. 23, 2020

Lol…”wartime” president…smh! I still can’t get over that one.