Some Covid Good News; Trump Remains Bonkers

Today is 26 days since Election Day and our deranged president continues to rant and rave that he won the election due to massive fraud and cheating. He continues to embarrass himself and his country with this demented story. His erstwhile legal team has completely imploded, with federal and state courts tossing suits out because they are without basis or merit. A story about one of them, Sidney Powell, is far from flattering and makes one wonder about her mental status. And just hours ago, Trump appeared on Fox claiming the election was rigged and the court system is fixed.

I don’t know what to make of Trump and his claims. First, the election result was clear as crystal: Biden won the popular vote by over 6 million and the electoral vote decisively. He is the President-elect and will be inaugurated on 20 January 2021. I think Trump is behaving as he is for a multiplicity of reasons. The first and most obvious is that his fragile ego cannot allow him to view himself as a loser, as Mary Trump detailed in her marvelous book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. Trump will carry the toxic legacy of his father, Fred, to his grave. Second is that in a sociopathic frenzy he will do anything to wreck what he has to leave behind. That he will bequeath scorched earth to the American people and his successor bothers him not the slightest. This is truly the mark of a sociopath. Third is his knows-no-end avarice. He and his family continue to spew forth emails asking for money so that he can continue his “battle” for reelection (it would be as though the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway continued to sail towards Hawaii after losing all of its aircraft carriers). That he is in debt is not the question; the question is, how much money can he grift from his credulous supporters in the time he has remaining. I check my email spam folder every day; on some days ¼ to ⅓ of the spam is from the grifter clan imploring me to send money. Finally, Trump knows at a visceral level that he and his immediate family members are in legal peril after noon on 20 January. He will no longer be able to hide from prosecutors as a perk of office. As Ruth Marcus noted in her recent column, any prosecution of Trump at the federal level should be only as a result of a thorough investigation, and not every outrage rises to the level of a crime requiring prosecution. On the other hand, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. are conducting civil and criminal investigations against Trump and his family which could easily put Trump in the defendant’s chair. If found guilty, there may be prison time in store for the 45th president of the United States that he cannot escape.

There is also the question of who does Trump owe money to and how much does he owe. Lenders such as Deutsche Bank are obvious but there are hints that Trump owes money to Russia as well. The best I can offer is stay tuned and be ready to pop some corn. This will be interesting.

I could not complete my post today without a comment on Covid-19. Thanksgiving promises to give us a surge atop a surge and the outlook for Christmas is no brighter. On the other hand, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meets 8-10 December to review the data for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for possible recommendation for Emergency Use Authorization in the United States. The preliminary data for this vaccine as well as Moderna’s vaccine (both using a novel mRNA technology) were startling with 90 to 95% efficacy. I will go out on a limb to suggest there is light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. But we need to allow the process to work. The ACIP review of all the data will be critical.