Pence is so terrified of Trump that it amounts to a cognitive disability.
Pence is so, so terrified of Trump that it amounts to a cognitive disability. Trump believes that people who wear a mask are intentionally signalling that they don’t like him, which he will retaliate against, individually or generally, as far as he’s able. So Pence won’t wear one, even at a Covid-19 briefing, while Fauci glares at him.
Trump believes that the wearing of a mask in America during the pandemic is a deliberate show of defiance — not against the virus — not against the likelihood of contracting or spreading it — but against him, personally. He believes that wearing a mask, physically distancing, the wearing of gloves in heavily trafficked public spaces, being rational, cautious, conscious and aware in a time of global pandemic that has already cost hundreds of thousands of fatalities is a sign of resistance directed exclusively at him. He feels people’s choices over whether they live or die are mere compliments or insults directed at him, his presidency and his non-existent administration.
He believes that choices made as to whether one follows universal precautions during a worldwide epidemic — that everything that happens, all phenomena, everywhere, all the time, are all about him — a symptom of the megalomaniacal self-centredness normal for a poorly socialized toddler, but pathological in an aged adult in their eight decade of life. To him, masks can only represent a sign that the wearer is choosing to defy him. To him, their choice has not to do with whether they, their families, and others thrive and survive as opposed to sicken and possibly die during a global health crisis, but solely to do with whether they will support him, personally, thriving and surviving in the next election.
Fundamentally, pandemic-deniers, like Climate Deniers, are terrified out of their wits — scared to death by their deranged form of Hell-touting, Apocalypse-threatening Evangelical Christianity, their cult-mind adherence to Trump (whom they know deep down is dangerously insane and are on some infantile, abused-child level attempting to placate), the Fox-purveyed, utterly demented pro-Trump conspiracy theories that are their main intellectual fare, the violence of their culture, the lack of a social safety net or any kind of health or financial coverage, the dread of the economic precipice that threatens by virtue of the greater proportion of Americans being constantly on the brink of bankruptcy (if you get sick or there’s an accident or an unexpected expense or a natural disaster or pandemic or something), on every level, on every front of terror…They can’t think straight. Their only defence is denial.
Trump’s cognitive disability is well known and has been much analysed. Object impermanence, cognitive dissonance, Dunning-Kruger Syndrome, psychological narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, Borderline Personality Disorder are but specks on the tip of that iceberg. But Fauci must feel like he, and we, are trapped in an episode of the fucking Twilight Zone.
