Work for Trump and you’re screwed.
A case in point: Dr. Deborah Birx, who’s technically the federal response coordinator (an easy job, because there’s no federal response to coordinate), but has often been Trump’s point person on Covid-19 non-response in front of TV cameras, which is a terrible job for reasons that should be glaringly obvious.
For months, “as the coronavirus … spread from raging fires in scattered epicenters to a national inferno, Birx … hewed much closer [than Dr. Fauci] to the White House’s often-problematic pandemic script,” staying “publicly mum in the face of Trump’s politicized and patently false claims about the contagion, [and] occasionally gushing about his nuanced appreciation for science,” NBC News says.
The net result: Her reputation is trashed.
Moreover, nobody likes her. Not Democrats, nor Republicans, and least of all her professional colleagues.
Birx, unlike most of Trump’s water carriers who struggle to walk a tightrope between conscience, professional responsibility, and his outrageous lies, can’t be fired from her day job, only relieved from her TDY at the White House. She’s an Army colonel on loan to Trump’s Covid-19 non-response effort. So she, at least, will still have a paycheck. And a pension. She might want to consider buying a retirement cabin 10 miles from the nearest road.
The NBC commentator says this month would be “an ideal time for Birx to grow a spine.” It’s too late. She’s already hopelessly compromised, having gone too far down the road of “the metamorphosis that seemingly competent and objective individuals undergo inside Trump’s White House,” which is a fancy way of saying he corrupts everyone around him, including highly educated and competent professionals you’d expect to recognize a tank trap when they drive up to one. She’s by no means the first.
You wonder why they do it. By now, Trump is a known quantity, and everybody who works for him gets fed into his mincing machine, which — this is redundant — makes you wonder why they do it.
Moreover, every formerly respectable expert who became a toady for this president will, from now on, be known to the world and history as a … toady. And a few months from now, none of them will have jobs (this has nothing to do with whether he’s re-elected; regardless of whether he stays or go, they’ll all be gone.)
Except Birx. At least she has the option of disappearing back into the Army after the mushroom cloud dissipates and the fallout settles. And she won’t have to worry about people bothering her for autographs.
Read story here.
Photo: Dr. Birx. What the ??? is she doing hanging out with this guy?? Is she out of her mind? It would seem so.