October 6, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Donald Trump is stuck.

Back in March and early April, the Trump administration relied on science and epidemiologists and put together a plan for the coronavirus. The Post Office would send five high-quality masks to every American. The economy would be shut down for a month or two so we could assess the situation while aggressively testing and doing contact tracing to isolate outbreaks and control and confine the disease.

Then, on April 7, all the news media, from newspaper to radio to television, announced a new scientific study showing that almost all the deaths had occurred in blue states, and the non-geriatric deaths occurred principally among Black, Hispanic and Native American people.

News reports tell us that following that news the White House held an internal meeting where Jared Kushner suggested that the situation could be used to make the Democrats look bad. Also, since white people were generally surviving the virus, they decided to cancel the entire plan to protect America and instead start pushing to open the economy back up. The Post Office’s plan to distribute masks was canceled. Those dying were mostly people of color, so why bother?

But now the coronavirus is most rapidly spreading through and ravaging the central part of America, which is politically red and racially white. And wealthy white donors are getting exposed at Trump fundraisers. This is not what Trump’s team was expecting.

But Trump is in a box now. Back when most of the infection was in cities and states run by Democrats and populated by people of color, Trump was enthusiastic about forcing people back to work and ignoring public health guidelines.

Now that his base, rural and small-town white people across the Midwest, South and West, are getting the infection and dying and experiencing long-term disabilities from it, including severe psychiatric syndromes, Trump can’t just say that he was wrong between April and now.

So, instead of telling the truth, he’s chosen to double down on his lies.

Now he’s telling us the coronavirus is no big deal, and we shouldn’t even bother to wear masks. That we shouldn’t “be afraid” of the coronavirus or let it “dominate our lives.” News reports say the slogan in the White House is, “We’re all going to get it eventually, anyway.”

Trump is staying with Jared‘s racist political plan to let people of color in blue states die, and doubling down on the herd immunity advice from his Fox News quack doctor, which could mean 6 million dead Americans within the next year.

Even worse, he’s let the virus spread so far and wide in America that President Biden may find it very difficult to put the pandemic back into the bottle.

Countries all over the world are getting the coronavirus under control. Life is close to back to normal, including the economy, in multiple countries around the world; they’re even playing rugby games in New Zealand next week in stadiums packed with fans. They haven’t had a new case in the country in weeks.

America will not return to anything resembling normal until the racists and political hacks among our senior political leadership are voted out and replaced by people who actually care about the health and welfare of Americans.

Go to IWillVote.com and double-check your registration. As many as 6 million American lives are on the line.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

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