Trump's Last Speech

This speech I listened to, for some reason.  I think because it was early in the morning, and by the time the inauguration was underway and Biden was speaking I was busy.  I've always been a bit allergic to these occassions anyway:  the bleating of the "journalists" on TeeVee between speeches is always a bit too much for me.  This reference to Trump's speech is the closest I've come to reading anything about what he had to say before he flew away:

Instead, he tried his best to plant the idea that anything great that President Biden does will be the result of a foundation that he, Trump, had laid: “Remember us when you see these things happening.” He made it clear that he believed that the toll taken by “the China virus,” as he, in a final note of xenophobia, called it, was someone else’s fault.

It was quite a bit worse than that, in context.  Trump framed his remarks on the pandemic by making it clear he was a great success who had built the greatest economy ever in the history of the universe, and it would have gone on being great but for the virus which came from China and so WAS NOT HIS FAULT! That's how it sounded at the time.  On reflection I realized it was as if Herbert Hoover had said his Administration was a complete success except for that stock market collapse and Great Depression which WAS NOT HIS FAULT!  Indeed it wasn't, but how he responded to it, was.

And now, as it becomes clearer how utterly Trump failed to respond to this virus (he had nothing to do with the swiftness of the vaccine, and utterly failed to make any distribution of it; and his opposition to any measures to mitigate its spread are obvious in the number of cases appearing daily (over 100,000, at most recent count) or the number of dead (well over 400,000)), perhaps that last speech should be his political epitaph.

After all, it doesn't matter if the Senate finds he incited the riot at the Capitol or just that someone so destructive to the nation should never run for federal office again and the pandemic is the irrefutable proof of that.  What matters is that they act decisively, for once.  If this was 1941, Trump would be whining about Japan attacking us without warning, rather than declaring war and guiding the military to plan an immediate response (the Doolittle raid) and prepare for the Battle of Midway (which turned the tide of war in the Pacific).  If all we are going to do is "move on," we need to at least slam the door in this asshole's face.