I was born in the 1960s. For my entire life, the Democratic Party has been a real party trying to come up with real solutions to real problems. During that same period of time, the Republican Party has been the Pretend Party. During my life, the leaders of that party have pretended that people were not poor or needy. They pretended that there was no racism, sexism, or bigotry, or that if it existed, it either needed to exist, or it made no real difference anyway.
Over the decades, the Republican Party has pretended that the Democrats were all radical Socialists and Communists—that Democratic economic policies could not work—and that asking the richest businessmen to give a little more back from all of the money that their hardworking employees had earned for them was some kind of huge burden—and something that we should worry about more than all of the Americans who were starving. Republicans have pretended that minds weren’t terrible things to waste, that people all over American weren’t trying to live off of a too-low minimum wage, and that legacy entrances into colleges weren’t a form of institutionalized discriminations in favor of White people over everyone else.
However, this year, the pretending is particularly egregious. This year, a Pretend Republican President pretended that a deadly virus was no big deal, that it would magically go away, that he did not need to take extraordinary measures to deal with it. This fake President pretended that making fun of wearing a mask would not have a terrible impact, and that blocking Chinese citizens from coming from China to America, but letting everyone else return from China, would totally take care of this deadly virus.
Today, we live in a world where the deadly virus is out of control, which of course was what happens when the President of the United States of America has massive super spreader events, hour after hour, day after day, not requiring people to wear masks, and his followers follow suit. It is what happens when a Pretend President says “Open the businesses!” and “Open the schools!” because he wants to get re-elected and does not care about how many people get sick.
Not only does Donald Trump not care about how many people have gotten sick or will get sick, he hasn’t even bothered to have experts come up with a plan to make sure that America has the contact tracing it needs or that front line workers have the PPE gear that they need. He scaled back testing that could help Americans know who was sick so that they could be quarantined because he figured that scaling back testing would make the number of infections look lower, because he worried that the rampaging infection that occurred due to his own negligence would make him look bad, which of course it does anyway.
Today, Pretend President Donald Trump spends most of his time plotting ways to try and overturn an election that he clearly lost as he does little to deal with the crisis that rampages across America, killing thousands upon thousands in its path. The irony is that if he had dealt effectively with the crisis from the beginning, by simply letting professionals draw up plans to deal with it and then putting them into action, Donald Trump might have easily gotten re-elected. However, Donald Trump’s advisor, Jared Kushner, who Donald Trump pretends knows everything, apparently told Trump early on that if he did not pretend that COVID-19 was not a threat, the stock market would crash, and then Trump risked not getting re-elected. So, Donald Trump once again pretended that his idiot son-in-law knew what he was talking about and pretended that COVID-19 would magically go away—and Trump’s ever worshipping Republican base pretended that Donald Trump was the wisest man ever—and then they pretended that they could gather in large numbers without masks and that it would not create a super spreader America.
Spider Man would say that with great power comes great responsibility, but the Pretend Republican Party has been ignoring its responsibility to the American people for more than 100 years. This is why Pretend President Donald Trump was a perfect fit for them. A Pretend Party demands a Pretend President, but a Pretend President, unfortunately, just pretends that real problems do not exist, and that one day they will magically just disappear.