Trump’s Closing Message to Seniors: I Don’t Care If You Die

There are many reasons for not voting for Donald Trump in November - basic morality being one that ought to matter to supposed "Christians."  But if one is over 65, there is an additional reason to vote against Trump: Trump views average Americans over 65 to be expendable as he tries to push economic reopening with little care or concern over the health risks involved or the potential costs in deaths, particularly among older white Americans, heretofore the core of the GOP's voting block.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the message Trump is sending to older voters as he puts his own interests - as is always the case - ahead of everyone and everything else.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump’s campaign would be in pretty good shape if it weren’t for old white people.

In most polls, the president’s support among Black and Hispanic voters appears to be slightly higher than it was in 2016. In Florida — a state Trump (almost certainly) needs to win to secure an Electoral College majority — his numbers with nonwhite voters would guarantee him victory as long as the Sunshine State’s retirees provide him with roughly as much support as they did four years ago.

But as of now, Florida’s seniors are doing no such thing.

In 2016, exit polls showed Trump besting Clinton among Floridians 65 and over by 17 points. This week, an AARP poll shows Biden leading Trump by just one point with that constituency. Of course, the Sunshine State’s elders aren’t uniformly white, and Biden is almost certainly performing better with nonwhite seniors than with white ones. But America’s elderly population is much less diverse than the nation as a whole — and older white voters have been a linchpin of the Republican coalition for more than a decade as the GOP has used the demographic’s supremely high turnout rate to compensate for its unpopularity among the broader American public.

[A]n average of all national live-interview polls since August shows seniors backing Biden over Trump by eight points. If Trump loses this predominantly white, Republican, and high-propensity-to-vote demographic group, his presidency will (almost certainly) be over in four months.

Any remotely competent campaign would respond to this data by adjusting its messaging to better appeal to Trump’s birth cohort. So what is the president’s plan for making American seniors Republican again?

The answer is, apparently, to inform them that Donald Trump doesn’t care much whether they live or die.

At a rally in Ohio on Monday, Trump belittled the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing, “It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects.”

Trump followed up this public-health analysis with a call for broader reopenings, implicitly arguing that a disease that kills only old people is not worth containing.

There have been 200,00 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. Many more people have suffered serious illness as a result of contracting the disease. The second-order victims of the pandemic’s economic and social effects arguably constitute the vast majority of the country. But Trump is right that COVID fatalities are heavily concentrated among those of advanced age. So if you consider senior citizens (or, at least, senior citizens who lack the wealth and power to insulate themselves from contagion) to be less than human, then perhaps you could say that COVID has killed “virtually nobody,” if you take a very expansive definition of the word virtually.

Maybe older Trump-to-Biden supporters are looking for a president who will tell them that their lives have no value and that the Dow’s performance must take precedence over protecting nonentities like themselves from a fatal disease. But it seems like a risky bet.