Fading sunshine outside this early-evening Thursday here in California’s Central Valley, the end of 2020 now just a few hours away. In the backyard, all quiet (Merced city traffic in the distance, the exception) but for a gaggle of birds chirping madly away hidden behind a small thicket of bamboo — nice.

Meanwhile, maybe we’re getting closer to the final hours of the T-Rump, too, and soon we won’t have to put up with the asshole, and he’ll be just an ugly history spot on our calendar of life. However, we still have him and the rampaging COVID pandemic and his tone-deaf-blindness of what is actually going on around him — the chaos, confusion and death he has intensified by his actions.
This afternoon, he released a five-minute speech from the White House posted to Twitter in which he claimed nonsense in the face of 327,000 dead Americas:

“Over and over again, we were told it would be impossible to deliver a vaccine by the end of the year,” Trump said.
“All of the experts said, ‘Absolutely unthinkable. Trump is exaggerating. It can’t happen.’ And we did it. … Years from now, they’ll be talking about it. They’ll be talking about this great, great thing that we did with the vaccines.”

The president added, “The world will benefit. We’ll benefit. And everybody’s calling to thank me.”

many people are saying pic.twitter.com/yS5d6EVf2n

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 31, 2020

What a lying piece of shit. Complete bunk.
In a coincidence of contradicting reality, a major piece late this afrernoon at The New York Times spells out how the T-Rump is such an odorous, inhumane asshole, he couldn’t accept advisors, or even family recommendations on how to handle the virus  — go read the whole, long article (behind a paywall, but I get on once-in-a-while, don’t know how that works) as if really describes a totally bungling mess:

“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19.
“I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”

Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate.
But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.

And on that day he was especially furious after being informed by Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, that it would be days before the government could give emergency approval to the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, something Mr. Trump was eager to promote as a personal victory going into the Republican National Convention the following week.

“They’re Democrats! They’re against me!” he said, convinced that the government’s top doctors and scientists were conspiring to undermine him.
“They want to wait!”

Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?

Worse the single-minded center of his actions, he couldn’t handle any guidance from anything, or anyone:

The result, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and others in contact with the White House, was a lose-lose situation.
Mr. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.

Efforts by his aides to persuade him to promote mask wearing, among the simplest and most effective ways to curb the spread of the disease, were derailed by his conviction that his political base would rebel against anything that would smack of limiting their personal freedom.
Even his own campaign’s polling data to the contrary could not sway him.

His explicit demand for a vaccine by Election Day — a push that came to a head in a contentious Oval Office meeting with top health aides in late September — became a misguided substitute for warning the nation that failure to adhere to social distancing and other mitigation efforts would contribute to a slow-rolling disaster this winter.

COVID choked him:

Weeks after his own recovery, he would still complain about the nation’s preoccupation with the pandemic.

“All you hear is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” Mr. Trump said at one campaign stop, uttering the word 11 times.
…
Mr. Kushner, who along with Hope Hicks, another top adviser, had been trying for months to convince Mr. Trump that masks could be portrayed as the key to regaining freedom to go safely to a restaurant or a sporting event, called embracing mask-wearing a “no-brainer.”

Mr. Kushner had some reason for optimism. Mr. Trump had agreed to wear one not long before for a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after finding one he believed he looked good in: dark blue, with a presidential seal.

But Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff — backed up by other aides including Stephen Miller — said the politics for Mr. Trump would be devastating.
…
When Mr. Trump returned from the hospital, his communications aides, with the help of Ivanka Trump, his daughter, urged him to deliver a national address in which he would say: “I had it. It was tough, it kicked my ass, but we’re going to get through it.”

He refused, choosing instead to address a boisterous campaign rally for himself from the balcony of the White House overlooking the South Lawn.
…
Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, briefed the president this fall on a Japanese study documenting the effectiveness of face masks, telling him: “We have the proof. They work.”
But the president resisted, criticizing Mr. Kushner for pushing them and again blaming too much testing — an area Mr. Kushner had been helping to oversee — for his problems.

“I’m going to lose,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kushner during debate preparations.
“And it’s going to be your fault, because of the testing.”
…
Some of the doctors on the task force, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, were reluctant to show up in person at the White House, worried that the disdain there for mask wearing and social distancing would leave them at risk of infection.

And a scenario to where we are now:

The debates inside the White House increasingly revolved around Dr. Atlas, who had no formal training in infectious diseases but whose views — which Mr. Trump saw him deliver on Fox News — appealed to the president’s belief that the crisis was overblown.

Scott Atlas is/was a professor of neuroradiology, medicine through x-rays, radio waves, whatnot, but with absolutely-no virus/respiratory background. The T-Rump saw him on Fox News, pullled him aboard in August. Atlas played the ‘herd immunity’ card like someone with no conscience.
He resigned the White House at the end of November.

Happy New Year (again h/t BJ):

Remember: if you decide to ignore social distancing by attending large parties on New Years Eve, don't act surprised when this uninvited guest strolls through the door. ????? pic.twitter.com/zCUpHCsJQC

— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) December 30, 2020

‘And days of auld lang syne?’

(Illustration: Salvador Dalí’s 1958 painting, “Meditative Rose,” found here).