Pre-operational postscript

And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling scientists. Via.

Or putting it another way (from Jonathan Swan's Axios interview of Trump, to which I'll be returning, as transcribed in news.com.au):

Trump: “Many of those tests are now obsolete, because you know, it’s called science, and all of a sudden something’s better. But because we tested so many people, 55-60 million people, very soon, we get cases. You test, some kid has even just a little runny nose, it’s a case. And then you report many cases. So we look like we have more cases than massive countries, like China – which by the way, doesn’t report, as you know.”

The test makes it a Covid-19 case, as Trump sees it. Sure the kid has the sniffles, but it's not "a case" unless some meddling functionary goes and tests for it, so it shouldn't count. It's not fair to count it, not fair to Trump.

That is, in the White House it's OK to test everybody that might come in the president's breathing range, because that's important stuff involving the president's health. But out there in the world, it's not about a virus that a kid with a runny nose might communicate to teachers or grandparents, possibly killing them the way Mrs. Miller or Robert O'Brien or one of those Secret Service guys could have killed the president (and Trump never shows any awareness that asymptomatic cases exist as well), it's about keeping score of the administration in his competition with the other Leaders. Not that he's trying to say it isn't really Covid, but how's he supposed to win if our own refs are so nitpicky all the time, calling a foul when the virus hardly even brushed against the guy?

It's not just that he has a different standard for events outside his own body, it's that he doesn't accord the same reality to things happening outside his body, and he sincerely expects his audience (all projections of the only mind whose full existence he can recognize, his own) to accept that.

And in that way it's perhaps not so much that he hasn't reached the concrete operational stage at all as that he can't make the required effort to extend it beyond his immediate purview into the bodies he doesn't occupy. And not so much, as I was trying to say, that testing magically creates Covid infections as that the infections couldn't happen without the malignant forces arrayed against him, which are somehow connected to testing, though he's not going to (can't) inquire too closely into how it works.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.