“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” — Stalin

To: The Lincoln Project

From: The HollywoodBowles

To whom it may concern,

First off, a caveat and compliment. I wear the liberal title proudly, and am ethically opposed to most of what you represent: non-choice, non-diversity, non-tolerance, non-science, non-environment. That makes your party a non-starter for me.

BUT. You make great commercials! Much better than anything we libtards can concoct. I don’t know why, but we suck at catch-phrasing. As the president would say, it is what it is.

And it’s in that spirit I offer you a new campaign in the presidential homestretch. It’s not nearly as clever as your brilliant Wake Up ad, but it beats the hell out of “Lock Her Up” or “Sleepy Joe.”

I call it the Quarter-Million Campaign. As you know, the U.S. will be approaching 250,000 American casualties from COVID — around the week of the election, perhaps a few days later, if rates and estimates maintain.

There are not many political leaders who get saddled with the word “million.” And when they are, it’s never positive. Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Hitler, Mussolini sported the figure, too.

And soon, Donald Trump. His handling of coronavirus — more than his affairs, finances, Russian collusion, government shutdown, etc. — synopsize in just three words (two if you drop the article) his incompetence. The virus has exposed just how out of his depth Trump is, from handling crises to calming a nervous nation to providing citizens with basic medical information.

An effective ad wouldn’t even need all of the words used in the above paragraph. Simply an ever-rising Johns Hopkins fever chart of casualties, played to the soundtrack of Trump’s rosy forecasts for the pandemic: “It’s going to be gone in summer”; “It will magically go away”; “If we did less testing,” yaddy. Then fade to a black-and-white photo. Maybe something like this.

You could probably run an ad as long as Wake Up, given how much snake oil we’ve been sold in the last eight months. My favorite is his latest: “We’re rounding the corner.” Like, into an alley?

It’s not fair to lay 250,000 deaths at his feet, I know. In truth, we are as much to blame for the catastrophe as he, if not more. Even in my own state, an allegedly educated one, even my friends, even my own mother — my mother! — seems determined to play with fire when it comes to a global pandemic. Because, you know, it is what it is.

But the president trades in hyperbole, so let’s speak his language. The beauty of the concept is that it’s evergreen: It will last well beyond the election, far into 2021, when the courts are being lobbied over how to call the race. You’ll want public opinion in your corner in that final dash, and A Quarter-Million can be easily modified as the body count rises. It’s a self-working magic trick: Each new title — A Half-Million, A Million — is more astonishing than the previous.

A Quarter Million. We’re not rounding the corner. We’re rounding off.