I KNOW I AIN'T NO PROPHET, AND I AIN'T NO PROPHET'S SON
Like Linus in the old Peanuts cartoon, Donald Trump is less clever than he imagines. Unlike Linus, Trump is incapable of self-reflection.
Trump has a few reliable “tells.” When he promises to deliver something in two weeks, you can be sure he’s bluffing. When he tweets “many people are saying,” he’s about to repeat something he heard on Fox. His frequent use of ambiguous statements about future consequences – “we’ll have to see” or “wait and see” – are meant to sound intimidating but those sorts of non-committal deflections actually signal that he has no idea what to do. When he says “not many people know” (e.g., that Lincoln was a Republican), it means he just found out himself.
He’s also terrible at keeping secrets. One tradition of America’s quadrennial presidential follies is the “October surprise.” Anthony Fauci is on record as predicting a vaccine sometime in 2021. Based on that, plus Trump’s own remarks this week, I have a prediction.
I predict that – in addition to whatever other surprises we may see between now and election day – sometime in late October, Donald Trump will announce that he’s approved a COVID-19 vaccine. He’ll have had nothing to do with its development, but he’ll find a way to take credit for it. On the eve of the election, he’ll claim that the vaccine will make the virus will go away, and things will be back to normal in a jiffy.
Spoiler alert: things will NOT be back to normal in a jiffy. We won’t know whether Trump’s vaccine is effective, or what its side effects might be. We won’t know if Trump let Big Pharma skip any phases of the clinical trials to get the product on the market faster. We won’t know how much a dose costs, or who will pay for it. We won’t even know if it’s a real vaccine, or a risky off-label use of an existing drug, or some quack nostrum that one of Trump’s credulous pals told him about.
Those answers will be revealed in the fullness of time, but that time will be long after November 3.
The wisdom of this strategy is questionable. Outside the MAGA swamps, voters have learned to be suspicious of Trump’s pronunciamentos. If he delays the announcement too long, many votes will have already been cast (via the dreaded mail ballot). But a deus-ex-machina announcement of a COVID cure right before the election is the kind of H.L. Mencken move – no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people –that the grifters in the Trump campaign would consider galaxy-brain genius.
On the other hand, maybe the vaccine tease is just a diversion from a different October surprise, which Donald Trump prophesied today: Joe Biden will “hurt God.”
I have two thoughts on that assertion. First, it seems impossible by definition. How would a mere mortal manage to hurt God? I mean, the Bible is full of people disappointing God. And the Bible is also full of false gods. Count ‘em off – Baal, Belial, Dagon, Ishtar, Marduk, Moloch, or some random Elohim? Hey, the harder they come, the harder they fall. Even Satan himself.
If Joe Biden is somehow mightier than all those pagan gods, it’s hard to square that with the “Sleepy Joe” image Trump is also pushing.
And besides, no one in the Biden campaign asked me, but hurting God doesn’t seem like a smart political move. Wait until after the inauguration, dude.
And if any of this actually happens, you read it first here. If it doesn’t happen … well, you still read it here first. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong, and it won’t be the last.