It turns out to be bad idea for people who have large public microphones to act as if they're venting to their 120 Facebook friends.

And oh, look, this is a perfect segue to a tweetstorm about my latest column!

So I've been saying Trump is dangerous basically since the beginning. Not because I thought he was going to cancel elections and become a dictator; I didn't think he had the competence, or American institutions the vulnerability, for that.

I thought he was dangerous because he said stuff no politician could say, and that was corrosive to American democracy in all sorts of ways. What happened on Wednesday doesn't need to itself be a coup in order to pose a mortal long-term danger to the Republic.

Also I didn't want the impulsive, belligerent narcissist to have access to nuclear launch codes, but that's a discussion for another time.

Seeing a lot of this circulating on the right, so let me explain why folks are worried even though it is not literally true that every ICU bed in the country is occupied at the moment.

#1, the big worry is ICU space, not hospital beds, and as you can see from this very thread, ICU utilization is running well above hospital utilization generally.

#2 The constraint on ICUs isn't beds, it's staff. ICU beds are (relatively) easy to build. They're not much good if the only people you have to staff them are the cafeteria workers.

#3 It's true that ICUs can flex to deal with high utilization. But to do so, they have to:

1) Stretch existing workers to do more (potentially compromising care)
2) Recruit workers from other specialties (potentially compromising care)
2) Hire additional temporary workers

Hiring temps is the best strategy. The problem is, it's a good strategy that's hard to implement when a staggering fraction of the nation's hospitals are all having the same problems, requiring exactly the same skills from the same shrinking pool of workers, at the same time.

I want to call out this particular point in my larger tweetstorm, because it sorta maps onto a dumb talking point from the left: "The government can borrow and spend any amount we want. American *can't* have a Greek-style debt crisis, because we borrow in our own currency!"

My right-wing followers, of course, understand why this won't fly: America borrowing in dollars, and under US law rather than some neutral third country, is not a law of nature. People with money could easily decide it was too risky to make us dollar-denominated loans.

(Or at least, at any price we'd want to pay.)

What would make them decide this? The fastest way would be for America to borrow a metric crap ton of money, and then default or let inflation eat away the value of our loans so we're repaying pennies on the dollar in real terms.

And since the "America can't have Greek-style debt crisis" talking point is genreallly only uttered by people who are urgin gus to do exactly the sort of thing that make it more likely we'll have trouble borrowing money in dollars, this is just deeply, deeply silly.

I mean it would probably work for a while--as Adam Smith said, "There's a lot of ruin in a nation". I am prepared to concede that the natural stopping point of this binge might be quite a few years away. I only say there is some stopping point.