Let's pray that we won't have to find out what the consequences are of a President who cares more about the health of the stock market than he does about the health of the American people.
Our entire history is loaded with Presidents who gave focus to the economy. That's what they generally should do, while appreciating the domestic social scene. It's a shuffling game where all is more important than the others at any given moment. This is why there are department heads, organizations, and such. Carter is a stand out from our Presidential history in this regard because he tried to blend humanitarian idealism into economic and foreign policy. He was a disaster on multiple levels and couldn't recover from his initial bad decisions (enter Reagan).
But don't confuse Trump. He is far too callous and out-of-touch with reality to care about anybody; and his care about the stock market is based solely on his ability to keep exploiting it as his own creation. His motivation is solely about pleasing his constituents' emotional irrationality for his re-election journey.
- Trump declared in one of his childish tweets that the media had fanned unnecessary alarm over the coronavirus. In the meantime, its not the media that is actually closing schools, repelling luxury liners, building special hospitals, and quarantining whole towns. This would be the world's governments. Thus, Trump's intention to simply denigrate the disloyal media is clear.
- Then, at a news conference Trump declared that "every aspect of our society should be prepared." Why? I thought it was just a matter of the media fanning alarm? He even credited decisions to limit certain flights into the US with containing the number of infections. His motivation here was to exploit the virus and attach it to his anti-immigration policies. Here I guess we see Trump himself "fanning unnecessary alarm" too.
- Yet, he still consistently contradicts health officials. This is not because of his vast experience as a medical professional. This is because, in his zeal to prove himself anti-Obama, which is a persistent obsession meant to prove himself better, he fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command in 2018. This was an Obama initiative in 2014. Trump has spent the last month playing down the coronavirus in an attempt to pretend that he doesn't have to face yet another stupid decision on his part. As the cases have risen and the governments around the world have made decisions, with the media merely reporting it, Trump & Co. have been steadily trying to figure how best to pull their heads from their asses once again.
So what we have here is his "fake news" game, his immigration phobia, his anti-Obama irrationality, and his ego. All of which was instrumental in courting the Conservative mob in 2016. Stock market? This is a man who has a history of bankruptcy and has actually declared that he doesn't care about the national debt, while forcing the Treasury to issue ever more bonds to China. His only care is that it keeps looking good long enough so that he can keep exploiting it as his creation for the voters who are actually too stupid to see the truth of it all (plenty of whom don't care either way).
