While Republicans abandoned Trump over the issue of facial coatings, and many urged Americans to wear masks for the past week, they have been silent about Trump’s effort to mislead the public about the risks posed by the virus.
The drop in the president’s poll numbers, particularly in the changing states in their showdown with former Vice President Joe Biden, is now an area of great concern to Republicans, and many longtime Republican strategists are baffled by his double strategy of ignoring the virus when trying to incite the race. wars
Most Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic (or his response to the nation’s racial judgment), which has sparked dismay even in his own campaign when the president is confident of an economic renaissance and good news about a vaccine. to restore his political fortunes
While Friday and Saturday’s speeches marked new heights in terms of the president’s inflammatory language, many Republicans have long been uncomfortable with Trump’s penchant for resorting to cultural warfare tropes and racially incendiary language that he believes arouses loyalty within your base.
Fear of contradicting the president about the coronavirus
The President’s view that the United States has changed the Covid-19 corner has also increasingly isolated him from key Republican leaders, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who begs the public to wear masks and stay home. . However, the President’s punitive nature, and the long list of people he has fired or tweeted after he was contradicted, still makes Republican Party officials-elect and his own public health experts loathe to criticize or correct it.
An example of that dynamic came on Sunday when CNN’s Dana Bash repeatedly pressured U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn to explain the President’s false statement that 99% of coronavirus cases they are “totally harmless”.
“I’m not going to go into who is right and who is wrong,” Hahn, a member of the White House coronavirus special force, told Bash during CNN’s “State of the Union” when she asked him to explain why the president made the claim when his public health experts have said exactly the opposite.
“What I will say is that we have data in the White House task force. That data shows us that this is a serious problem. People need to take it seriously,” said the FDA chief.
One exception was Miami-Dade County Republican Mayor Carlos Giménez, who contradicted the president on Sunday by finding his county in a difficult situation: “The virus is not harmless. No, absolutely not,” Giménez said Sunday in CBS News’ “Face the Nation”. Noting that the positivity rate is around 20% in his area, he said that more Floridians need critical care.
“When you have more (cases), you will obviously have more hospitalizations, more ICUs, more ventilators and, unfortunately, you will have more deaths,” said Giménez.
Meanwhile, former Trump National Security Adviser Tom Bossert tweeted the ominous message Sunday: “We are in trouble … Once a state has a prevalence of more than 1%, it becomes much more difficult to extinguish the crisis, “Bossert tweeted. “It will take a lot of effort to put out these flashlight fires. More than just masks. We could top 500,000 deaths in the US this year if this trend continues.”
More Trump protests amid alarming signs of coronavirus spread
Although coronavirus deaths in the United States have decreased, there is little sign that the virus will disappear. The increase in patients overwhelmed some Texas hospitals as concern grew about diminished capacity in intensive care units. Florida set an all-time record for most cases in a single day on Saturday, beating the previous record set in New York in mid-April. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned on CBS ‘”Face the Nation” Sunday that “there is no clear line of sight on how we are going to get this under control.”
The political polarization of the virus, largely fueled by conflicting messages from Trump and his public health experts, was in the spotlight over the holiday weekend.
The footage from the weekend emerged from partygoers dancing and screaming without distancing themselves at an event in Diamond Lake, Michigan, and crowds at a Wisconsin water park.
But the concern is that the president’s descriptions of a harmless virus will lead his followers to lower their guard over the virus. In direct contradiction to Trump’s “totally harmless” claim, the US case fatality rate for coronavirus stood at 4.6% this weekend, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a Democrat, told CNN’s Boris Sánchez on Sunday that the situation in Miami “is going to get much worse,” and said the disconnect between reality on the ground and the president’s message is making make it much more difficult to force Floridians to heed the guidance of health experts.
“We are telling people to make sacrifices, to put on masks, to socially distance themselves from the people they love, to make sacrifices for others,” Gelber said, and then “on Friday night, the president will organize this big event where none of those countermeasures were being followed. So how do we tell people to swallow very difficult medications when the President, by his action and his words, tells them they don’t have to?
A growing number of Americans also do not trust the President’s information about the virus. Only 26% of registered voters trusted Trump to give accurate information about the coronavirus, according to last month’s New York Times / Siena College survey, while approximately 77% of registered voters trusted CDC.
It’s still unclear what damage he can inflict on fellow Trump Republicans with the president on top of the fine in November, and whether they will continue to support him as his message grows more dangerous.
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