Donald Trump continues to kill people
When I speak of the “common” disdain for Dr. Anthony Fauci I employ the word in the English sense. Common as in low, predictable, obvious, unimaginative, rote, ignorant, unenlightened, illiterate. Whenever a Republican tries to justify their almost visceral hatred of the octogenarian humanitarian they invariably begin and end with how often Dr. Fauci gets things wrong. What they really mean is one time early on Dr. Fauci and many scientists thought masks would be of little use and they said as much. It turns out they were wrong and they corrected themselves. That’s it.
The real reason Republicans hate Dr. Fauci so much is because he made their insect god Donald Trump look like a fool and they have never forgiven him for it. So now their campaign of ignorance and lies is actually killing people. When it comes to how far they are willing to go for their stupidity, be advised common (in the above sense of the word) Republicans are willing to let people die for it.
“I mean, it’s ideological rigidity,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN’s State of the Union, “I think there’s no reason not to get vaccinated. Why are we having red states and places in the South that are very highly ideological in one way, not wanting to get vaccinations – vaccinations have nothing to do with politics.” But for the terminally stupid it has everything to do with politics when Trump says it does.
Dr. Fauci called scenes from last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) “horrifying” when members cheered following a comment that the government was not able to achieve 90% vaccinations. “It’s horrifying,” Fauci said. “I mean, they are cheering about someone saying it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives.”
The statistics are in, and the vast majority of people being hospitalised in America for COVID-19 are the unvaccinated. That statistic does not seem to have any effect on the mentally delinquent Trump supporter. After all, when confronted with hard statistics like that the terminally stupid invariably reach for the tired cliché about how to lie with statistics. Bashing the science of statistics is too often the first refuge of people who hate to think. It’s the fool’s shortcut for dismissing something they are too lazy to understand.
Perhaps the greatest irony in all this is Republicans hate what the pandemic is doing to the economy and their personal freedoms. You’d think a group of people who are forever whining about how awful it is to wear a mask in public would want to put these days behind them. But the logic of the stupid has always been self destructive. After all, their insect god lost the presidency because of his ego, so it follows that they would take steps to ensure the pandemic they hate so much continues to endure.
Donald Trump could change this. He could launch a campaign extolling the logic and virtue of getting vaccinated. But the controversy over vaccination is too valuable a propaganda weapon for Trump to consider such a thing. That it could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people is a matter of complete indifference to a malignant narcissist like Trump. After all, a man like Trump who was born to wealth and elite privilege has spent his life getting away from people just like his supporters. The blue collar hard working man and woman are exactly the kind of people Trump cheated after they built his buildings. Why would he suddenly give a shit about them? And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.