Raining this early-evening Saturday here on this tiny patch of California’s Central Valley. Outside just now smoking a small bit of a Black&Mild under the backyard-lawn umbrella, the ambiance was nice, a tad maybe on the fairy-tale side, too.
Contrast greatly the reality of our predicament, and this actuality of how we got here (h/t BJ):

Hannity. Rush. Dobbs. Ingraham. Pirro. Nunes. Tammy. Geraldo. Doocy. Hegseth. Schlapp. Siegel. Watters. Dr. Drew. Henry. Ainsley. Gaetz. Inhofe. Pence. Kudlow. Conway. Trump.

Today, we salute the Heroes of the Pandumbic. pic.twitter.com/35WLDgoHcf

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 3, 2020

I can’t watch the T-Rump for any amount of time. Clips mostly from twitter feeds is about all I can handle, especially of his crazy-ass daily blubberings on the coronavirus, which is shitty at way-best. The creep proves day after day he’s a sociopathic criminal and a danger to everybody on the planet.
Today was no exception — a summation via The Daily Beast:

President Donald Trump on Saturday spent much of his daily press briefing on the coronavirus raging against perceived enemies, from the media, to the Ukraine whistleblower, to the recently ousted commander of a Navy aircraft carrier.

On the same day the U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic surpassed 8,000, Trump opened the briefing with a slam at the media, which he accused of “spreading false rumors.”
“Get this over with, then go back to your fake news,” Trump said.
…
In addition to backing the Navy’s decision to ax Crozier, Trump appeared to mock him for daring to sound the alarm about the virus.

“I thought it looked terrible what he did, to write a letter,” Trump said.
“This is not a class on literature.”

He went on to take aim at the governors of states that have been hit hard by the coronavirus, claiming without evidence that the states were asking for more equipment than they needed.
Trump singled out New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, claiming that the estimates that New York will need 40,000 ventilators were overestimates.

“40,000, think of it,” Trump said.
“40,000. It’s not possible. They won’t need that many.”

He also blubbered this (the Guardian):

“Breaking news last night, you know that you saw that, where I think the probable presidential candidate for the Democrats will be Joe Biden, and he agreed that I was correct when I stopped people from China very early from coming into our country,” Trump says.

Shortly after, a reporter asks the president to comment on Biden’s tweet from roughly an hour ago, where the former vice-president said Trump “is not responsible for the coronavirus, but he is responsible for failing to prepare our nation to respond to it”.

Says Trump: “He didn’t write that. That was done by a Democrat operative. He doesn’t write. He’s probably not even watching right now. And if he is, he doesn’t understand what he’s watching.”

He adds: “They released [the tweet] at a strange time. Sort of strange time to release something like that, but he admitted I was right.”

Asshole!
In his way, the T-Rump might be working on a way-more sinister motive, other than just being a cruel, mean-spirited incompetent shithead to enlighten his wealth — maybe sitting his ass up as a king, or more like it, another Kim Jong-un in the making. I mentioned a similar approach in my post last Monday on the authoritarian shift in Hungary and the powers granted Viktor Orban. Groundwork for our future?

In that same vein, a most-readable piece by Lucian K. Truscott IV at Salon this morning on the T-Rump’s antics leading to a big move — main points:

Trump’s motives at this point are, for want of a better word, sinister.
He appears to be using the playbook of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, readying the ground for an election that will have two candidates but only one possible outcome.
What we are seeing in Trump’s nightly lies and obfuscations and denunciations of Democrats and the media is the beginnings of a Trumpian totalitarianism.

He has seized control of the political debate using his nightly virus press conferences, which are more frequent and last longer than his political rallies.
He is gaining control over the media in his choices of whose questions he accepts, taking questions from friendly outlets and belittling outfits like NBC, CNN and PBS. (The New York Times and the Washington Post have stopped sending reporters to the briefings, covering them from outside the press room.)
He has gone against rules agreed to by the White House Correspondents’ Association by allowing the alleged “reporter” from the OANN network to attend every briefing while representatives of other news organizations have to cycle in and out on a schedule set by rules according to social distancing needs.
…
But perhaps most remarkably, Trump is using the strictures necessary to control the virus as a form of participation in mass passivity.
In her classic book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt pointed to fear of terror as a tool used by totalitarian regimes to control populations.
“Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible,” Arendt wrote.

For “depopulation” read “deaths,” and with victims of the virus in the tens of thousands and potentially headed for more than a million, Trump has his hands on one of the key levers of totalitarian rule.
You can see it nightly on his face.
People talk about Trump’s “lack of empathy,” but as the bodies pile up, I think what we see in Trump is the delight of a dictator in the making.
For every dead body wheeled into the back of a refrigerated truck, Trump sees a hundred frightened voters who can be manipulated into adoration of their fearless leader.

But we can beat this worthless lying scum-sucking bastard in November.
There are more of us than there are of them, and we can win if Democrats get angry and stay angry and get out the vote.
The coronavirus focuses this election like no election before.
We can talk about abstract ideas like income inequality, and we can point to real problems like global warming and the need for universal health care, but tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dead bodies will rally the Democratic Party and vote this murdering bastard out of office.
We don’t have to play by the old Chicago rules and “vote the graveyard.”
All we have to do is remember those who have been sacrificed to this despicable man’s criminal lying and dereliction of duty.
Then we need to turn out and vote.

Read the whole piece, etc., kind of eye-opening, a fairy-tale of trepidation…

(Illustration: ‘Donald Trump,’ by Adam Khabibi, found here).