Sean Hannity was on TV the other night lavishing praise on President Donald Trump for his "leadership" during the pandemic, comparing him to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, towering figures who steered their countries through times of war.
Laughable stuff, of course.
In Trump, we have a president who lied to the country about the dangers of the novel coronavirus, flouted the advice of public health experts, imperiled his credulous supporters by dispensing crackpot medical advice and congratulated himself repeatedly as much of the country morphed into a petri dish of disease.
It's neither FDR nor Churchill to whom our president should be compared.
It is that other iconic figure in American history, Typhoid Mary.
In the early 1900s, Mary Mallon, a cook for wealthy families, was believed responsible for infecting dozens of people with the salmonella typhi bacteria, at least three of whom died. A "superspreader" before the term existed, she was an asymptomatic carrier, who refused to believe she was infected and spreading a potentially deadly disease.
Trump doesn't have that excuse. He knows he's infected.
And yet one of the first things he did after helicoptering back to the White House from his brief sojourn at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was to stride up the steps to the Truman Balcony, whip off his mask and pose as if he were some kind of conquering hero instead of a delusional COVID patient still shedding millions of virus particles, endangering the health of anyone who came near.
"He's jacked up on steroids," said CNN's Anderson Cooper.
"It is amazing that all of these guys with this autocratic fetish," a Lincoln Project co-founder, Steve Schmidt, told MSNBC's Brian Williams, "they certainly do like the balconies, don't they?"
Reed Galen, another disaffected Republican co-founder of the Lincoln Project, put it best in a two-word tweet: "Benito Trumpolini."
