By Hal Brown, MSW
I read the following and decided that as a retired psychotherapist I had some free, thank you very much, advice for the once and never again president. It’s what I might tell a client in his situation, albeit in less blunt words. I realized I could spend some time actually writing something but then I really I could just go into my study and take a photo instead. (click here to enlarge entire image and here to see the coin box a client gave me)
This may be painful for you to read so I understand if you don’t. You may have trouble getting past the first sentence where the king of self-aggrandizement and lord of liars calls Drs. Fauci and Birx “self-promoters” who are trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts.
Playing the role of his unofficial psychotherapist I had to read through it. It combines pathos with psychopathology. I couldn’t fit it into my title but you can add in a third letter P, prevarication.
From March 29, 2021 at 9:40 p.m
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Here is the full statement from former President Donald Trump on his former White House Coronavirus Task Force members.
“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned. They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine—putting millions of lives at risk.
We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world. We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression. Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before.
In a fake interview last night on CNN, Dr. Fauci, who said he was an athlete in college but couldn’t throw a baseball even close to home plate, it was a “roller,” tried to take credit for the vaccine, when in fact he said it would take three to five years, and probably longer, to have it approved. Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move it through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this.
Dr. Fauci is also the king of “flip-flops” and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible. He fought me so hard because he wanted to keep our country open to countries like China. I closed it against his strong recommendation, which saved many lives. Dr. Fauci also said we didn’t need to wear masks, then a few months later he said we needed to wear masks, and now, two or three of them. Fauci spent U.S. money on the Wuhan lab in China—and we now know how that worked out.
Dr. Birx is a proven liar with very little credibility left. Many of her recommendations were viewed as “pseudo-science,” and Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room with her. The States who followed her lead, like California, had worse outcomes on Covid, and ruined the lives of countless children because they couldn’t go to school, ruined many businesses, and an untold number of Americans who were killed by the lockdowns themselves. Dr. Birx was a terrible medical advisor, which is why I seldom followed her advice. Her motto should be “Do as I say, not as I do.” Who can forget when Dr. Birx gave a huge mandate to the people of our Nation to not travel, and then traveled a great distance to see her family for Thanksgiving—only to have them call the police and turn her in? She then, embarrassingly for her, resigned.
Finally, Dr. Birx says she can’t hear very well, but I can. There was no “very difficult” phone call, other than Dr. Birx’s policies that would have led us directly into a COVID caused depression. She was a very negative voice who didn’t have the right answers. Time has proven me correct. I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long—they are like a bad habit!”
This is a version of Dr. Robert Hartley’s (Bob Newhart) advice to a fearful client who used two words to convey basically the same thing my three words suggest.
Addendum: In an ironic twist Dr. Deborah Birx’s attempt at rehabilitation is assuring she makes the news everywhere, including in my own Daily Kos story about Rep. Ted Lieu’s calling her out as one of his enablers from yesterday. I have little doubt that these stories combined with all the great and well-deserved publicity President Biden is getting for the better than anticipated vaccine roll-out played a role in prompting Trump to write this.
POLL
I added a poll which was inspired by a comment. Click how much you think he wrote himself if you read it, if you didn’t read it or skimmed it click that choice. By writing it himself I mean that he wrote it but may have had someone else clean it up so it was grammatical.