Swamp Rabbit wore a surgical mask today when he went to the SuperFridge. To protect himself against Covid-19, he said, but I figured he just wanted to rob the joint without being identified.

He brought ketchup and fish sticks back to the swamp, just in time to hear me ranting about Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Why did the liar-in-chief force the states to engage in a bidding war for much-needed medical equipment and, in some cases, actually use FEMA to bid against certain states for that equipment? Why did he refuse for so long to invoke the Defense Production Act, which compels private companies to quickly make sure there is no scarcity of equipment needed for a national emergency? Is this a case of Trump being stupid and malicious, or just stupid?

“Don’t make no difference,” Swamp Rabbit said. “With a dude like Trump, stupid and malicious are the same.”

I showed him a Boston Globe editorial about Trump that doesn’t pull any punches. It starts with a famous literary line:

‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,’ wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. A century later, it’s clear: The epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions in the White House have doomed the world’s richest country to a season of untold suffering.

The language is even stronger a few paragraphs down, just in case Globe readers hadn’t yet got the point:

The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his hands.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Trump ain’t no Lady Macbeth. If he gets blood on his hands, he just wipes it off and looks for something else to wreck.”

He suggested I check out Trump’s daily marathon press briefings and think about how we used to wonder what would happen to the country if its fate fell into the hands of someone who can only wreck things. As Yeats asked:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

We’ve known for three years what the beast looks likes. The only question now is how much wreckage he will cause before he slouches in some other direction.