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| Trump with Axios National Political Correspondent Jonathan Swan |
From Salon:
[I]t’s not so much that Trump thought he would directly profit from people dying. It was more that he convinced himself that any measures taken to mitigate the pandemic — whether that meant a rigorous lockdown, mask mandates or a serious nationwide testing regimen — would hurt his chances of re-election, and he’d much rather see people die in large numbers than let that happen.
But perhaps this is splitting hairs: However you slice it, millions of people have gotten sick and more than 155,000 are dead because Trump thought he could cheat on the coronavirus numbers the same way he cheated on his taxes, cheated his customers, cheated charities and cheated the so-called students at his so-called university. His voters elected him because they admired his sleaziness, and thought they would benefit from his cheating ways. But now they’re just as likely to get sick or die as the liberals they were so eager to enrage and humiliate.
We can’t expect some mass exodus back to reality among Trump supporters, of course. It’s very common for people who have been defrauded to refuse to admit it, and to defend the con man who targeted them, rather than admit that they were wrong in the first place. This is visible in cults like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, where members may be willing to die before conceding they should never have followed their cult leader. Trump’s approval rating remains stuck at a stubborn 40%, so now we know: That’s the proportion of Americans who would rather risk death from a pandemic than admit that maybe the liberals were right all along.
Read the full article.
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