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Now here’s an interesting question.These are four musicians that I’ve admired and enjoyed in varying degrees over the years. If we’re going to compare them with each other, I think we have to look at all of them as being more than just guitar players, because that’s not the only thing that they’ve all done.This answer may well come across as a tad pretentious, but I’m looking at it from the perspective of someone who’s interested in a lot of different music, not just blues-based guitar playing. So that’s my standpoint: to try and see these four guys in the round, so to speak, and perhaps to see if they can be compared with each other, without making empty and foolish claims about one being objectively better, etc.If some component of my personal opinion comes into this it’ll hopefully be obvious, and it should go without saying that I mean it as opinion.Whether it convinces the reader or not is a matter of how well I explain myself.You might want to get a beverage, at this point. This will be a long one. And I make no apologies.Jimmy Page combined various types of musician into one.He’s a remarkable guitarist, obviously. A genuine stylist. And also a notable songwriter.In general, I prefer his rhythm playing to his lead playing, because he’s one of the brilliant riff-makers of any period in rock music, which is a highly underrated talent.Guitar fans routinely overvalue flashy technique at the expense of the ability to make memorable and effective music that communicates with people. Page has some chops, for sure, but many of his most striking creations (‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Immigrant Song’, ‘Good Times Bad Times’, ‘Communication Breakdown’) are well within the reach of the average bedroom guitarist.This, perhaps, is why that aspect of his talent is so underrated: since so many bedroom guitarists find him relatively easy to play, they fail to realise that the ability to come up with riffs like that at all, is a gift that they themselves lack.But there’s another thing about him, which is the reason why, rather than have a picture of him onstage, I wanted a picture of him in the studio.Page’s riff-making is part of his larger gift of musical construction.He had a sound in mind for Led Zeppelin, and he chose the musicians that he wanted to help him create it.From the very first album, there’s a blocky clarity about Zeppelin’s music, that you don’t find in the Yardbirds, and you don’t find in Zeppelin’s peers, except perhaps Black Sabbath, a bit later on.You can almost see Led Zeppelin’s guitar and bass and drum parts, as they lock together, and you can almost wander through the space between them. That is, when they weren’t doing full-on balls-to-the-wall rock and roll, like in ‘Rock and Roll’ or ‘Celebration Day’ or ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’. Page is a producer as well as a musician, and his production fingerprint with Zeppelin is a big feature of why their recordings have continued to sound so good. He knew what he wanted, and he got it.Only later, when stupefying success and overindulgence caused him to lose focus, do Zeppelin’s albums start sounding…not exactly like they could be anyone’s, but like the rock beast has been fatally wounded, and is stumbling blindly on, waiting for Legolas to climb up its legs and give it the coup de grace.I was too young ever to see Zeppelin live, but live recordings and video of them don’t have nearly the appeal for me as their studio recordings do. That’s why I think of Page as being at his happiest and best in the studio, carving those epic recordings out of silence with his three bandmates. (Of course, we know that John Bonham was also happiest when he wasn’t touring, so there’s that.) And that’s why I chose a picture of him in the studio, looking happy.So, as a creator of a sound, for a very specific purpose—not an inarticulate, bullying visionary like Captain Beefheart, but as a calm and focused bandleader who knew what he wanted—that’s what I value most about Jimmy Page.He was the principal architect of some damn good tracks.Eric Clapton is a bit different.The reader may start to notice that I have not made my image choices lightly.I’ve already gone into my whole Clapton thing elsewhere, but brief recap:When I first wanted to learn guitar, I knew little about it, so I asked around for who the best guitarist was. The only answer I got was ‘Eric Clapton’, so I dutifully listened to a shitload of Clapton, and it took me a long time to realise that I found most of it very, very boring. The only period of his career that I found consistently rewarding was the first five years, in which he was in no less than five bands: the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes.Clapton is not a visionary musical architect, like Jimmy Page.He began as a singing guitarist, and that’s still basically what he is. More than any other guitar player of his generation, he’s invested the most time in playing the role of the solitary virtuoso.One man, with a guitar, singing the blues, in a very expensive suit.He has never been his own producer, except kind of on Layla and other Assorted Love Songs, where Tom Dowd was the executive producer and the whole band got production credit. The overall sound of Clapton’s music over the years has been shaped largely not by him, but