Mad king Donald has gone full Joe Stalin in the last week or so. He is helping his friends and punishing his enemies, and using the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans to do it. People are dying and more will die because of it.

In the 4,000-year-old "Epic of Gilgamesh," the arrogant eponymous king killed Humbaba, the giant guardian of the forest so that he could cut down the cedar stands in what is now northern Iraq to build his great city of Uruk. Gilgamesh's people then diverted the Euphrates River to irrigate fields of barley.

A normal person as president would anguish over telling his nation that a quarter million people were going to have to die because he listened to Fox News hosts and spent two months holding rallies and playing golf when he could have been ordering test kits, ventilators and personal protective equipment.

While we're all experiencing shock and anger at how Trump has created a crisis in America by lying and procrastinating and grandstanding, there's a larger emotion that's reaching deep into the lives of many of us: Grief.

On January 20, the United States and South Korea both diagnosed their first patient with the coronavirus. South Korea immediately begin testing their population and started a nationwide program of social distancing.

The coronavirus crash has turned the fact that we don't make anything in America anymore from a topic for philosophical and political debate into a crisis in our hospitals causing people to die and endangering our frontline health care workers.

Donald Trump spent years hanging out and doing business with mobsters and people associated with them. His lawyer, Roy Cohn, was the chief lawyer for the biggest mobster in New York City, and the Italian mob had infiltrated the New York construction and real estate business. Now Trump's mobster tendencies are bubbling to the surface.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas has said, essentially, that old people should be willing and enthusiastic to patriotically die so that Trump can put the economy back into gear. Apparently he didn't get the memo that most of them will die in a hospital, clogging up our healthcare system and infecting our healthcare workers.

The Associated Press recently did a good roundup story about how the Trump administration procrastinated for months before acknowledging the gravity of the situation that we face as a nation. It answers a lot of the "what" questions, but answers none of the "why" questions.

A joke floating around on the Internet says, "How do you know if you have coronavirus?

Congress is debating how much money to give to corporations and average Americans to try to blunt the economic impact of this pandemic. Republicans have repeatedly blocked or reduced efforts to get more money to individuals at the low-end of the economic scale, saying that we can't afford to spend this much money.

Forget about Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Andrew Cuomo is now the acting President of the United States. Trump continues to think that the job of president is "reality show moderator in chief."

On my radio/TV show last Friday, I said words to the effect of, "Get ready for unemployment levels that are worse than the Republican Great Depression. Get ready for a stock market failure that will be worse than the Republican Great Depression. Plan for the worst and hope for the best." Several people admonished me for talking "fearfully."

Dear airlines, hotel chains, banks, and other industries who are begging Donald Trump and Congress for bail outs. Get in the f*cking line. Most of you didn't even pay taxes last year.

One of the video clips that has gone more viral than most is a Republican congressman on Fox News telling people how important it is that they go out to their local bars and restaurants to keep the economy from being hurt.