This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!’” Vanity Fair quoting an un-named ally of Donald Trump saying the President was furious about the coronavirus.

The President of the United States @realDonaldTrump has just walked from the White House to St John’s Church where rioters set fire last night. It’s a triumphant moment of hope over fear. Tweet by Richard Grenell@RichardGrenell.

Ahead of Trump Bible photo op, police forcibly expel priest from St. John’s church near White House RNS Religion News Service

Being quarantined at home makes everything out in the world seem surreally imaginary; behind the trees, over the next hill, ten miles away people are sick and dying…So I am told and so I believe only because of a blind faith that I’m being told the truth. When I make my infrequent forays into that world, I don’t see any bodies or obviously sick people stumbling around. This virus has not produced zombies, not even pictures of bodies – although we do see refrigerator trucks for body storage – but I believe that death is, in fact, out there.

• I’m shocked by the power that President Trump has solely because he is exercising it; power that I didn’t think came with the office. It turns out that what I thought were legal limitations on Presidental Power were just suggestions. Over and over, Trump will do something that I thought was illegal but turned out to just be a quaint convention that past Presidents followed. Conventions like granting access to Congressional oversight committees or not firing people whose job it is to make sure the Administration is following the law. I thought our commitments to WHO were locked in by treaties but, it seems, the President can just wave his arms and poof, the treaties are gone (or never were). We watched The Great over a series of days last week. It is a very fictionalized account of Catherine the Great of Russia and her rise to power by a coup d’état that she organized against her husband. It is also an essay on the power of Office. Watching it, I kept thinking about the power of the Presidency and how much Trump has enlarged and changed that power.
• I’m shocked that most, if not all, American companies do not have enough reserves to go a couple of months without income. A month without income and airlines are going broke, a month without income and Neiman Marcus has to declare bankruptcy. It is apparently considered good business to be leveraged to the maximum and have a business plan that assumes nothing will ever go wrong.

• I’m shocked that the picture above, of troops in full battle gear, is real. It was taken yesterday, June 2nd, 2020 at the Lincoln Memorial.
• I’m shocked that in the picture below, nobody even knows if these troops, who reputedly said they were with the Justice Department but have no identifying badges, are even with the government.

• I’m shocked that the Trump Administration is so inept. When Donald Trump won the election, I got in more than several fights with my friends who kept saying he was dumb. I thought he had run a brilliant campaign – although it was aided and abetted by Hillary running an unusually tone-deaf campaign – and was smarter than he was getting credit for. But, watching this Administration bumbling through the pandemic, first trying to say it wasn’t even real, and now escalating the violence of protests when everybody wants a leader to spread calm, I realize I was wrong.

• I’m shocked that our supply lines are so fragile. It turns out that our efforts to make our supply lines as efficient as possible, going to “just in time” deliveries by eliminating the waste of redundancy, has taken all the resiliency out of the system.

Maybe it is just my age, maybe I’m shocked by everything that is different now, but I do not think so, I think we are in the midst of major societal changes. I think that these really are extraordinary times.