For the last two weeks, Americans have witnessed the leadership skills of our “attention span of a gnat” president on daily display. It has not been a performance for anyone with a weak stomach. We’ve watched the supposedly “most powerful man in the world” ramble and blather and blunder and lie and spread false information to a nation in the throes of the worst health crisis it has faced since the Influenza Pandemic of 1918.

His position, to the extent that it can be discerned amidst the jumble of his sometimes near incoherent pontificating, has varied widely with each fresh outing. The coronavirus, which he initially dismissed as a hoax possibly spread by either the Democrats or the “Deep State” or the Chinese to make him look bad, morphed into something real but no more harmful than the regular flu. In private, the admitted germaphobe and obvious paranoid, is said to have feared that someone from the media might deliberately acquire the disease to infect him.

A few days on and the Great Hoax disappeared to be replaced by a real threat. A threat that he had completely under control. He gave himself a 10 out of 10 for his perfect handling of the crisis, though he was rather vague as to how he was handling it beyond crowing about all the great people he had working on it and all the great progress they were making. He trotted some of those great people out on display. He even let them speak to the American people about the threat in the kind of details he is incapable of handling. Much of what they said contradicted what he said but he allowed them to say it, for a while. Either that or he didn’t realize that what they were saying contradicted him. His chief expert mysteriously disappeared to be replaced by a rotation of others some of whom also contradicted him but did it more diplomatically. At the same time, just to cover all the bases, he declared that he had zero responsibility for handling the outbreak and suggested that it was the responsibility of the individual states to fight it. Though he later claimed to have ordered the federal government to help, apparently out of the goodness of his non-responsible heart.

Another day on and TV viewers got a hearty dose from his impressive collection of junk science. A miracle med for malaria that was almost ready to save the day. Other cures that are very promising. Meanwhile, his estimated length for the crisis swung wildly. One day it was July or August, the next day it was two or three weeks. At some point, he seemed to lose interest in the whole health crisis thing and began to talk about more pressing matters like the stock market. Of course, even then the market’s rise and fall had to be framed in terms of his own importance. How he had spent billions of dollars of his own money to get elected so he could save America and lift the economy to the stupendous heights from which it was now crashing. Of great past sacrifices like the one he made by dodging the Vietnam War draft and using his gigantic genius to make his country strong against the threat of Communism by making shady real estate deals.

It wasn’t long before he changed course yet again. Having roughly followed health experts who told Americans to self-isolate and avoid even small crowds he, as usual, turned on them in his newfound concern for finance. Now pandemics were no longer his top priority. He was back to his lifelong number one interest, money. His new program? Cut struggling workers a one-time check for enough to pay a month’s rent and dump trillions into a slush fund for rich corporations with few or no strings attached to ease their pain…and boost the stock market. Hey, how about another round of tax cuts for the rich? They’re suffering too, you know! Which means of course that most of those pandemic fearing folks he’d told to stay home a few days earlier would have to go back to work. But what the hell. The virus crisis will soon be over. And it never was as dangerous as the “so-called experts” said it was. And a cure is just around the corner.

Most of his hardcore supporters still believe that the pandemic is either a hoax or a Deep State conspiracy and will come quickly on board to back the new revised Trump Master Plan. Perhaps without realizing it “The Great Divider” has found yet another way to divide America. From now on it will be the brave, patriotic “MAGA” folks who fear not the evil slant-eyed Chinese virus versus the wimpy cowardly socialist-loving traitors who refuse to defend the flag. It’s the same 53 to 42 percent break on who is who. The country is so deeply divided these days that politics determine peoples’ belief in medical science, and “expert” is a dirty word to all Trump loyalists and 80 percent of Republicans. By God, what we need is more ‘just fell off the turnip truck’ amateurs to solve America’s problems.

Will Trump’s position on the pandemic change once again? How many American deaths would it take to change it? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Even 1,000,000 would be only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. 1,000,000 less consumers wouldn’t be enough to hurt the U.S. economy significantly. Perhaps the outspoken Lt. Governor of Texas might wish to lead a “Lay down your life for Wall Street” movement for Senior Citizens. I’m sure Trump would back him…today. But as our stable genius president has boldly said hundreds of times before when faced with tough decisions. “We’ll have to see about that.”