America's Other Contagion: Conservative Irrationality

America continues to reel from the coronaviris pandemic - a situation made worse by the Trump/Pence regime's delayed reaction and initial ignoring of the warnings coming from numerous experts.  Now, the same mindset that set the stage for a worsened impact on the nation is being exhibited by many on the right who want to prematurely "reopen the economy," largely out of fears that following the advice of medical experts will dim Donald Trump's re-election chances.  And for Trump, it is always only about him.  Increased deaths is I suspect an easy trade off in his mind if it improves his re-election outlook.  Thankfully, Trump cannot force governors and mayors to drop socially distancing orders and we may be saved from the embrace of "alternate facts" by the increasingly irrational right wing.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump/the right's continued refusal to accept medical and scientific fact.  Here are excerpts:

The most dangerous contagion we now confront is the coronavirus, which has killed more than 20,000 Americans and thrown more than 16 million out of work. The second-most-dangerous contagion is the conspiracy-mongering, hostility to science and outright irrationality promulgated by President Trump and his loudmouth media enablers. It will take intensive contact tracing to follow the spread of crackpot ideas: Is Trump infecting the cable news hosts, or are they infecting him? Suffice it to say, [Trump] the president and his media fans are both afflicted with perilous misconceptions that are making the threat from the coronavirus far more acute.

At first, both Trump and his media toadies dismissed the threat from the coronavirus, claiming it was no worse than the flu and that it would miraculously disappear by April. Any suggestion that Trump was mishandling the threat was dismissed as a “hoax.” Then on March 13, Trump finally declared a national emergency, and the tone among the Fox News propagandists instantly changed — from deriding concern about the coronavirus among liberal bed-wetters to lauding Trump’s heroic wartime leadership.

The new resolve did not last long: Within days, the drum beat on the right evolved into “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Conservative talking heads argued that the economy had to be reopened even if it meant sacrificing the lives of the aged and infirm who are most vulnerable to covid-19. Trump was listening: On March 24, he announced that he would “love” to restart the economy by Easter.

On March 29, Trump had spoken of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths as a likely scenario. Now an influential model from the University of Washington projects “only” 61,545 coronavirus deaths. (Other models are more pessimistic.) But instead of concluding that social distancing works, many on the right are now arguing, with characteristic illogic, that the threat was overhyped all along and that we can all go back to work.

There is even a budding subculture of coronavirus truthers who claim that death figures are exaggerated by a liberal media conspiracy to make Trump look bad. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume and “Diamond & Silk,” among others, have all claimed that, as Hume put it, the “fatality numbers are inflated.” In fact, the official death toll is likely a vast underestimate because so many people are dying without being diagnosed with covid-19.

But because the Trumpified right lives in a world of “alternative facts,” we are back to where we were a few weeks ago, with many conservative commentators and administration officials once again braying for the economy to reopen. Trump — Fox viewer No. 1 — is listening intently, and he is receptive to the message because he is seeing his poll numbers fall as the unemployment numbers rise.

Internal government projections, reported by the New York Times, show that “if the administration lifts the 30-day stay-at-home orders, the death total is estimated to reach 200,000.”

The consensus of experts — you know, the people whom right-wingers don’t listen to — is that it will be impossible to lift social distancing requirements until much more widespread testing and contact tracing are in place.

It’s hard to talk sense into [Trump] a president who thinks that a virus can be defeated by antibiotics. Public health officials such as Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx are like the passengers in a car that Trump is slowly driving down a winding mountain road: Can they convince the president that we won’t get to our destination faster by simply going straight off the cliff?