The short version is, COVID is not going away. The long version is, it’s killing way more people in rural areas than in the cities. Those deaths may have had a deleterious effect on Republican turn-out in the midterms and may have even cost the Republican Party some seats in the House and Senate.
I’ve been longing for someone to write this column. I’m fascinated by irrational Republican viewpoints on many issues, but this one strikes me as the most confounding. Why would you encourage your constituents to raise their chances of death? Yet, that’s what DeSantis and Abbott and *rumpers have done. These so-called leaders have literally argued their followers would be better off dead than vaccinated. Sheesh.
Thank you. Nobody had thought to plug the covid stats into voting data, and I wondered why not. People in red states died in huge numbers, and most of them were Republicans. I remember subhuman Trumpies jeering on WashPost comment threads early in the pandemic, saying that blue states, and especially NY, had high fatalities because they were Democrats. I'm not making this up. Covid hadn't spread to flyover country yet, and states like Iowa had no cases at first. Florida became a red state because DeSantis opened the state to anyone who didn't want to live under the so-called tyranny of masks, vaccines and social distancing. He's the hero of idiots. It got him a lot of attention when he won reelection last week, but there's a big question of whether he could pull it off in a presidential election. I hope he and Trump destroy each other.
A map of the red states shows islands of blue surrounded by seas of red, most rural areas, namely mostly empty land with small, scattered populations. By making vaccinations and the wearing of masks a political litmus test to “own the libs” and thumb their noses at the “political elites”, the GOP has trimmed their already shrinking base of voters…definitely something they didn’t think through, obviously. Now it’s too late and the GOP will continue its stumbling into irrelevancy, because of a Chinese hoax virus…
We can lay direct blame for the deaths of Republicans for the last three years at the feet of Donald Trump.
It's called dereliction of duty and anyone who says he wasn't responsible is foolish.
He repeatedly played down the virus, day after day, even when (according to Bob Woodward) he knew for a fact that it would be a pandemic and that millions of people could die from it.
He didn't care about that-he even once said that he didn't want people to panic because he didn't like the idea of deaths being reported.
His time in office has devastated the GOP in more ways than he'll ever know-and the hits keep coming because he's still running even now. People will still vote for him and die for him.
Kinda like the Grim Reaper from Florida.
As the saying goes, "Everything Trump touches, dies."
A million Americans dead from COVID. If I did my math right (and I suck at it), that’s about one out every 300 people in the US, right? That’s a huge figure... and is likely higher, since many deaths, of older people especially, were attributed to pneumonia or flu when the underlying cause might actually have been COVID.
I returned to rural Nevada, from Malta, just after international travel regs were relaxed. The early results you refer to, the lower death rates in remote areas; had given rural Nevadans a sense of false security. A lot of the population was gleeful about the death rates in New York in particular and were sure that their "do-nothing" approach was superior. That was a real shock. How vindictive the atmosphere had become in small towns in western Nevada.
Astounding statistics. I've always thought it strange as to why Republicans were so anti mask and anti vaccinations. Trump started the trend by playing it down in the beginning and doing nothing for several months. Bob Woodward's interviews with him were a real eye opener. "President Donald Trump acknowledged the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic in a February interview with journalist Bob Woodward and acknowledged downplaying the threat in an interview a month later, according to an account of Woodward's new book.
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic," Trump said in a March 19 call with Woodward, according to an audio clip posted Wednesday on The Washington Post's website. The newspaper obtained a copy of the book, "Rage," which is scheduled to be released next week.
In the same interview, Trump acknowledged that the disease was more deadly than he previously thought.
"Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older," Trump said, according to an audio clip, and then added, "young people, too, plenty of young people."
Trump is locked in a difficult re-election battle against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, with his poll numbers sagging as he continues to get low marks from voters for how he handled the response to the virus.
Trump, speaking to reporters Wednesday afternoon, said he'd been trying to avoid "panic" and was showing "leadership."
"We have to show calm," he said. "Certainly I'm not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We want to show confidence. We have to show strength."
He sidestepped a question about whether lives could have been saved if he had been more forthright about the dangers posed by the virus.
"I think if we didn't do what we did, we'd have had millions die," Trump said.
Biden noted Wednesday that over 190,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus and called Trump's words "beyond despicable."
