It is one of those constants of American life that remain true throughout the decades: When the nation faces times of crisis, everyone eagerly turns their attention to singer Barbra Streisand. Not for her songs, of course, but for her punditry. Thankfully, she never disappoints. Nowadays, one only has to browse to her Twitter account to read wonderfully-wise quips about the current state of coronavirus affairs, written with the poignancy and objectivity we’ve all come to expect from the Yentl star.
“I wrote a song called ‘Don’t Lie to Me’ after Trump was elected, because he was a serial liar. Now, with more than 20,000 people dead because of his incompetence and lies, he’s proven that he can’t handle the truth. He’s unfit to lead this nation…especially in a time of crisis,” Streisand tweeted on Sunday.
Terrific.
Streisand did not follow up this tweet with specific ideas about what Trump could have done to prevent those 20,000 deaths from a disease that started in Wuhan, China, and she didn’t mention that Trump shut down travel from China while Democrats stood idly by and accused him of xenophobia. Nor did she mention that Bill de Blasio was still resisting shutting down the schools in New York City as late as March 16; NYC, of course, being the home for roughly half of the U.S.’s total coronavirus deaths.
She certainly didn’t mention that Donald Trump, being just a mortal man, has no power to “stop” a virus from spreading through sheer will or magic.
Instead, she tweeted this out later in the day: “Trump doesn’t like the World Health Organization for telling him to stop politicizing this virus, so he’s threatening to defund them! How sick.”
Once again, Streisand did not mention that the World Health Organization is under fire from many world leaders, not just Trump, for their early deference to China and their utterly botched approach to the coronavirus outbreak in the first few months. She did not mention that WHO, relying on falsified information from Beijing, told the world in January that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission. No, no. She read “Trump” and “World Health Organization” and tweeted out the first nonsensical opinion that came to her mind.
But none of this is new for Streisand, who has pretty much dedicated her Twitter feed to a nonstop Trump-bashing playground since 2015. You’d think that she could find better things to do with her time than write Tweets and songs about her hatred of the president, but that’s the terrible thing about this illness – it takes away your entire sense of perspective.
And by illness, of course, we mean Trump Derangement Syndrome, not the coronavirus.
