Opinion | With the Coronavirus, It’s Again Trump vs. Mother Nature

What’s the common theme? We have a president who is enamored with markets but ignorant of Mother Nature, and we have paid a steep, steep price for that — and will pay an even bigger price when it comes to climate change, if Trump remains in charge.

How so? I believe that the most powerful force on the planet is Mother Nature and the second most powerful force is Father Greed, i.e., the markets. The coronavirus spread in America because Trump looked at the problem through the lens of the markets first and the science of natural systems second, if at all.

Early on, Trump clearly spent his days watching the markets and downplaying the virus’s potential for rapid spread. If the markets were doing well for investors, Trump thought it meant that he was doing well containing Mother Nature’s Covid-19 disease — one of many Darwinian engines she employs to mercilessly sort out the weak from the fit.

Trump thought that closing off flights from China was enough to stem this growing epidemic and calm the markets — without the mass testing, surveillance and quarantines of the infected that South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore employed to great success. You could hear that in the reckless, premature assurances by Kudlow, Kellyanne Conway and Trump himself that the virus had been contained.

Trump even believed he could manipulate markets — which was why he sent Dobbs that autographed chart after HE announced a new policy measure. That for him was the true indicator of his performance against Mother Nature.

It was his deadly mistake.

Mother Nature was not impressed by Trump or his markets. Mother Nature, alas, doesn’t “open” her workday at 9:30 a.m. or close it at 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and then take weekends off. So precisely when Trump was autographing his one-day stock chart to be touted by the knuckleheads at Fox, Mother Nature was silently, relentlessly, mercilessly and exponentially spreading the coronavirus among us.

As Rob Watson, one of my favorite environmental teachers, likes to remind people: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.”