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?

U.S Governors Reject Trump’s Dangerous Coronavirus Timeline

A recent post looked at Donald Trump's desperate desire to end social distancing and to send all Americans back to work to improve his re-election chances come November.  Boosting the stock market and keeping the economy from retracting is more important to Trump than the lives of American citizens.  Since we have a self-absorbed sociopath in the White House it is encouraging that a majority of the nation's governors are rejecting Trump's "imaginary timeline" to quote Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican.  Meanwhile, Hogan, Governor Northam of Virginia and the Mayor of Washington, D.C., announced a joint regional response to the COVID-19 crisis.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the adults in the room saying "no" to the petulant child's foolish statements.  (An exception to common sense and sanity -Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick who said grandparents are willing to die to support the economy)  Here are article highlights:

Governors across the nation on Tuesday rejected President Donald Trump’s new accelerated timeline for reopening the U.S. economy, as they continued to impose more restrictions on travel and public life in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

The dismissal of Trump’s mid-April timeframe for a national reopening came from Republicans and Democrats, from leaders struggling to manage hot spots of the outbreak and those still bracing for the worst. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, the head of the National Governors Association and a Republican, called the messaging confusing since most leaders are still focused on enforcing the restrictions, not easing them. He accused the White House of running on a schedule made of some “imaginary clock.”

The pushback suggests Trump’s talk of an early reboot is unlikely to gain traction. In most cases, it’s state leaders — not the federal government — who are responsible for both imposing and lifting the stay-at-home orders and other restrictions intended to stop the contagion.

But the governors’ reaction also revealed the striking disconnect and growing tensions between Trump and the state leaders closer to the front lines of a crisis that threatens to overwhelm U.S. hospitals and claim thousands of lives.

As soon as next week, Trump wants to take another look at recommendations about business closures and self-isolation, and said Tuesday the country could reopen by Easter Sunday — less than a month away. “Our people want to return to work,” he said.

But governors suggested that view had little connection to the reality they’re facing. California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he and Trump are “clearly operating under a different set of assumptions.” California, home to 40 million people and the world’s fifth-largest economy, reported hundreds of new known cases of COVID 19 and now has more than 2,200, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said the infection rate was doubling every three days and pleaded for more federal help as the number of cases in the state surpassed 20,000.

Even some of Trump’s usual allies are continuing to move ahead with tighter controls on travel, commerce and mobility, despite the president’s words. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed stay-at-home orders that continued to spread through the biggest cities. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said public health needed to come first, and South Dakota Gov. Krisiti Noem is stressing limiting business activity, not relaxing them. Among the few statehouse leaders to publicly endorse Trump’s view was Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, 69, who on Monday suggested that people his age and older can “take care of ourselves ” as the nation gets back to work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people over 65 are at higher risk for the disease. Hogan, the Maryland governor, told CNN. “We don’t think that we’re going to be in any way ready to be out of this in five or six days or so, or whenever this 15 days is up from the time that they started this imaginary clock.”