by the company he keeps, and (at least in the seventies and eighties) by whatever was the state of his hangover that day.The virtuoso tradition grew in the nineteenth century, and because of its focus on the skill and heroism of the virtuoso, it’s always tended to shove the accompaniment of the virtuoso’s performance into the background. For all that Clapton has hired some great sidemen, does anyone listen to his recordings just for them? Has he really brought out what’s great about them? On some of his 70s recordings, the heavy lifting in terms of guitar playing isn’t even by him, but is by George Terry, his second guitarist, because Clapton was too drunk to deliver.Fine: he got his act together, and since the 90s, he has been sober, conscientious and disciplined. And as his post-alcohol nerves have steadied, he has all the more conscientiously attached himself to the virtuoso tradition, as it was established in the 19th century, although in his case it’s in a comfortable blues-country-rock mode, not exactly the challenging conditions of a classical work. (Chopin used to show off, by playing his own concerti as solo works. Has Clapton ever made an entirely solo recording?)But since Clapton got himself together, has the music been as effective?What I’m arguing is that Clapton’s greatest focus, and I think most of his value for his fans and admirers, goes into a very narrow field: his guitar playing. And if you’ve got an appetite for it, and it does the job for you, then he certainly delivers something.I’m less convinced by the whole solo-bluesman thing. Because I think that there are aspects of the blues that almost entirely escape Clapton.I’m going to quote a distinguished African-American authority on the music, Albert Murray, who had this to say in Stomping the Blues, which was described by Greil Marcus as ‘the best word [on the blues] anyone has offered for a long time’:That the blues as such are a sore affliction that can lead to total collapse goes without saying. But blues music regardless of its lyrics almost always induces dance movement that is the direct opposite of resignation, retreat or defeat. Moreover, as anyone who has ever shared the fun of any blues-oriented social function should never need to be reminded, the more lowdown, dirty, and mean the music, the more instantaneously and pervasively sensual the dance gestures it engenders.This earthy, celebratory aspect of the blues is something that you can hear on a classic blues album like B.B. King’s Live at the Regal, but it’s not something that I would associate much with Clapton.At the risk of annoying my friend Mr. Tom Robinson, whose learned love of both blues and Victorian poetry surely exceed my own:Clapton is the Tennyson of the blues.He has a compulsion to weep and moan, rather than take Albert Murray’s advice:The main thing, whatever the form, is resistance if not hostility. Because the whole point is not to give in and let them get you down.This is perhaps why those of us who no longer love Clapton, no longer love him. The blues can haunt us all; but we have to exercise our sympathies a good deal harder, in order to see them dancing around the soul of a maudlin, Armani-suit-wearing, Tory-voting millionaire.For all Clapton’s dexterity and sincerity, what he chooses to say in his music just isn’t that pressing, and hasn’t been for a long time.Jimi Hendrix didn’t live long enough.He got his most fitting epitaph from Jesus himself, in Mark 6:4:καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὅτι Οὐκ ἔστιν προφήτης ἄτιμος εἰ μὴ ἐν τῇ πατρίδι αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐν τοῖς συγγενεῦσιν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ αὐτοῦ.And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.”It still baffles and offends me that there are rock guitar fans out there, who are still unwilling to accept the extent to which Jimi Hendrix changed the way we think about the guitar in music.Hendrix’s peers accepted it.The Claptons and Townshends and Becks, and even the McCartneys, gladly allowed his influence to flow into their music, and they absorbed and digested it. (Unless, like Robin Trower and Randy California, they didn’t digest it at all, but just played it back as if they’d thought of it themselves.)And then their fans in turn praised, in the music of those white rock musicians, the very thing that Hendrix had inspired them to do.Except for those fans who insisted that he didn’t belong to that company, because he was too ‘messy’ or was just playing ‘distorted blues’, or whatever.This was not a new strain in Hendrix’s reception. Jon Landau’s review for Rolling Stone of Are You Experienced? had hardly been overflowing with praise:Above all this record is unrelentingly violent, and lyrically, inartistically violent at that.As Joe Carducci sardonically noted, I believe Jon lowered his stylus onto the rubber mat, here.Hendrix came from the musical background that his white British peers only knew from listening to the recorded evidence of it.I already talked about Jimmy Page as having a sound in his head which he wanted to create. Well, Jimi Hendrix was his precursor, in that respect: the first great visionary of rock guitar, the guy who understood that it was capable of being a fundamentally different instrument from what it had been in the hands of Scotty Moore or James Burton or anyone else