Musing
Oh he was just thinking aloud.
After several days in which state public health officials have rushed to issue urgent warnings to Americans about the dangers of ingesting disinfectants, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, sidestepped the opportunity to amplify that message Sunday.
Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper what the American people should know about disinfectants and the human body, she instead defended the President’s tendency to muse aloud about his ideas as he processes new information, and suggested that the media had missed the point of the White House presentation.
Birx noted that when Trump made the remark Thursday, he was engaged in a “dialogue” with William Bryan, the acting head of science at the Department of Homeland Security, about a study detailing the use of light and disinfectants to help kill the coronavirus on surfaces.
Now wait just a god damn minute here. Trump was talking to the press, on camera, with much of the country watching. That’s not the time or place for him to have a clueless “dialogue” with one dude about injecting disinfectants and “light” into our bodies. You don’t have a dialogue with Party B by addressing Party A even if Party B is still in the room, and you sure as hell don’t do it when you’re addressing the press and the country during a pandemic.
Someone I know, now happily divorced, was married to a chap who was an ignorant redneck, and when he came out with his stupid, ignorant, racist opinions would “explain” them or soften them or in other ways try to make them sound less shameful and foul than they were. Thus Dr Birx. It’s trying and embarrassing for the explaining party.
From Sense and Sensibility
“Ferrars!” repeated Miss Steele; “Mr. Ferrars is the happy man, is he? What! your sister-in-law’s brother, Miss Dashwood? a very agreeable young man to be sure; I know him very well.”
“How can you say so, Anne?” cried Lucy, who generally made an amendment to all her sister’s assertions. “Though we have seen him once or twice at my uncle’s, it is rather too much to pretend to know him very well.”
(Lucy says of Anne that she cannot hold her tongue. Ditto Trump.)
Just remembering the time I was at a meeting about the seismic retrofit of a large and very heavily used public building, when my boss’s boss’s boss said something like ‘hm, can’t we just prop it up with wooden posts or something?’ Made me wonder why I bothered to go to engineering school.
Trump fires anybody who fails to run this kind of interference with the press for him.
So Brix has a choice: either learn to brown-nose like Pence, or give up the job.
Presumably, she thinks she can do more good in the job than out, or she wouldn’t have taken it in the first place.
You could argue that the harm she does by covering for Trump outweighs whatever good she can do as coronavirus response coordinator, but that’s her call, not ours.
Keep in mind that if Trump boots her, then either
– the job goes unfilled (like many in the administration) or
– Trump replaces her with someone who will do what she won’t (cover for him)
So standing on principle doesn’t make the problem go away.
Steven#14
I think standing on principle can work, depending on the way you go about it. Dr Brix, as you call her, might try dropping a few brix. By standing up, politely extracting the microphone from the drumpfkopf, and then telling the assembled minitude and the TV cameras that the drumpfkopf is out of its tiny little mind and is talking dangerous nonsense and that she is resigning on the spot because she cannot work for a dangerous, disgusting fool any more, and then walking out.
Tim Harris,
In what sense would that “work”? For whom? I mean, you and I would enjoy the spectacle, but what would it accomplish? Trump is still going to be president through at least January 2021 — your hypothetical stunt by Brix wouldn’t cause Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, and it’s not going to lead to another impeachment with removal. I doubt it would move the needle in terms of the election. It’ll be a cable news cause celebre for a week, during which Trump loyalists will explain that Brix was a Deep State Democrat who chose to sabotage the Dear Leader rather than do her job. Trump will replace her with someone more sycophantic and almost certainly less qualified. Hell, he might hire Dr. Oz for all we know. It’ll turn up the heat on Dr. Fauci, as reporters try to ask him what he thought about Brix’s comments.
Not sure it would do much for Brix personally. She’d be tossing away a career in public health; I don’t think even Democratic governors or future presidents would be that eager to hire someone who was willing to undermine her boss like that. I’m sure she’d find an income somehow, either as a practitioner or as a cable news contributor/author of tell-all book, but that isn’t everyone’s dream.
Seems like a cool fantasy but, you know, easy for you or me to say.
Yes, doubtless you are right, Screechy Monkey, but I do think that if there were more people willing to resign publicly (by which I don’t mean doing as I suggested Birx might do), as opposed to trying to be the adults in the room doing damage-control until Trump decides to drop them when he’s tired of them or because he feels they haven’t been sufficiently loyal, it might have some effect.
I think that people like Mattis and McMaster should have either declined Trump’s offer or resigned at some point. All they did was lend their credibility to him, and squander their reputations. Trump would get some lesser hack to fill the role, and while the government might be a little more dysfunctional, it’s not likely to hurt anyone.
I think the calculus is a little different for the people who are working on the pandemic response. We really do need competent people in there. Obviously if it gets to a point that you can’t accomplish anything because of Trump’s interference then yes, you should resign. But if it’s just a matter of stifling a grimace during his press conferences, I can see the rationale for doing so.
Dear Screechy Monkey – yes, agreed!