‘Mad dysfunctional kingship’: Historian Jon Meacham explains how Trump’s ‘adolescent response’ on coronavirus cost lives

On “The 11^th Hour,” Meacham told host Brian Williams that one of Trump’s failures during the pandemic has been an inability to express genuine empathy the way that President Lyndon B. Johnson expressed genuine empathy in response to Hurricane Betsy in the 1960s when he said, “I am your president, and I’m here to help.” Meacham lamented Trump’s inability to become a sympathetic figure during the pandemic, telling Williams, “We can’t normalize what is fundamentally a mad dysfunctional kingship.”

The following morning, Meacham defended two U.S. presidents of the past who faced a major crisis — Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Pearl Harbor and Republican George W. Bush with 9/11 — and explained why it’s unfair to compare either of them to Trump with coronavirus.

An argument that has been used against Trump during the coronavirus pandemic was also used against President George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt following the Japanese military’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: he should have seen it coming. But Meacham, on “Morning Joe,” explained why it is unfair to blame Bush for 9/11 or FDR for Pearl Harbor but quite fair to attack Trump’s response to coronavirus: 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were “singular events,” whereas coronavirus was a crisis that grew worse and worse while Trump ignored warning after warning.

Back in January and February, Trump downplayed the severity of coronavirus —insisting that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. He was dead wrong, of course: according to researchers at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, COVID-19 had killed more than 56,200 people in the U.S. as of early Tuesday morning, April 28. Worldwide, the staggering death toll stood at 211,894.

In January and February, Meacham told “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, coronavirus was an “unfolding crisis” that Trump was warned about repeatedly. And Trump’s “refusal to accept a fact,” according to Meacham, was an “adolescent response.”

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Detonator Donnie Or Donnie The Detonator And His Nuclear Weapons

In November of 1980 America elected Ronald Reagan as President a strident Cold Warrior.  For all of his bluster and anti Communist rhetoric he began  negotiations for the first START Treaty with the former Soviet Union with the aim of reducing the nuclear arms arsenal of both nations.   Two treaties were negotiated: The first coming into effect in 1991 during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush and the second in 1993 during the Clinton administration.   Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama continued working for the reduction of nuclear weapons.   Along comes Donald Trump who thinks that if America has nuclear weapons  surely they can be put to good use. Additionally Donnie Dunderhead has no idea what the Nuclear Triad is.   And now the fool has come full circle.

Why stop there? When the stupid flows it should flow not like a trickle but like a torrent.  Today he decided that what the world needs is another  arms race.

But on Friday’s Morning Joe, during an off-air conversation with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, Trump daftly asserted — according to the MSNBC duo — “Let it be an arms race, we will outmatch them at every pass. And outlast them all.” Remarkably, the comment came following an appearance on Morning Joe with newly-named White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who allegedly phoned the President-elect while sitting with Brzezinski and Scarborough; when the phone was transferred over to Brzezinski, the above comment was reportedly made by Trump.


It's hard to believe or even fathom that Donald Trump will become commander of America's military on January 20, 2017.    Can the world survive with Donald Trump as commander in chief of America's armed forces?   It's beyond frightening that this man baby will have the ability to destroy  us all.