Trump supporters and reality- existing on parallel tracks that will never meet
It's more than just willful ignorance; it's dangerous stupidity and the willingness to give the former President a free pass for ineptitude and incompetence
Abusers – they’ll manipulate and they’ll lie to you.
And when you no longer give them that power, they’ll try to manipulate your family or the people close to you instead. Abusers want everyone to hate you just as much as they do. It’s sick.
Their lack of morals and integrity is sick. The amount of hate they harbor in their hearts is sick,
as are their psychopathic or sociopathic traits.
LaTasha “Tacha B.” Braxton
Perhaps you wonder, as I do, who the people are that make up the cohort of Americans putting Donald Trump slightly ahead of or even with President Joe Biden in so many national polls. And maybe you wonder what those mental and moral midgets might be (or even if they are) thinking.
Do you, like me, wonder if they remember anything about the last ten months of 2020? You remember that awful time, right? The COVID-19 pandemic that stretched into much of 2021 and killed more than a million of our fellow Americans?
If you listen to Trump supporters these days, you have to wonder if those (not) Ph.D. candidates remember the pandemic at all. Or if they’ve wiped it from their memories as merely an inconvenient blip on what they remember as an unblemished record of unparalleled brilliance from Donald J. Diaperfull.
What disturbs me the most is that neither the Biden campaign nor the mainstream media are focused on the Brookings Institute’s estimate that roughly 70% of US COVID-19 deaths can and should be attributed to Donald Trump’s incompetence.
Some estimates show that fully 40% of COVID-19 deaths in this country could have been avoided. In general, Trump’s policy failures during the pandemic exacted a heavy toll on public health.
Trump’s. Policy. Failures.
In the final year of Trump’s Presidency, life expectancy in America fell by 1.13 years, and 450,000 citizens died from COVID-19. Many of those deaths would have been avoidable if not for the volumes of willful disinformation deliberately disseminated, much of it by the White House, some of it by the President himself.
effects on population health [and] [h]is incompetent and malevolent response to the COVID-19 pandemic capped a presidency suffused with health-harming policies and actions.
Donald Trump is arguably responsible for three-quarters of a million deaths. One could credibly argue that he should be on trial for genocide and/or willful incompetence leading to the death of thousands.
Instead, he has a legitimate shot at winning back the Presidency in November, and I have only one question for his supporters:
HAVE Y’ALL LOST YOUR FUCKING MINDS?
Seriously, have you completely forgotten 2020 and 2021?
Increasingly, it appears people are willing to completely block Covid out of their memories, and essentially give Trump a pass, crediting him with the economy he presided over up until lockdown while ignoring everything that came after. And at the same time, they seem perfectly willing to blame Biden for the devastating economic aftermath Trump left us with, no matter how skillfully he has led us out of it.
Of course, Republicans have been doing their damnedest to revise history in order to reinforce this false narrative. Remember when Trump recently insisted with a straight face that “everything worked” when he was president?
No. Everything did NOT work while Orange Jesus was President, COVID-19 being Exhibit A, B, and EVERYTHING ELSE. The entire country was shut down for most of 2020. Refrigerator trucks were being used as morgues at hospitals. And even when vaccines became available after a Herculean effort, far too many brain-dead anti-vaxxers refused to take them because…well, because they couldn’t be bothered to put the public good over their narrow self-interest.
And so the unvaccinated died in large numbers…and still, anti-vaxxers wanted nothing to do with vaccines that had been proven to work and to be one Hell of a lot safer than dancing with COVID-19.
And so, the pandemic became, in large part, an exercise in natural selection- in this case, weeding out the stupid and those who refused to trust science.
Now, Republicans are appealing to these same intellectually incurious and thoroughly propagandized White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals, claiming that when Trump left office, everything was terrific.
Sure, Trump left Joe Biden record job growth, job increases, and wage increases…and every American got a free pony and a new Volvo. Youbetcha.
Of course, the evidence reveals the truth to be a fair bit different, but Trump supporters never think to check the receipts, do they?
For instance, there’s this from April 2020 from CNBC:
The total employment level of 133.4 million fell to its lowest since June 1999.
And, SURPRISE, a chart to illustrate that Sen. Daines is lying:
And then the Guardian had some not-so-good news to share:
US economy shrank by 3.5% in 2020, the worst year since second world war
And, yes, there’s a chart to explain their point:
Comparing wages and earnings in 2020 vis-á-vis 2019…well, that didn’t hold up so famously, either.
Then there was the death, disease, and destruction that happened on Donald Trump’s watch.
So, yeah, tell me again how AmeriKKKa was a veritable Paradise when Donny Diaperfull was President….
The fact is, not only did many things NOT work during Trump’s presidency, but he made it much worse with his fumbling response to the pandemic. He downplayed the severity of the virus, signaled he wouldn’t wear a mask, and spread dangerous disinformation about Covid cures right from the White House press room. In fact, a 2021 report found that 40% of deaths from Covid could have been avoided if Trump hadn’t mismanaged the crisis.
These are inconvenient facts for Trump, of course, but lucky for him, voters appear willing to forget all about them, just as he would have them do.
Or as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it on All In With Chris Hayes, voters have given Trump “a Covid mulligan.”
But why? Given all of the ineptitude, incompetence, lies, dishonesty, misinformation, and disinformation emanating from Trump’s White House, how can he be forgiven? Why should he be given “a Covid mulligan” that he in no way deserves?