who’d stuttered his way across a rockabilly record.In five short years, Hendrix, like Moses, sketched out a promised land, and huge numbers of his followers entered into it and took up possession.And then, when they were asked, far too many of them said Oh yeah, I was never really a Moses guy, my real influence was always Aaron.I still marvel at Hendrix’s sheer eloquence on guitar: his capacity to make it convey whatever mood he wanted, whether it was apocalyptic or sensual or angry or Promethean, or wispy, or cheerful, or sad, or even comical—his 1969 Albert Hall performance of Elmore James’ ‘Bleeding Heart’ is both a devastating blues, and also, as Albert Murray would have appreciated, a hugely entertaining and good-humoured defiance of the blues.He was tugged this way and that, by expectations and politics and his own appetites, and by events, and he died when he had only just shown us what he meant.He left us a whole approach to the guitar, a bunch of brilliant recordings, and quite a lot of truly great songs, too. Hendrix’s material has entered the repertoire, in a way that Clapton’s songs, and even Page & Plant’s songs, really haven’t.His death is one of the great tragedies of 20th century music.Everything about Hendrix’s career, apart from its end, makes me think that he could have gone on to further greatness.And so we come to the oldest and strangest of this quartet: Frank Zappa. Here seen with another fully paid-up member of the awkward squad, Pierre Boulez.As is probably clear by now, I reckon Hendrix to have been the finest of these four, as a player of his instrument.Technically he was capable of things that were quite beyond Clapton (in particular, certain kinds of rhythm and chordal playing) and as an innovator, the influence went from him to Page, in terms of how Page went from being a studio guitarist to being a guy who wanted to create a new sound in rock music.Zappa’s path as a musician was completely unlike the other three. And yet in some ways he resembles all of them.He began as a drummer in a high school marching band. He liked blues and R&B and doo-wop, became interested in percussion, taught himself to read and write music, discovered 20th century modernist music, taught himself to write it, and then started to take the guitar seriously.Music for Zappa was firstly a thing that he created as a composer, not something that he primarily wanted to do because he liked expressing himself on the guitar.As I wrote in another answer, Zappa at the beginning of his recording career wasn’t even a particularly good player. He liked blues, and had definite likes and dislikes in terms of tone and attack, and he became a capable all-purpose lounge/studio guitarist. But the Mothers of Invention had two albums under their belt before Zappa had become a guitar player whose style was instantly recognisable.No: Zappa was, as he said himself, ‘a composer who happens to be able to operate an instrument called a guitar’. And although he knew Hendrix and played with him in New York in the 60s, and was friendly enough with Clapton to get him to do a spoken-word cameo on We’re Only In It For The Money, Zappa didn’t develop his unique, shiny/filthy, huge sound until the mid-1970s, after years of touring and composing.And I don’t buy the disclaimers of those who try to argue that Zappa hated rock music, and only played it so he could earn enough money to do other stuff. That sounds to me like the grumbling of those who feel that they’ve been disappointed by his failure to be more sincere, more weepy, more consolatory, when he never tried to be any of those things.Prolonged exposure to his music reveals the personality behind it: the smart, sarcastic, determinedly unsentimental class joker and local wise guy, who keeps his deepest sentiments buried in his music where nobody can mock him for them, and who rehearsed his expert musicians in hours of seamlessly segued complex music, and then deliberately released live albums in which they (and he) hilariously fuck it up. (But not without recording at least one perfect take, somewhere, because he wasn’t just in it for the money.)Zappa, like Hendrix, lived a life that could and should have been longer; but with his enormous discography in mind, can we really say that he didn’t get a chance to show us what he could do? I think he proved himself many times, and I think that the people who complain that he was too cynical are themselves the sentimentalists.That’s the straight face of a man who only cries on the inside.Zappa didn’t show a lot of emotion in life, but one of the few times that he did was when he got into a heated discussion with a born-again Christian about music censorship. The born-again Christian (I can’t find out who, sorry), insisted that children were too young to be exposed to things that were ‘not normal sexual relations’. Zappa replied ‘Information doesn’t kill you.’ The born-again Christian insisted that it was better that children remain ignorant of some things. Zappa’s reply was fervent.Anyone who would rather have their children be ignorant is making a mistake—because then they can be victims.Because then they can be victims is the secret justification for Zappa’s preference for not making his music a pretext for self-expression, as Clapton did, and not constructing a giant, perfectly articulated rock juggernaut, as Page did.He wanted the audience to put the pieces together, to figure it out, to see how it all fitted, and not underline everything. He wanted the audience to not sit back and let it all flow over them. He wanted them as engaged as he was.That, to me, is how Zappa dealt with the legacy of Hendrix’s trippy, visionary output: by making his own junk-sculpture project/object out of blues and doo-wop and rock and ‘Louie Louie’ and Webern and panty jokes, and filth, and secret words, and insane percussion interludes, and epic guitar solos, all of it descriptive of a world where you were in danger at all times of being the victim, because somebody’s got to be, but he wasn’t going to be so arrogant as to pretend that he could lead you out of there.He just wanted to entertain you, and keep you awake enough to be alert.In the end, the idea of ranking these musicians against each other is futile.But for all Clapton’s general solemnity about his art, his music is far less ambitious in scale and intention than Zappa’s, even though Zappa bluffly and rather faux-modestly insisted that it was all just entertainment.Hendrix was still growing when he died, and we’ll never know what he could have become, but what we have is still the last great conceptual leap forward in rock guitar.Jimmy Page is a master craftsman, in a time when music had perhaps more than a healthy proportion of inspired amateurs.In the end, we like what we like, and we are inspired and moved by what inspires and moves us.All criticism can do is perhaps provoke us into thinking that we didn’t give something a chance—or, alternatively, that we’ve given it enough chances by now.Thanks for reading.Sources:Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, rev. edition, 1994Barney Hoskyns, Led Zeppelin IV, 2006Barney Hoskyns, Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin, 2012John Irving, ‘The invention of tradition’, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Music, 2001Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues, reprinted in Collected Essays and Memoirs, 2016Charles Shaar Murray, Cross-Town Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop, 2001Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, 1994Frank Zappa, The Frank Zappa Guitar Book, 1982Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1989

I know, right? What’s plodding old John Bonham compared to Keith Moon, the wild boy of rock drumming? Who could possibly compare them? Moonie is clearly the real thing, more notes for your money, sprung from nowhere, a self-made genius with no precursors.Oh, wait.For a start, there can be no official consensus on who’s the ‘best drummer in rock and roll history’. So, any attempt to advance John Bonham or Keith Moon as a candidate is just fan talk.Inspired by Ethan Iverson’s brilliant blog post on jazz drumming (The Drum Thing, or, A Brief History of Whiplash, or, “I’m Generalizing Here”), I suggest that there are basically two ways to regard the rock drummer:as a servant of the band’s music (Iverson calls this the ‘devotional’ drummer);as a virtuoso.Now, I don’t think that these roles are necessarily mutually exclusive, but neither do I think that the virtuoso drummer is automatically superior to the servant drummer.Faster, yes; flashier, more conspicuous, more attention-getting, more noisy. But better? Does having a flashy drummer in the band make the band better? I submit that it does not.Some great and immortal rock and roll has been made by bands that had notably unflashy drummers: the Beatles’ recordings, for example. There was a Quora question about what the Beatles’ music would have been like if they’d had Keith Moon on drums, and it attracted a few answers along the lines of It would have been amaaaazing!No, it wouldn’t. It would have been terrible. The other Beatles weren’t flashy instrumentalists, and having Keith Moon on drums would have fatally upset their meticulously balanced music. I don’t think that The Band’s drummer, Levon Helm, ever took a drum solo, but his majestic playing is absolutely central to songs like ‘Don’t Do It’, ‘Chest Fever’, ‘The Weight’ and ‘King Harvest’. Drummers like Helm and Ringo Starr are the models of the drummer-as-servant, taking their inspiration not so much from the flashier types of jazz drummer, but from soul/R&B masters such as Motown’s Benny Benjamin and Richard ‘Pistol’ Allen, and Stax’s Al Jackson Jr.Other examples of great but unflashy drummers in major bands, who served the music rather than demanding that the music serve them? Jimmy Carl Black in the Mothers of Invention; John French in the Magic Band; John Densmore in the Doors; Pete York in the Spencer Davis Group.But music is not always so resistant to being divided up into categories.One of the reasons why The Who was such a tempestuous band was that Moon was an atrocious timekeeper. He played faster or slower according to his mood, and he seldom bothered to devise coherent parts, preferring instead to flail away at the drums in a way that more or less made rhythmic sense. The only thing that succeeded in reining him in was when the band started to use synthesizer tracks on Who’s Next, forcing Moon to stick to a steady tempo. (In the live performance of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ from The Kids Are Alright, you can see Moon wearing headphones so that he could time his solo to a click track; without it, the