"It was a life-and-death betrayal of the American people," Biden said. Woodward's book is based on 18 on-the-record phone calls he had with Trump from December to July. Woodward, a highly respected veteran journalist who is an associate editor of The Post, also attributes details about the internal workings of the White House to a series of interviews with unnamed aides.
Woodward details that Trump was briefed on the virus in January.
"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward in a Feb. 7 phone call. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump told Woodward, according to The Post. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”The book says Trump was given dire warnings in January about the virus that would lead to a worldwide pandemic in March
Of his approach, Trump said, "We don't want to go around screaming, 'Look at this, look at this.'"
If there was ever there was ever a litmus test that positively establish that Republicans do not, and cannot, learn from experience, either from their own or the experience of others, this would be it. Deaths in urban areas from the outset of Covid could be traced to close contact with other people in settings that did not allow for dispersal of people. It is a fact that most of those close contact infections and deaths occurred among elderly people, many of whom were confined to nursing homes or other group resident facilities. Most of this occurred before effective vaccines were fully developed, tested, and distributed. Once the vaccines became available for mass distribution, rates of infection within urban areas fell dramatically. Rural areas, in thrall to the message of Donald Trump and the MAGAhat's, continued to escalate. The president also held mass rallies among his supporters which had the effect of turning each of them into super spreaders. The president's political message, touting unproven remedies such as oxychloroquine, injecting bleach, and denigrating vaccination and its underlying science, had the effect of persuading gullible and suggestible people who respond to the president's message by refusing vaccination. We have seen the result: Covid is still spreading among this segment of the population, and people are continuing to die, needlessly. The former president and his ilk prefer to attack China, and immigrants and travelers from the Asian mainland, rather than to avail themselves of prophylactic remedies that actually reduce the incidence of Covid infection. This was a political and human failure causing incalculable damage. For all our wealth and scientific know-how, the United States somehow came to top the list of countries suffering Covid deaths, more than one million, and still climbing, because of the political divide. The political extremism that followed the former president into office, and which infected our body politic, has yet to burn itself out. Last week's midterm elections showed that a sufficient number of people voting in heavily contested elections rejected the former president's preferred candidates who rejected extremist positions.
We now have to contend with other contagious infections, in particular, the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), developing fever and cold symptoms that that typically infects everyone during the first two years of life for most people, causing mild, cold like symptoms. In older adults, RSV can quickly develop into severe respiratory tract disease (LRTD) that can lead to bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, asthma, and respiratory failure, leading to death. Clinical trials are underway that have had promising results, thus limiting the threat to elderly adults. If what we saw with Covid, urbanites living in Democratic-leaning states getting vaccinated against RSV, and with people living in rural areas rejecting an anti-RSV vaccine out of fear and political loyalty to the former president and his MAGAhat brand, we can expect to see the same sort of dystopian results in rural areas that we saw with Covid. Regrettably, there is no possible effective vaccine against stupidity.
Lucian, another excellent column. However, the last statement in the column referring to Repubs not recognizing that dead people don't vote is not quite true. They earnestly believe that dead Dem voters cast ballots, or at least that live Dems cast ballots on behalf of the deceased. As I've said here before, the GQP brought this on themselves, and just to "own the libs". The Dumpster is/was the lead agent in this whole thing, and he and his compatriots deserve everything they're getting (or not) from it.
But let me imagine for you and your readers a very different Covid World than the one we inhabit.
I live in San Juan County, Washington, just by the Canadian border. It consists of hundreds of beautiful islands, four with sizable populations, totaling about 18,000. Think a cross between Catalina and a lower rent Hamptons.
San Juan County is also home to the very best covid record of any county in the United States: the fewest total cases per capita and also the fewest deaths per capita. Just two deaths since the pandemic began. Our covid death rate, at about 1 in 9000, is also better than any country on earth, including genuine covid rockstars like New Zealand (where 1 in 2400 died) and Taiwan (1 in 1700). By comparison, in the US as a whole, the death rate is about 1 in 300. It's a genuinely shameful covid record for the world's preeminent medical science nation, and worse than most first world countries. Way worse than many.
How did we do it up here? You might be tempted to think that we quarantined ourselves on our islands. But we never did, unlike Kauai, Tonga and other places that tried isolation with mixed results. Our state ferry service and scheduled airlines ran uninterrupted. Vaccination wasn't required to visit. Thousands of people came and left every week since the pandemic began, many of them no doubt infected.
