“Fauci’s transgression is to base his evaluations — after decades of public service and expertise fighting HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika and anthrax — on facts and logic that conflict with Trump’s chosen version of reality. Fauci has long said that only the virus can decide when normal life — things such as NFL games and schools reopening, for instance — will be safe again.
“Trump has always been battling the pandemic he wants to fight, rather than the one that actually exists, with a strategy shaped mostly by his political requirements as he seeks a second term. The pandemic arrived in the US despite his insistence that it would not be a problem. Now, with 84,000 Americans dead and 1.3 million infected, Trump argues that the country has prevailed over the virus and it’s time to get back to work.”
Views: 50
It’s a more interesting failure mode than it first seems. The typical politician is skilled at getting front-and-center ahead of what his voters feel, do, and want, and most politicians have been doing that in this crisis, and so will come through OK (politically), presenting themselves as the saviors.
Now Trump got into office by sniffing out that a bit over 40% of the voters have a lot of unsatisfied nativist/populist/ethnic itches, and he positioned himself strategically in front of that. That caused a historic upset that resembles Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and to a lesser degree, Reagan. And while his supporters do tend to support quicker reopening, and no doubt would like to beat on China, the polls suggest that Trump has played all the angles of this in ways that won’t quite cut it come November.
How is it that after defeating conventional politics so handily that in this crisis, he has constantly made worse choices than conventional politicians?