Calling Bullshit

Calling Bullshit

Today it has been announced that SXSW, the South By Southwest music/film/media festival in Austin, that has been held annually without interruption for thirty three years has been cancelled this year due to the Coronavirus.. Today, the Italian government has indicated that it is locking down Lombardy and a few other surrounding provincial areas to contain the virus at the potential cost of massively hobbling the Italian economy, where Milan and Lombardy are the economic engine of the country. That will mean sixteen million people who have not been able to go to the gym or the pool for a while will not be able to go anywhere for a longer while. They will effectively be quarantined. Today WHO said there have been 106,000 cases and 3,600 deaths, with 60,000 cured cases and 42,000 open, of which over 6,000 are serious or critical. And now the Grand Princess cruise ship lingering outside San Francisco Bay will dock in Oakland and all forty one or so travelers (who came from Hawaii) will go into either medical or quarantine government facilities.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, when asked about the Americans being quarantined on the Grand Princess, while it was hanging around offshore of San Francisco Bay, was asked if he favors letting the people off the cruise ship to be admitted to medical facilities in the U.S., could only think to say that he was against it because it would elevate the country’s infection numbers. Wait a minute, did the President of the United States really just say that? Did he put his political spin goals ahead of what is best for the general population or even more so, the poor people stuck on that ship and undoubtedly distraught over their fate? Yes he did. This was an easy question to get right because either having the people stay on board (presumably for the containment of the virus and protection of the population), or having the people placed in a proper medical facility on shore (the humanitarian answer) were acceptable answers. The only wrong answer is the answer that Donald managed to muster. It was an unadvised and unscripted answer that made it all the more horrible because it shows the world and certainly the American electorate that Trump’s gut reaction is to worry only about how things affect him and that he is devoid of empathy for the people for whom he purports to work and serve. The White House team, as sycophantic as they may be, must have winced when he came up with that gem.

The historians tell us that there was another example in American history where an administration chose to spin the facts on an epidemic rather than be transparent and give Americans all that they needed to know to protect themselves and curtail the spread of the disease. That was Woodrow Wilson, who thought the information needed to be managed as the fighting in WWI raged towards its end in November, 1918. His withholding of information contributed to almost one third of the U.S. population getting the “Spanish Flu”, as it was called, and the eventual deaths of an estimated 675,000 Americans. And that was light compared to the rest of the world, which suffered deaths of between 50-100 million. It is impossible to say how much of the U.S. exposure was due to Wilson’s decision and it is somewhat hard to suggest that it was a political decision rather than a choice, as he suggested, to lessen the death toll from fighting at the expense of added influenza exposure risk. Perhaps he could be forgiven for not knowing the harm such a pandemic could inflict since epidemiology was in its nascent stage of formation then. But there is no excuse for the leader of the United States to not know how harshly an epidemic like COVID-19 can inflict harm on a population. Trump has now famously said that he had no idea how impactful the 1918 flue was and that no one knew. The fact that everyone in the scientific and historian communities knew belies this comment, as does the fact that Trump’s own grandfather was felled by that Spanish Flu epidemic. One added note of concern is that the history we teach in our schools has tended to ignore the flu epidemic of 1918, which leads us to believe that Trump is not the only proponent of “Ignorance is bliss” mentality.

This evening I heard a pundit on MSNBC (where else?) say that the problem Trump has is that his whole life he has been able to get by on bullshit because it was never about anything terribly important or world-shaking. I have been in the development business, having taken over a troubled developer in late 2008 in the depths of the financial crisis and having spent two years reorganizing and refinancing the twenty-two trophy development properties. They were all bought at the peak, or be more precise, over-paid-for at the peak, over-leveraged at the peak and were all teetering on foreclosure. I had been a banker at the senior-most levels for over thirty years but had never touched a commercial real estate deal, much less restructured one.. I was in luck because when things are SO bad, you can actually throw out the standard playbook (which I had never read) and you can make it up as you go because normal business logic has gone out the window. Suddenly common sense is the best guiding principle.

It was during those two years that I met Donald Trump a few times and even tried to do a deal with Ivanka on a property. Even then Donald was considered a joke of a developer. His reputation was mostly all about being a bullshit artist and film-flam man. His brand was already tarnishing and he was less a builder than a brander. Donald was still trying to sell Trump Soho condos at the time (I actually met him in the breakfast room there one day). He was like every other glad-hander I had ever met on Wall Street. You smile and pretend he knows who you are and what you do and that he even cares one iota, which he does not. He wants to sell condos and anything you can do to help him is all he wants to hear. Focus is not a bad thing, but single-mindedness and ends-justifying-the-means thinking where you will do whatever it takes to sell a condo, is not a very attractive or discriminating business suit to wear. That is how Donald dressed every day of his business life. There is some good that comes from devotion, but even in real estate development it matters who you sell condos to and how. The problem with Donald is that he never learned that lesson about discriminating between \good and bad business and good and bad approaches to problem-solving. He puts his helmet on and runs straight at it and rams his head into that wall until it gives way. It shocks most people when they see it in action. It is “chain-saw carpentry” at its best. And it is refined bullshitting at its core. I hesitate to say it even worked for him in real estate development, but he is where he is so who’s to judge whether he got there by design or accident.

But when it comes to global leadership. When it comes to running the most powerful country in the world. When it comes to dealing with an external threat like a global pandemic, the harm he can and is causing to our world and the entire world by applying his normal bullshitting approach is beyond scary. I don’t say it lightly, but Donald Trumps is threatening humanity by bullshitting us all into our graves.