With coronavirus cases on the rise across the country, President Donald Trump has continued to cast doubt on health officials and his own administration’s response to the pandemic, prompting some of his fiercely loyal supporters to question not only the advice of experts, but also the existence of the virus.
From the early days of the virus, the president has repeatedly downplayed its impact, vowed it would “go away,” incorrectly compared it to seasonal flu multiple times, and resisted wearing a mask until months after the pandemic, even mocking political opponents. yes they did. they.
In response, enthusiastic supporters have echoed the president’s changing views on the virus, ranging from refusing to wear a mask despite federal guidelines, to the far right who do not believe in a virus that has left more than 130,000 Americans killed, according to interviews with more than a dozen Trump supporters at recent campaign events and across the country.
“COVID is nothing more than a way to try to take, in my opinion, and I’m only speaking for myself, to try to get the president out,” said loyal Trump supporter Vinny Scarnisi of Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
“It is brainwashing. There is no reason to be afraid. Absolutely not. It is a joke.”
Scarnis’s words questioning the coronavirus threat come as the death toll continues to rise in the United States, cases are rising across the country, and hospitals at hot spots are nearing capacity.
On Monday, the president used his massive platform to re-cast doubt on his own administration’s response to the virus, continuing a pattern that has plagued the county’s pandemic efforts.
Trump retweeted a post to his more than 80 million followers of game show host Chuck Woolery, alleging that “everyone is lying” about the pandemic, including the appointment of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the media communication, Democrats and even doctors, to harm his reelection chances.
In defense of the president’s tweet, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump has confidence in the CDC, but that his intention was to express his discontent with “rebellious people who filter the guidelines prematurely.”
“The notion of the tweet was to point to the fact that when we use science, we have to use it in a way that is not political,” McEnany said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
While it’s common for many Americans to form political positions from their party leader Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, he says the influence is “especially true for the president’s strongest supporters. Trump. ”
“They definitely take their sense of what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, from the president himself,” Kruse told ABC News. “I think the mixed signals that the president has given about the severity of the crisis, the reliability of medical authorities, including his own CDC and Dr. Fauci, and the effectiveness of wearing masks, have been questioned in his mind because the President has put so many doubts. ”
Kruse says that some of the president’s staunch supporters tend to believe and trust what Trump says, following the historical pattern of presidents and their central bases. However, he says, presidential influence is amplified in the Trump era.
“I don’t think we’ve seen it up to this point where they’ve rejected all the other authorities. Even the ones they previously trusted. When it comes to the president versus anyone else who’s on the president’s side.”
Polls point to a highly partisan divide when it comes to wearing a mask to fight the virus, with Republicans much less likely to wear one than Democrats, 36% to 94%, respectively, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.
And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, told FiveThirtyEight that the hyperpartisan environment surrounding the coronavirus response has only made fighting the virus more difficult.
“When you don’t have unanimity in your approach to something, you are not as effective in how you handle it,” Fauci said. “So I think you would have to assume that if there wasn’t that much division, we would have a more coordinated approach.”
Many of the president’s supporters echo the specific language Trump has used to minimize the pandemic year-round, including when he called the virus “a new hoax” by Democrats at a rally in South Carolina in February, at the time in that he was referring to what his rivals were like. “politicizing the coronavirus”.
“The pandemic is a hoax, a hoax. I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Warren Goddard, 91, who showed up for the Trump rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, only to discover that it had been canceled.
Goddard told ABC News that he planned to enter the rally but was not going to wear a face mask and had not worn it during the entire pandemic.
“I can’t get the virus. It’s not protection,” Goddard said, adding that he doesn’t think a mask will prevent him from getting sick.
Her Connecticut daughter Margaret Becotte also says she doesn’t wear a mask, but she did have a “Trump 2020” souvenir mask.
“I don’t think this is going to protect you from anything,” he said. “This is a piece of cloth that does nothing. Nothing at all … My children will not wear that mask.”
Becotte called the “advice” from medical experts, who say that one of the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus is to wear a mask, “controversial” and says he will not support companies that demand to wear a mask because it violates their rights.
“I will never do business with them again if they ask me to leave, because it is my constitutional right to choose my body and what I want to do.”
A few weeks ago, at the president’s last rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Peggy Reeser, 77, said she was attending the large-scale event at the door with full knowledge that at her age she put her in a high-risk demographic. , according to ABC News “I think that [Trump] it’s worth it “when asked why he was taking the risk.
David Angle, who attended the rally with Reeser, called COVID-19 a “magic virus” and said he only used his mask to “piss people off.” “I am more concerned with driving my car or having a heart attack than the coronavirus,” Angle said.
Another Tulsa meeting attendee, Gisela Soliday, 76, said she was not concerned about the virus because she did not believe the number of deaths reported was accurate and repeatedly tried to compare COVID-19 with the flu.
From the start of the pandemic, Trump regularly appeared in front of the cameras for White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings, which were never worn with a mask and repeatedly downplayed their need.
It wasn’t until July 11 that the president was seen wearing one in public when he visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where everyone is required to wear a mask.
A Florida supporter of Trump who told ABC News in April that he refused to wear a mask because the president was not wearing it now says he will wear a mask after seeing him wear one on Walter Reed.
“If you decided to use one, that means this is getting really serious. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m going to use it now,” said Kimberly Love, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when asked if she saw Trump in a the mask rocked it to start wearing one.
Love also said for a period of time that he carried a screenshot of a fake card that claims he doesn’t have to wear a mask.
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