Eye by Tony Tasset

Trompe L’Oeil is French for “deceive the eye.” It is a term used to describe an artistic technique that uses realistic imagery to create an optical illusion. It is also a term that sounds like it includes the US President’s last name. In French tromper means to decieve. In English Trump means the same thing. Abraham Lincoln, the father of the Republican party is once supposed to have said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” After more than three years, I think that we have finally arrived at the last phrase/phase of that saying. The Washington Post has kept a running count of the number of Trump lies while he has been in office. That tally reached 18,000, at the start of last month. That’s a heck of a lot of lying.

Since then, more than 36 million Americans have lost their jobs and the country is on pace for 100,000 US Covid-19 deaths by the end of May. Numbers like these are too large to lie your way out of, not that Trump won’t try. He can lie, he has lied and he will continue to lie, but like in Lincoln’s affirmation, the truth eventually comes out. Just as the weekly totals of American carnage continue to rise, Trump’s poll number are now falling. As the carnival barker that he has always been, he will continue to distract, misdirect and lie, but more and more Americans are daily awakening to their own true situation and it is not a pretty sight. While the scale of unemployment dwarfs the tragic losses from the virus, one was caused by the other. You cannot fix the economy until you cure the pandemic and there is no way that either of these changes will occur in the time that we have until the election. I don’t care how much bleach you drink.

Just as pandemics come, they also always go. It is the way of such things. It is just Trump’s dumb luck that this one occurred in an election year. He could have listened to his advisors, the expert ones, not the sycophants and if still unable to get out in front of this thing, make it look like he was at least trying. Instead, he distracted, misdirected and lied. Inevitably causing the Covid-19 tail, not to be pinned on the donkey, but rather on his own fat ass. Now he is stuck with it and no matter of wiggling will get it off of him. All signs are leading to his and his party’s suffering an election defeat of historic and monumental proportions. I just worry about how many people will have to die to bring down this clown.