performance would have been a mess.) The result was that he came up with some of the best drumming of his career: ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is, I think, a high point in rock drumming, in part thanks to Moon’s expertly-paced solo before the re-entry (‘Yeeeeaaaahhhhhhh!’) No surprises that Dire Straits ripped it off for the into to ‘Money for Nothing’.John Bonham, on the other hand, was a superb timekeeper. The Who’s songs derive their rhythmic pulse from the interplay between Townshend’s rock-steady rhythm guitar and Entwistle’s turbulent bass playing, but Led Zeppelin songs are always driven by Bonham. Just as Ringo Starr tended to play subtly behind the beat, Bonham sometimes tended to play subtly ahead of it: a good example is his part on ‘The Song Remains The Same’, in which for most of the song he pushes the pace forward with a galloping kick, kicksnare, kick snarekick, but after a while he varies this by adding an extra blow on the snare: kick, kicksnare, snare-kick snarekick. During the guitar solo, the song changes into a dreamier and even country-tinged mood, and Bonham varies his part accordingly, leaning on the ride cymbal and varying the pattern with atmospheric blows on the toms, but you can almost feel him getting impatient, and sure enough, the arrangement changes to a descending run which culminates in a pause which he fills with one of those titanic, hammering Bonzoid fills in which he always seems to play slightly fewer notes than you remember him playing, before returning to the galloping pace it had earlier.John Bonham was, I think, of the school of Ringo Starr, Benny Benjamin and Levon Helm: for all that he took an epic solo in ‘Moby Dick’, he was the drummer-as-servant. Keith Moon was the drummer as virtuoso: he didn’t like drum solos, but he didn’t need to like them, because he soloed all the time anyway.Was Moon more ‘talented and original’ than Bonham? I don’t think so. Both of them contributed, in their way, to their band’s music, and Moon was a perfect fit for The Who’s early, churning, restless music. In mid-career, he calmed down enough to contribute to some genuinely great recordings, but I think there were times when he was a liability to the band; when they would have been better off if he had been more in control of himself.John Bonham lost control of himself off the stage. When he was behind the kit, he drove the band with the confidence of a Titan. Unlike Moon, he understood that silence is as important as sound. Think of the massive, ominous intro to ‘When The Levee Breaks’, an instance of Bonham lagging slightly behind the beat for a change, like Ringo on steroids. For most of ‘The Rain Song’ he doesn’t play anything at all, and when he does he makes each note count. I read somewhere that Page gave him the credit for steering the whole arrangement of ‘In My Time Of Dying’. One of the most cataclysmic moments in Zeppelin’s music is Bonham’s huge, nineteen-note fill after the big theremin freakout in the middle of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and yet it’s juxtaposed with such delicacy: it’s followed by the stop-time guitar solo, in which each bang! bang! is succeeded by just Page’s snarling guitar and Bonham’s discreet tapping on the hi-hat.Of course, there’s also the fact that Bonham had Jimmy Page as musical director, and Page knew exactly what he wanted. The Who had no musical director, just four big egos wrestling with each other. As Townshend once complained, ‘I write these songs and give it to them, and it all gets turned into this fucking sausage machine.’If a young drummer were to come to me and ask who’s a better model as a drummer, John Bonham or Keith Moon, I know what my advice would be: Listen to both of them. But don’t do what Moon did.Edit: Well, this answer has had a lot of love, so to say thanks for that, here’s a contemporary composer paying tribute to John Bonham. Christopher Rouse’s ‘Bonham’ isn’t as well-known as it ought to be:

He was born rich, was a difficult, bullying child who once hit a teacher as a pre teenager. He was sent to military school from eighth grade through high school, most likely because of incorrigibility. This experience did not lead to a military outcome. Bone spurs got in the way.For whatever reasons, Trump attended Fordham, then transferred to Wharton Business, a part of the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, where he claimed he graduated at the top of his class in 1968. He did not. (Thanks to some alert readers, this paragraph has been edited. I had mistakenly said that Wharton was a graduate school at the time.)Trump has threatened anyone who reveals his educational record at any level with a lawsuit. Why? He claimed that being at Wharton was “super genius stuff,” implying that he fit that description. Professors described him otherwise. There is no evidence that he graduated with honors of any sort.Trump worked with his father in real estate while in and out of school, often serving as a rent enforcer.During his 30s and 40s Trump sought endless attention and deals of any kind to promote himself. We have all heard about his bankruptcies, attempts at building big projects, borrowing money he neglected to repay, and stiffing contractors. He moved from that to selling his brand.In 1989, the Central Park Five case made headlines. A group of young men were