Trump and the Gore Effect

From our American correspondent, Esteban:

After losing the 2000 Presidential election by about a thousand votes Al Gore went into hibernation for a while. When he emerged, he picked up the torch for Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming. For those of us in the Climate Realist set, a truly hilarious phenomenon then seemed to emerge – every time Gore gave a Global Warming speech in a Northern city in the Winter, they got smacked with a Winter storm. Cleveland in January, blizzard. Chicago in February, Polar vortex. It was suggested that if you doubted the existence of God, this was proof that he was real and had a sense of humor.

Fast forward to early 2017. A friend and I were having a laugh at the sorrow and misery of Leftists over President Trump. In particular, we found it hilarious that he seemed to have an amazing sense of timing or just plain luck. Case in point – Trump tweeted out something to the effect that if you doubted the importance of his immigration policies, just take a look at what happened in Sweden the previous weekend. Nobody could figure what he was referring to, nothing exciting had occurred in Sweden (apparently, he was talking about a segment from a show by Tucker Carlson about No Go Zones and other problems of unassimilated immigrants). Rather than find out what his point was, of course, the usual suspects launched into a frenzy – I think some high-ranking Swedish official even weighed in. Then, as fate would have it, the immigrants promptly lit up a couple of neighborhoods, burning and rioting, driving out the police. If you put this in a script it would be rejected as too pat.

A more recent example – the President noted that work is ongoing to find vaccines, treatments, even a cure for the Wuhan virus. He mentioned that Chloroquine had shown promise. He didn’t say it was a cure, didn’t oversell it, just mentioned that it had shown promise (it had). It was just a casual reference in a message of hope. The old media took this and ran with it, tried to make it THE STORY for days – the President is making crazy promises! Some Democrat governors even threatened doctors if they used it to treat the Chinese Coronavirus. Now evidence is rising that it has tremendous potential and one of the governors has asked the Federal government to provide her state with more of it.

I’ve settled on an explanation for both of these phenomena. The Gore effect really does show God has a sense of humor. As to President Trump and his luck? A combination of things. To quote Longfellow “whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad”. President Trump’s existence is so irritating to many on the Left that they cannot help but bristle at trifles, indeed they scrutinize every sentence trying to find something to get outraged about. “He said the Allies won WWII, but millions died, how can you call it a win”!!!

One of his most frequent critics was challenging him at a recent press conference, reading back quotes that seemed at least mildly contradictory re: how bleak or hopeful things were during the Kung Flu pandemic. Among the quotes he included was that the President had advised the American people to “stay calm”. I submit that you have to be losing it to include that in a list of quotes designed to make the other guy look bad.

Another winner – the press have been knocking themselves out pushing the narrative that it’s racist to refer to it as Chinese or Wuhan. BTW, their networks were calling it that a month or so back. But, seriously, we’re expecting 100,000 dead if we’re fortunate, suffering massive economic pain and the big worry is political correctness?

Perhaps it’s not luck or timing so much as that his critics have gone ‘round the bend. Even a guy who rambles off the cuff as often as he does seems quite reasonable by comparison.