COVID19 Update - Day 48

US Tests: 5,593,495
US Cases: 981,134
US Deaths: 50,327
Worldwide Cases: 3,036,770
Worldwide Deaths: 210,804

I'm starting with the personal side today.  On advice of a college friend (hi Sally!), I just read Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, which resonated for me.  But I mention it here because one particular description of Frankl's theory of logotherapy explains a lot about the miscreant currently occupying the White House.  Professor William Winslade of the Hastings Center summarizes logotherapy as follows:

To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that "points, and is directed to something, or someone, other than oneself . . . by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love."

I think this is the real reason why we see a story like this one every couple of weeks --- saying that Trump is feeling 'frustrated' or 'isolated'.  The man has not once in his life cared about serving a cause, and he has never loved anyone but himself.

And his insistence on continually feeding his ego is why he constantly demands praise for the 'great job' he insists he's done in handling the pandemic, when in fact he's done almost nothing at all:

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

And in closing, I'd just like to remind everyone that COVID19 doesn't care about your politics.