We saw it coming from Donald Trump

Many of us saw it coming when Donald Trump first announced his campaign for the presidency of the United States.

A fellow with no public service experience in his background, no military experience, not a hint of self-deprecation was running for the nation’s highest office.

His entire professional life had been aimed at one goal only: to enrich an already rich guy with even more loot, earned from allegedly shady business dealings.

So he runs for the presidency in 2016 vowing to shake up the government. He needed to vow to first learn something about how government works. He didn’t know then anything about the federal government operation he would inherit and he damn sure doesn’t know anything now that the government is in crisis trying to do battle with the COVID-19 virus that has killed tens of thousands of Americans.

Yep, some of us saw it coming. I don’t want to say “I told you so,” but … well, you know.

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been a classic cluster fu**. His daily rants long ago ceased delivering any useful information. He uses the White House press room as a forum to campaign for re-election.

He boasts about the “great job” his administration is doing, and then he lies constantly about what he has said previously and then about his denials.

There are so many aspects of Donald Trump’s time as president I find disheartening, so I’ll settle on just two key elements.

This man lacks any semblance of empathy. His White House rants — and I no longer will call them “briefings” — never contain a single expression of sincere empathy for the victims of COVID-19. They never speak to loved ones’ suffering, let alone to the suffering of those afflicted by the killer infection.

The other element deals with Trump’s inability or unwillingness to tell the truth. He lies about big things and small things. He lies about what he knew of the pandemic early on and lies about “friends” who have been stricken by the illness. He once lied about all the “friends” who died on 9/11, but there is no record of Trump ever attending a single funeral of anyone who perished on that terrible day in 2001.

Donald Trump has built his version of the presidency using the same blocks on which he cobbled together the business that was started for him by his wealthy father. He cannot resist seeking self-aggrandizement even in the face of the world’s dire health crisis.

Some of us saw this coming long ago. We couldn’t have predicted it would present itself in this particular context, but truth be told, we aren’t surprised in the least to see Donald Trump behaving in this hideous fashion.