There’s a powerful throughline that ties Trump’s executive order today cutting the number of recommended childhood vaccines to his decision to attack Iran.
Both are the acts of a reckless fool, guided by pique and petulance, driven by a monomaniacal desire to shove his fetid ignorance into the faces of the “experts,” the “deep state,” and basically anyone with reasonable credentials, training, or a claim to know what they’re doing.
To call this short-term thinking, as I have done in the past, is really to do a disservice to the selfish instinct to “grab it and run.” That corrupt intention remains. But this is something worse. It is no-term thinking: actions taken with little apparent consideration even for their immediate consequences, much less what comes next.
We can see in measles outbreaks and spiking gas prices that the negative impacts come immediately. That these disasters will only metastasize and compound over time, in ways we cannot predict, is the wonderful inheritance we will have the pleasure of living with for years to come.
Good leaders try to respond to problems that already exist or to the concerns and demands of their constituents. But Trump, never one to follow positive human instincts, seems to love creating crises where none previously existed.
Years of data and the accumulated wisdom of generations of doctors and scientists around the world have produced a clear consensus around childhood vaccinations. And the evidence of their success can be found in the fact that kids, you know, sort of don’t die or become incredibly sick from diseases that have all but been eradicated.
But Trump, seeking a legacy wherever he can find one, apparently feels that harming children can take its place on a long list of chaotic catastrophes, from blowing up the Middle East to getting impeached and indicted to burning up the planet to fomenting hate.
Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for what this man has inflicted on the nation and the world. But there is a treatment, and it starts with protesting, organizing, and voting.
If we survive this plague, we will hopefully produce the antibodies that protect us and our democracy from this madness. And when we develop enough herd immunity, we can go back to giving our children and the generations who follow a real shot, both literal and figurative, at a better future.
We can be guided by everything this regime is not: intelligence, wisdom, empathy, and the basic understanding that it is a lot better to try to solve problems than to spend your days manufacturing disasters and making everything worse.
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