The disaster that is the Trump administration reaction to and handling of the Coronavirus crisis has been decades in the making.  It is the result of raising to seriousness for political purposes, willful ignorance, superstition, and an anti-science bias.

The right and the Republican Party saw political benefit in cultivating those traits in the population.  They knew, as a minority party, ignorance and superstition would help them gain and maintain political power.

They were right.  But now, we are in the position of having people who don’t believe in government running an enormous advanced industrialized government at a time when a coordinated government response to the Coronavirus is essential.

We also have a complaint, cowardly, mediocre corporate media whose biggest and most powerful stars can only find the courage to tearfully plead with the Trump administration to show leadership (Jake Tapper today.)  They are pleading with people who think “believing” in science is optional, and that government is not there to help people, but to line the pockets of the rich.

At the absurd dog-and-pony show that is the daily press briefing, reporters use precious time asking questions like 1) Does the First Lady wear a mask? And 2) Why we don’t fix the roads while everybody is at home.

Meanwhile, right in front of our faces, Donald Trump and his administration, like snake oil salesmen, tout drugs which they maintain will treat the Coronavirus to distract attention away from the fact that they have failed miserably to run the government they are in control of and are doing nothing but trying to find a way to profit off the crisis.

When asked today how he could justify touting unproven drugs, Trump responded: “We don’t have time…to test it out.”  We don’t have time to test it out.  Just think about that.  We don’t have time to test the drugs to see if they work before we use tax-payer money to stockpile the drugs.  We don’t have time to test the drugs to see if they work before we recommend people use them.  Anybody who knows anything about the scientific method knows that this kind of statement is insane.  INSANE.

You don’t even have to know something about the scientific method to know that this is idiocy.  You just need some common sense.  Why would you take a drug you had no idea was effective in treating the condition you were suffering from?  Why?

We don’t have time to test the drugs out, Trump continues, “with the test tubes and the laboratories.”  He says this like the testing of drugs with test tubes and laboratories is self-indulgent lark that people might want to do for fun if the situation wasn’t so serious.  This is the talk of a man who has no idea what science is.  He is as willfully ignorant and superstitious as the people who were courted by the Republican party and cultivated by Fox News.

It is bad enough to have a political party that cynically uses ignorance and superstition to get elected.  It is quite another to have people in charge who are themselves ignorant and superstitious.  It may well be deadly in a world where technology is the key to survival and to mass extinction.