accused of raping a woman in Central Park in NYC. Trump took out full page newspaper ads declaring their guilt, and that they should be executed. They went to prison. Later, they were released because of a confession and DNA evidence. Trump would not accept that and still does not. He cannot be wrong.We also know about his three marriages and bragging about affairs and that he can grab women’s private parts because he was “famous.” He has been accused of inappropriate sexual advances by dozens of women. He denies it all, and said he would sue all those women after his election. He did not and will not.All through his life he has sought advantage and conned people of all stripes. There is a good chance that he has been involved with criminal types from both here and abroad, specifically Russia, and who knows where else. Money laundering is a good possibility in that mix. All this has been chronicled by many. Tony Schwartz wrote the Art of the Deal, and David Cay Johnston wrote extensively of Trump, showing his egocentric, pathological lying and bullying. There are many others with similar findings.As we know, Trump started many different ventures that failed: casinos, an airline, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, a magazine, condo developments leaving investors holding the bag, and Trump University, among others.He compulsively sought media attention in tabloids, with Howard Stern, and endless other shows. He sometimes called in disguised as someone like John Barron to tell how rich he was or how many women were after him. He got himself involved in 4000 lawsuits of one form or the other. His constant lies, bullying and bragging were, and are, his method of operation. Add to that zero empathy and you have a toxic stew.Then he ran for President, for the third time, in 2016. The first two were anemic, mostly for show and to increase his exposure. His behavior did not change with that effort and has not changed since. It has only worsened, given the power conveyed to him.What could go wrong if a person who cannot get enough power and attention, gets both? Could corruption possibly follow?He owns golf clubs and claims to be a great golfer, and to have won numerous club championships. Rick Reilly wrote a book about Trump’s golfing called Commander In Cheat, saying that on a 1–10 scale of cheating at golf, Trump is an 11. Golf is like bicycle shorts, it reveals a lot about a man. Remember that he said he would not be playing golf as President? His golfing has cost us far over $100 million.So here we are in a horrible pandemic needing solid, honest, responsible leadership to help heal the nation both economically and medically, without blaming and attacks. We shall see.April 14 edit: On April 13, Trump declared that the President’s authority is “total.” It is not.April 18 edit: After his proclamation that his authority was total, Trump decided to say that it was up to the states when to relax restrictions regarding the Coronavirus. Is it cynical to believe that he could blame them when things go wrong? Soon thereafter, protests arose in Michigan against restrictions. Ignoring social distancing, the protesters, some armed with weapons and Confederate flags, expressed their support for Trump and disdain for the governor who Trump called “that woman.”After the protests, Trump claimed that the protesters were very responsible. In what way? Since there is always something else, Trump Tweeted LIBERATE, followed by the state’s names, to the people of Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. Those swing states all have Democrat governors. There will be more, the safety and welfare of those people affected be damned.April 24 edit:On April 23, Trump suggested that it might be a good idea to inject disinfectants somehow to help fight the virus. He was entirely serious. When there was pushback regarding the obvious dangers of his, he said he was being “sarcastic” to play with the media. He has done that before when caught in an obvious lie or some ridiculous claim. He is never wrong. Remember that.July 4 edit:As of now, nearly 133,000 have died from Covid 19. Trump is bragging about the great job he is doing containing it. After too many states reopened early, cases are rising to about 50,000 per day. It is 4000 per day in Europe. Same population as the US.Because of protests regarding Black Lives Matter, and removal of monuments, Trump is accusing liberals/Democrats of being anti-American and traitors. He spent the July 4 weekend attacking, dividing and having another rally where people are jammed together without masks. Trump’s need for adoration far exceeds the need to keep people safe. He is the Most Patriotic American.July 25 editTrump’s latest is to now pretend that he realizes the dangers of COVID-19 and that we should wear a mask, socially distance, etc. He will claim that he believed that all along. Secondly, he is sending forces to Democratically run cities to conquer the very dangerous, in-American protesters there. All for the benefit of his Law and Order followers. The Law and Order Leader pardoned Roger Stone, who had been convicted of numerous felonies. Trump said that Stone was “unfairly treated.” It is a common Trump accusation, but referring to himself as the victim of that, and Hoaxes and Witch Hunts. Look back 30 years and he did the same then.There WILL be more. Never fear.