It is truly a fool’s errand trying to make sense of anything Donald Trump does, beyond assuming he sees it as being in his very personal self-interest. But given that –and only that — that as an incontestabe reality, I still can not understand his refusal to ramp up and coordinate nation-wide testing for COVID-19.

If you accept that every move he makes is sociopathically-focused on getting himself reelected in November, and by that I mean shamelessly re-writing recently (recorded) history, scanning the radar for any and every possibility to lay blame for this catastrophic debacle on someone else and encouraging his troll-cult of “gun enthusiasts” to actively rebel against the states on whom he’s sloughed off the fundamental responsibilities of the federal government, the lack of “testing thing” still makes no sense.

I don’t know about you, but I long, long ago stopped thinking that Trump — a man who can’t read note-card memos much less books and thinks Captain Bligh was a role model for “very powerful” leadership — makes many or really any of the policy decisions in his White House. Clearly, he has no interest in doing anything other than the ceremonial, lights-and-cameras-on work of being President.

(The latest example were his “Liberate Minnesota!”, “Liberate Michigan!” and “Liberate Virginia, and save your great Second Amendment! It’s under siege!” tweets. These were tweets posted not as he was in his gold-trimmed jammies late at night, getting ready to go nighty-night after a snack of Kentucky Fried Chicken, nor were they even in the early AM, a bit groggy and entertaining impure thoughts about the blonde on “Fox and Friends”. No. They were just before noon, in the middle of a supposedly all-hands-on-deck, 24/7 fight against an international pandemic, and seconds after watching some nitwit on FoxNews. He was watching fcking TV! Point being … he never works at his job. Someone else is doing that.)

The assumption, already well-documented through contemporary reporting and almost certain to be verified in the “after action” investigations into what — to repeat myself — is the worst dereliction of duty and failure of executive function by a president in U.S. history, is that Trump “policy” such as it is is a product of the imaginations of others. Like, for example, 34 year-old former high school malcontent/Joe Goebbels-like senior advisor Stephen Miller. And the chronically-bungling senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner. And likely the various old tycoon cronies like Tom Barrack — (one of) the guys who did what he could to profiteer off the 2008 collapse, the inauguration and every Trump move since, along with whoever followed him into the men’s room, and of course the deep thinkers on talk radio and FoxNews.

But even then, with Trump as this vain empty vessel playing useful idiot for America’s worst characters and impulses, it makes no sense not to use the Defense Production Act and divert a fraction of the fire hose of deficit-exploding money for a Manhattan Project-style nationwide testing program. Testing, ordered by him (or whoever) and directed by him (or one of his many “task forces”) would without question have the effect of restoring a semblance of order and a functioning economy … before the election.

As we know from those pesky things called numbers, testing in the USA is slowing down rather than speeding up.

As dismaying as it it to imagine, Trump would be rewarded for at least doing that, never mind so completely screwing up the response to a forseeable and well-predicted international disaster.

So why isn’t Team Trump, Miller, (or the latest chief of staff and ex-North Carolina hill country real estate broker Mark Meadows), Jared, Ivanka, Sean Hannity, etc., pushing him on this? It’s not like he’d have to, you know, do anything. He wouldn’t have to show up in a WalMart parking lot and stick swabs up voters’ noses. He wouldn’t have to even break into any of his free-styling gibberish-and-invective spewing afternoon press rallies to express a moment’s worth of empathy for the 35,000 – 40,000 already dead. Hell, he could even go out and play golf! (They might even let him use the ball-washers.)

The only explanation that makes any sense is that someone, somehow has already made it clear that his failure to date is so far beyond the range of Herbert Hoover, (as in Hoover times-100), that the only election strategy now worth pursuing is to pour everything into the blame game. Blame everything on the states, states with Democratic governors in particular. THEY refused to do their job! THEY refused to test! THEIR incompetence is what has held down the economy. And THEIR whining about needing Trump’s help only shows THEIR ineptitude and weakness.

Without testing there’s no imaginable way the economic tragedy of Trump’s incompetence will have dissipated by November. With testing — at the level of hundreds of thousands per day — there is at least a real-world chance that recovery would be sufficient enough to allow millions to return to work.

And at that point thousands would forget/ignore how all this got so off-the-charts bad and vote to give Dear Leader another chance.

Go ahead explain it to me. I don’t get it.