Yalie Scott Shapiro—"bad for Yale, bad for America" according to a colleague (incorporated into his Twitter bio)—is a convivial and learned tweeter. One of his recent stunts involved a caption-writing contest for the above picture of Trump's coronavirus team setting to work at maybe their first meeting. Shapiro himself suggested:
"Ok, our first priority is to put out a press release agreeing that the food is great at Sammy's Mexican Grill in Phoenix. Make sure you capitalize 'GREAT'"
This was puzzling to me, and therefore intriguing. Being moderately proficient (for my age) at performing Internet searches, I now know about another of those minor debacles of Trump Time that partakes, in roughly equal measures, of the funny, the absurd, and the pathetic. Here's the story:
A couple weeks ago (Feb 19), Trump had a rally in Phoenix. Flew in, flew out: airport, motorcade, arena, motorcade, airport. This couple who own Sammy's Mexican Grill in the Tucson area are in the MAGA cult so they traveled to Phoenix for the rally. Then, a couple days ago, they complained that pics of them at the rally were circulating on social media and that the libz were hating on them and boycotting their restaurant. Predictably, this landed them on Fox News, which aired a segment about their troubles yesterday at around 7:30 in the morning, eastern time. At 10:11 a.m., the President of the United States tweeted:
The food is GREAT at Sammy’s Mexican Grill in Phoenix, Arizona. Congratulations to Betty & Jorge Rivas on doing such a wonderful job. I will try hard to stop by the next time I am in Phoenix. Support Sammy’s! @foxandfriends
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 1, 2020
Mildly amusing because, for one thing, the restaurant isn't in Phoenix—it's around 100 miles away, in a Tucson suburb. That Trump's confused about the location suggests that, notwithstanding his testimonial about the GREAT food, he's never been to Sammy's Mexican Grill. (On his most recent trip, he wasn't within a hundred miles of it.) But, on the day that his coronavirus team, headed by public health whiz Mike Pence, was rolling up its collective sleeves to start work, the president was himself watching Fox and tweeting about what he saw. Thus Scott Shapiro's hot take on what was being discussed at the meeting—the administration's top priority, as demonstrated by what the president was devoting his time to. Well, it's cheaper for us than when he plays golf!
The kicker is that the same couple got embroiled in an identical controversy during the 2016 campaign. It seems to have worked out well for them, as their restaurant filled with customers eager to own the libz by dining at Sammy's Mexican Grill. Pretty sure it's not too cynical to suspect that they attended Trump's most recent Arizona pep rally for the purpose of igniting another controversy and thereby refilling their restaurant with a new generation of MAGA devotees willing to eat food prepared by the people Mexico sent us ("not their best"). If only the President of the United States, their in-house Yelp reviewer, could place the restaurant in the right city!
Shapiro's Twitter feed can be enlightening as well as fun: for example, he recently recommended this article, by Jacob Hacker, "the most informed person in America on healthcare," he (Shapiro) says. It's long and I've only scanned it, but I'm going to read the whole thing more carefully when Family Feud is over. I already learned that FDR wanted to make national health insurance part of the Social Security Act of 1935, but he concluded that the opposition of doctors might then kill the whole program. In the realm of alternate history, one can speculate about what might have happened had Roosevelt dared to roll the dice and fight the American Medical Association. Is it possible that we'd be stuck with national health insurance and that it'd be as wildly unpopular as the other provisions of the Act have proven to be? It seems outrageous, but the federal government confiscates part of every paycheck, feeds the stolen proceeds into this ginormous government fund administered by deep state operatives, and then redistributes the wealth to recipients who need it more on account of being members of a favored demographic group. I'm pretty sure that's how it works. No wonder everyone has hated it for 80 years!
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