My 10,000th blog post- and maybe my most important

This, as it happens, is my ten thousandth post on this blog since I started it in the first years of this century. It has seen me change from probably too partisan a supporter of George W. Bush and a committed Republican to a Never Trumper who cannot envision himself ever being a Republican again. It has seen the Republican Party change form the party of free trade and solid constitutionalism and a muscular foreign policy based on the protection of our national interests and personal freedom and a level playing field for all Americans regardless of ethnicity or creed to the party of protectionism and trade wars and authoritarianism and head-in-the-sand isolationism and narrow nativism and anti-Muslim bigotry and contempt for both the Constitution and the rule of law.

I have blogged on many subjects during the years I've written this blog. Many of the issues I've written about have been on matters of historical importance. I've been right about some things, wrong about others, and both right and wrong in different ways about still others. But this should be a landmark post in the history of this blog, because it may be the most important I've ever written.

When Donald Trump was elected president I was certain that he would be a one-term president- if, indeed, he even finished out his first term. He's basically a narcissistic Cliff Clavin, a clueless know-it-all who actually knows practically nothing, a habitual crackpot who wants to be taken as the ultimate authority on everything. He's the guy who was sure that Barack Obama was born in Kenya long after it was definitively proven that that notion, which never had any actual evidence to support it in the first place, was tinfoil-hat material. The same is true of the notion that 9/11 was an inside job.

It wasn't, in case you're actually in doubt. And I wonder how many self-styled "Constitutional conservatives" who have somehow climbed aboard the Trump Train can forget the time that he insinuated that Sen. Ted Cruz's father had conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy!

I saw it as inevitable that someone as massively and categorically unfit for the office as is Mr. Trump would mess up so badly that there would be no way he could be returned to the office even by an electoral fluke like the one that put him in office. I concede that I underestimated the willingness and even the ability of a large minority of the population to simply turn off their minds, automatically accept every absurd claim he made and every outright lie he told, and refuse to listen to anything that reflected badly on him. I overestimated the intellectual integrity of a great many people who are simply to smart to have honestly fallen for his nonsense.

But he hit upon a winning formula. Confirm people's prejudices, always tell them what they want to hear, and they'll follow you anywhere. What I never expected, though, is that when he finally made his defining blunder, it would be so potentially lethal.

It's not just that he downplayed the significance of the virus causing the current pandemic despite the better advice of everyone who actually knew what they were talking about.  It's not just his idiotic comparison of COVID-19 to the flu, or the way he inspired radio personalities on the crazy right to actually claim that it was nothing but the common cold (one of the viruses that cause the common cold is another member of the coronavirus family, but one neither as lethal nor as communicable). Even now he is talking as if irresponsibly truncating the measures we take against this pandemic would somehow save more lives than it would cost if it meant keeping the economy from going into recession.

He knows that if the economy goes into recession he will lose; I don't think he realizes that he probably will anyway. But that's not the same issue as people dying and the notion that somehow a recession would cost more lives than COVID-19 is beyond absurd.

We have reached the point where his crackpot clownishness has become lethal. Yet people are repeating it. Others are risking their lives and the lives of others through irresponsible behavior and stupid stunts based on the phony premise that we're "overreacting" to a pandemic which has the potential to kill millions and which even with all the precautions we're taking may well end up infecting nearly two-thirds of the human race.

There comes a point where civility in discussing such things becomes counter-productive. I just unfriended a retired LCMS pastor who was repeating Mr. Trump's absolute nonsense on Facebook. That kind of lethal stupidity has to be confronted for exactly what it is.

When you elect a notorious crackpot as president, this is the kind of thing you have to expect. That the people who repeat Mr. Trump's idiotic comments at some level honestly believe them, either from a simple lack of better information or because they've removed their filter for nonsense when it comes to the things he says doesn't change the fact that it's resulting in people contracting COVID-19 who wouldn't have otherwise and without a doubt is literally killing people even now. I didn't think that even somebody in as far over his head as Donald Trump is could mess up this badly. But this has passed the point where we're dealing with a mere difference of political philosophy or opinion.

The Trump administration represents what I hope is a temporary triumph of prejudice and willful ignorance over common sense. But now that ignorance is killing people, and it's time to take the gloves off.

We need to call shenanigans on the lethal nonsense being spewed by President Trump, his administration, and his most irresponsible followers because it's now literally endangering people's lives and has the potential to kill large numbers of our fellow Americans.

In the same position we are in, Mr. Trump would doubtless advocate that people doing that be silenced. After all, he doesn't believe in free speech, he doesn't believe that he should ever be accountable, and that's just the way authoritarians who hold the Bill of Rights in contempt roll. But I'm not advocating that.

What I am advocating is that we curtly and abruptly call this lethal nonsense what it is, how far it is beneath contempt, refuse to listen to it, and not pull a single punch in spelling out to just how dire a pass the Age of Trump, the Era of Willful Ignorance has brought us.