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Sunday, September 20, 2020

How Many Trump Supporters Will Die on the Altar of Trump's Vanity?

Donald Trump's victims keep piling up since the coronavirus outbreak. Now there have been 6 million American COVID-19 cases and 200,000 deaths, a death rate much higher than other comparable countries. Many of these infections and deaths are directly attributable to Trump supporters doing what he told them to.

There was the Arizona guy who died from taking chloroquine phosphate after Trump gushed about hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure (it isn't).

Then there was Herman Cain, who died not long after attending Trump rally in Oklahoma.

Now a pro-Trump anti-mask pastor is in the ICU after trying to pray away the virus:

When coronavirus cases began increasing in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in late July, Pastor Paul Van Noy prayed with his congregation that the city council would not pass a mask mandate.

“I don’t want to be told I have to wear a mask,” he said at the lectern. “We’re adults and we don’t need the government to tell us what to do.”

A little over a month later, he and his wife contracted the virus and he has landed in the hospital’s intensive care unit struggling to breathe, he said in a statement this week.

“I haven’t taken this Covid seriously enough,” his wife, Brenda, said on Facebook Sept. 4, shortly after her husband was admitted to the ICU.

Trump has been leading the country in opposition to mask mandates, even as the head of the CDC says that masks are better at preventing the spread of COVID-19 than a vaccine will be.

Then we found out that Trump admitted to Bob Woodward that he has been lying about the severity of the pandemic this whole time. What's amazing is how easily Trump admits to Woodward that he lied. This guy is an idiot.

Trump has politicized vaccine development, trying to force drug companies to get a vaccine out much sooner than is safe or feasible.

The crazy thing is, face masks should not be at all controversial. Look at this clip from the Flintstones, aired in 1966, in which wearing a face mask is mentioned in a simple, off-handed manner:

People wore face masks during the 1918 flu pandemic, and it was no big deal. Many western states had mask mandates.

The problem is that Republicans have decided that they must oppose absolutely everything that Democrats endorse, no matter how reasonable the Democrats' proposals are, from climate change, to the Affordable Care Act (which is now completely obviously a necessity, what with all the people who have lost jobs -- and their health care -- due to the pandemic), to keeping schools closed until the virus is under control, to wearing face masks indoors.

Thousands of people are getting violently ill, racking up huge hospital bills, suffering life-long physical disabilities, and dying, all because Trump doesn't want people in masks reminding everyone what an abysmal job he has done as president.

Infection rates are down in blue states and skyrocketing in red states. In the end how many Trump supporters die on the altar of Trump's vanity?

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