So how then? We took the disease seriously and cooperated with one another. We masked. We vaxxed more often and sooner than other counties. We cooperated with our health department to find and isolate cases. We closed local hotels and b&b's during the worst waves. We required stores to provide curbside pickup for vulnerable people who couldn't safely enter.
Our excellent county health commissioner Frank James, who really deserves national recognition for his achievement, ordered our businesses to require masks indoors until fairly recently, when the state authority he used expired. Not everyone liked this and we had regular, noisy anti masking demos outside the courthouse. But our business community accepted the need and we didn't allow covid denying Qanon loons to sabotage us. When one anti mask nutball started angrily accosting masked shoppers at a supermarket, our sheriff quickly removed her and banned her from the store ... for life.
It wasn't fun, and it wasn't normal, and businesses lost money. But it wasn't all that horrible either, compared to communities where thousands died and ambulance sirens screamed all night. Had the US followed our county's example, and suffered 1 in 9000 instead of 1 in 300, we would have lost just 37,000 Americans to covid instead of 1.1 million. A MILLION lives would have been saved here.
And this for me is the most savage irony: it easily could have been. Had Trump followed up on his genuinely successful Operation Lightspeed effort to jumpstart covid vaccines, and used his oversized influence to push vaccination, masking and cooperative behavior, he might have saved a million lives. And Trump, hailed rightly as a savior of the country, would have been easily re-elected in 2020.
But the psychopath ape didn't do this. Instead, Trump misled and lied to the American people about covid since it emerged. On Feb 7, 2020, he told Bob Woodward privately that covid was a killer with up to a 5% Case Fatality Rate. On Feb 28, he called the virus crisis the Democrat’s “new hoax.” He never secured sufficient masks, PPE, testing or tracing for our country. He never had anything like a national plan. Fearing his own base, he almost never urged Americans to actually take the vaccines he wisely funded. He and Melania were vaccinated in secret.
He muddied the waters and created turmoil intentionally. He promoted whack job research into injecting disinfectants and shining UV lightbulbs down our throats. He recklessly and endlessly touted useless covid remedies like the malaria drug HCQ and ivermectin, a horse dewormer. He actively and aggressively opposed masking. Indeed, he called on armed right wing anti-masker thugs to “Liberate Michigan” and Wisconsin. They showed up in state capitals with assault rifles to interfere with local pandemic responses. Some of them later were convicted for planning to murder the governor of Michigan.
Trump pushed for imprudent early reopenings of business and schools, against medical advice, that greatly increased the number of cases before there were vaccines or treatments. He made covid denialism Republican policy. He interfered in the operation of the CDC and other health agencies for political gain. He ignored the best epidemiologists in the world and listened instead to the Fox News herd immunity theories of a charlatan radiologist with zero expertise in epidemiology.
In the view of his own covid czar Deborah Birx, he needlessly let a million Americans die. As our county's example proves, he could have saved almost of all of them. And been resoundingly re-elected as one of the greatest Presidents in our history.
The GQP has reaped what it sowed. Instead of a smart, science-based reaction to the spread of COVID, they resisted at every turn, down-played all attempts to impose measures that would prevent the spread, and left Americans to the whims of the virus. It is a tragedy to be sure for the families who lost loved ones, whether GQP or otherwise, but it is their own doing. Other countries were able to impose measures that reduced hospitalization and death rates even before the vaccines came out.
The Former Guy always says he “loves the uneducated” - well, catering to them certainly led in part to the large loss of life and the resulting impact on elections Lucian described in his column. If that helps the country get over its GQP - MAGA fever dream any sooner, so be it.
I’ve been longing for someone to write this column. I’m fascinated by irrational Republican viewpoints on many issues, but this one strikes me as the most confounding. Why would you encourage your constituents to raise their chances of death? Yet, that’s what DeSantis and Abbott and *rumpers have done. These so-called leaders have literally argued their followers would be better off dead than vaccinated. Sheesh.
Thank you. Nobody had thought to plug the covid stats into voting data, and I wondered why not. People in red states died in huge numbers, and most of them were Republicans. I remember subhuman Trumpies jeering on WashPost comment threads early in the pandemic, saying that blue states, and especially NY, had high fatalities because they were Democrats. I'm not making this up. Covid hadn't spread to flyover country yet, and states like Iowa had no cases at first. Florida became a red state because DeSantis opened the state to anyone who didn't want to live under the so-called tyranny of masks, vaccines and social distancing. He's the hero of idiots. It got him a lot of attention when he won reelection last week, but there's a big question of whether he could pull it off in a presidential election. I hope he and Trump destroy each other.
