President Herbert Hoover assured the country that things were already “back to normal,” Liaquat Ahamed writes in Lords of Finance, his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the financial catastrophe. Five months later, in March 1930, Hoover said the worst would be over “during the next 60 days.” When that period ended, he said, “We have passed the worst.” Eventually, Ahamed writes, “when the facts refused to obey Hoover’s forecasts, he started to make them up.”

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To be fair, Hoover gets a bum rap. He wasn’t so ‘much making forecasts up’ as trying to talk people, who were about to panic, down from the ledge. A panic would have crashed the banking system — and he knew it. He did follow the advice of the ‘best’ economists available, which turned out to be spectacularly bad. I think the subtitle of Ahamad’s book sums it up best “The Bankers Who Broke The World”.

We’re in quite a different situation. Trump is not lying to prevent a panic. He’s lying for ‘ratings’ on his ‘plague show’ (what I’ve been calling his pandemic updates) — or maybe for some other reason, but I’d be willing to bet it’s venal, selfish, or malicious, and probably a mix of all of those. And then there’s the possibility that he just has no grasp on reality. We all know he was raised in the church of Norman Vincent Peale (power of positive thinking)?

I’d agree that we’re unlikely to ever see any kind of Federal leadership so long as this person is in office. Further, he and his Republican cohort seem to approve of the current situation: let the people in blue states die — they’re probably libtards anyway.