Can you imagine this happening to a Democratic President? (Seriously.)
Job One of a President is crisis management. Donald Trump faced a crisis…and screwed the pooch BIGLY…and yet millions of Americans are willing to overlook that and the fact that he’s responsible for 750,000 COVID-19 deaths.
How is that even possible?
On his show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes spoke with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times about why people have, understandably perhaps, ”blocked out” Covid.
Bouie remarked on why it is so maddening to see the public refuse to hold Trump accountable for his clear failure of leadership through the height of the pandemic.
“Here’s the thing: the job of the presidency is being prepared for crises. That’s all it is. We judge presidents historically over how they handle crises…
“Donald Trump faced a crisis. And that’s the job and he failed to handle it. And so it’s strange that so many Americans—and I think a lot of coverage—has given him a mulligan as if it doesn’t count. No, this is precisely the thing that counts the most.”
Yet an NBC News poll from January 26-30 shows Trump more trusted to manage the economy by Americans over Biden by a 55%-33% margin. A Morning Consult poll from January 16-22 shows Trump more trusted by 51%-33%.
Even good economic news under Biden doesn’t seem to redound to the President’s benefit.
But according to Yahoo Finance’s Biden Economic Scorecard, not surprisingly, it’s inflation that continues to keep voters sour on Biden’s handling of the economy. Namely: inflation-adjusted income.
Real incomes have dropped by about 1% since Biden took office. Under Trump, real incomes were up about 3%. Biden’s underperformance is entirely due to inflation, which on the whole has risen by more than nominal income during his term. Biden’s not the worst on this measure; Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush score worse. Both of them, notably, lost reelection bids.
Of course, neither Carter nor Bush faced a lying sociopath who tried to stage a coup and ended up facing 91 felony counts from four indictments….
But here’s something else that doesn’t make sense:
WTF, right? Have Americans forgotten about the refrigerator trucks serving as morgues? Have they erased 2020 from their collective memories?
In their defense, it would be easy to understand. Looking back on 2020, it isn’t easy for me to fathom some of the things that did happen and that I endured personally. It’s even harder for me to comprehend what we as a country went through.
But that isn’t to say that we should forget it altogether, especially when you consider that much of what happened occurred precisely BECAUSE of Donald Trump’s ineptitude and incompetence.
We must not forget, because 2020 should serve as an abject lesson of what happens when we allow a lying sociopath so much space in our heads. Thousands of people would be alive today if more Americans had listened to doctors, scientists, and researchers instead of an orange-hued sociopathic dumbass.
Michael Steele noted that this is largely a function of Trump’s ability to create “a fog…narratively speaking,” taking advantage of people’s tendency to look back on even rough times fondly in retrospect.
As The Weekend guest Tia Mitchell pointed out, it’s not unusual for this absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder effect to happen with former presidents. See the way George W. Bush, largely seen as disastrous at the time of his presidency, has benefited from time away from the public eye (not to mention a whole new level of a disastrous presidency to make him look downright competent by comparison.)
The worst year of Trump’s presidency coincided with a once-in-a-lifetime health and economic crisis. So there must be something else going on here than just looking back through rose-colored glasses.
There could be a psychological basis for Americans’ refusal to associate Trump with the trauma of Covid.
People may be forgetting much of what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic because of what the brain naturally does to create event boundaries around traumatic events. It compartmentalizes things to help protect itself from damage.
Over time, this natural process can help us forget how bad things were.
So, how do we remind people of how poorly Trump mishandled his Presidency?
About three years ago, as Joe Biden’s term had just begun, and Trump was already threatening to return to the national stage, The Washington Post’s James Downie warned that “we can’t forget [Trump’s] terrible Covid response.”
Downie wrote:
…the chilling prospect of Trump 2024 remains…
As long as this threat to the country’s future remains, with every death milestone passed, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the outsize role Trump played in an utterly incompetent pandemic response — and the grim human toll that accompanied it.
And so how does Joe Biden—and all of us for that matter—do that?
Trump himself may be giving just the clue.
As the new year began and it became clear that Joe Biden’s strengthening economy would not be the detriment for Biden that Republicans had originally hoped, Trump began to signal that he doesn’t want his presidency to be remembered for the disaster that was 2020.
Last month, Chris Hayes flagged a speech Donald Trump gave in which Trump asked supporters:
“Were you better off 5 years ago or are you better off today?”
Five years ago, yeah? It’s almost like he doesn’t want to remind you of 2020 and what a miserable cock-up his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was. And he certainly doesn’t want Americans thinking about all of their relatives, friends, loved ones, and coworkers who died on his watch.
Five years ago? It’s not like 2019 was going gangbusters, but no one had yet died from a virus no one had heard of or developed a treatment, much less a vaccine, for.
Every Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan has incorporated some version of the “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” question into their campaign. That Donald Trump has transformed that question from four to five years is an amazing tell on his part.
Donald J. Diaperfull may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he knows enough to understand that reminding people of 2020 won’t end well for him. All it will do is conjure up images of refrigerator trucks, shrouded bodies, Ivermectin, and him talking about drinking bleach.
Nobody wants to revisit the COVID-19 pandemic…but Trump REALLY doesn’t want to go there because that’s where he’s most vulnerable. He screwed the pooch, and he knows it.
It’s too bad most of his followers don’t give a shit about that.
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One could add the many tens of billions of dollars Trump's trade war with China cost Americans.