Listening to our marginally articulate president the other night, I suddenly understood: The economy wasn’t merely his pride. It was more like his lover. He can’t get enough of it. He won’t be kept from it.
Ain’t no mountain high enough. Ain’t no pandemic grim enough.
Briefing after briefing, I see it, sense it: how he itches to feel that rush again. He digresses from the terrifying present and uncertain future to revisit the heady past, when he lavished trinkets on the Dow and it purred on cue, telling him how potent he was.
Having it turn on him is more than he can bear. It has addled him – I mean even further. “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” he said during the White House briefing Monday evening. He repeated those words – “this is not a country that was built for this; it was not built to be shut down” – and then trotted them out yet again at a town hall on Fox News on Tuesday, apparently convinced that their profundity demanded it.
He also boasted – for the zillionth time – about how the economy just before the pandemic was the best economy ever. Those lips! Those eyes! They’d be reunited, he and his amour. They’d be together again when the credits rolled.