April 20th 2020

By Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash

Trump, Fox News and America’s right wing billionaires, who are all working together to stoke an “Open the country!“ movement, are making a huge bet. When Mike Pence was telling people in 2000 that cigarettes don’t cause cancer, while many people no doubt died because of his advice, he was never held accountable for it. When Donald Trump and the coal lobbyist who runs his EPA allowed a poisonous pesticide to go back into production and be used on our food crops, there will be an explosion in cancer and neurological disease, but he almost certainly will not be held responsible for it. When Steve Mnuchin illegally “Robo signed“ thousands of mortgage documents, throwing thousands of Californians out of their homes, he escaped any responsibility for the suffering and destroyed families he caused.

When Fox News promoted the Tea Party campaign to stop Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid, Harvard University says tens of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily, but Fox News was never held responsible for that. The same guys are now betting that they can successfully politicize the Coronavirus and use it to get themselves reelected and lay their hands on as much of the stimulus money as possible, and they will not be held responsible for that, either.

Trump made a bet like this three months ago when he chose to ignore the Coronavirus, and now over 40,000 Americans are dead, but by and large he is not being held responsible for that; instead, the networks put him on TV every night. These grifters and political criminals are all doubling down on their bet that they can simply bullshit their way through this and succeed: do you think they’ll win that bet?

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.