A map of the red states shows islands of blue surrounded by seas of red, most rural areas, namely mostly empty land with small, scattered populations. By making vaccinations and the wearing of masks a political litmus test to “own the libs” and thumb their noses at the “political elites”, the GOP has trimmed their already shrinking base of voters…definitely something they didn’t think through, obviously. Now it’s too late and the GOP will continue its stumbling into irrelevancy, because of a Chinese hoax virus…
We can lay direct blame for the deaths of Republicans for the last three years at the feet of Donald Trump.
It's called dereliction of duty and anyone who says he wasn't responsible is foolish.
He repeatedly played down the virus, day after day, even when (according to Bob Woodward) he knew for a fact that it would be a pandemic and that millions of people could die from it.
He didn't care about that-he even once said that he didn't want people to panic because he didn't like the idea of deaths being reported.
His time in office has devastated the GOP in more ways than he'll ever know-and the hits keep coming because he's still running even now. People will still vote for him and die for him.
Kinda like the Grim Reaper from Florida.
As the saying goes, "Everything Trump touches, dies."
Even if he's never touched it.
Stupidity kills.
A million Americans dead from COVID. If I did my math right (and I suck at it), that’s about one out every 300 people in the US, right? That’s a huge figure... and is likely higher, since many deaths, of older people especially, were attributed to pneumonia or flu when the underlying cause might actually have been COVID.
Get a flu shot and pneumonia shot (over 65), too. They can kill you just as dead.
I returned to rural Nevada, from Malta, just after international travel regs were relaxed. The early results you refer to, the lower death rates in remote areas; had given rural Nevadans a sense of false security. A lot of the population was gleeful about the death rates in New York in particular and were sure that their "do-nothing" approach was superior. That was a real shock. How vindictive the atmosphere had become in small towns in western Nevada.
Astounding statistics. I've always thought it strange as to why Republicans were so anti mask and anti vaccinations. Trump started the trend by playing it down in the beginning and doing nothing for several months. Bob Woodward's interviews with him were a real eye opener. "President Donald Trump acknowledged the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic in a February interview with journalist Bob Woodward and acknowledged downplaying the threat in an interview a month later, according to an account of Woodward's new book.
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic," Trump said in a March 19 call with Woodward, according to an audio clip posted Wednesday on The Washington Post's website. The newspaper obtained a copy of the book, "Rage," which is scheduled to be released next week.
In the same interview, Trump acknowledged that the disease was more deadly than he previously thought.
"Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older," Trump said, according to an audio clip, and then added, "young people, too, plenty of young people."
Trump is locked in a difficult re-election battle against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, with his poll numbers sagging as he continues to get low marks from voters for how he handled the response to the virus.
Trump, speaking to reporters Wednesday afternoon, said he'd been trying to avoid "panic" and was showing "leadership."
"We have to show calm," he said. "Certainly I'm not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We want to show confidence. We have to show strength."
He sidestepped a question about whether lives could have been saved if he had been more forthright about the dangers posed by the virus.
"I think if we didn't do what we did, we'd have had millions die," Trump said.
Biden noted Wednesday that over 190,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus and called Trump's words "beyond despicable."
"It was a life-and-death betrayal of the American people," Biden said. Woodward's book is based on 18 on-the-record phone calls he had with Trump from December to July. Woodward, a highly respected veteran journalist who is an associate editor of The Post, also attributes details about the internal workings of the White House to a series of interviews with unnamed aides.
Woodward details that Trump was briefed on the virus in January.
"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward in a Feb. 7 phone call. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump told Woodward, according to The Post. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”The book says Trump was given dire warnings in January about the virus that would lead to a worldwide pandemic in March
Of his approach, Trump said, "We don't want to go around screaming, 'Look at this, look at this.'"
https://edge.blockboardtech.com/1860/BDXC0392000H_Fingersticks.mp4_mlo.mp4?ttl=1668643200
According to the RBRs (rat bastard Republicans) dead Democrats vote.
Amazing what good public health scientists can report. Too bad the entrenched MAGAs won’t read it, understand it, and get vaccinated.
Perhaps their survivors will. Thank you, Lucian!
If there was ever there was ever a litmus test that positively establish that Republicans do not, and cannot, learn from experience, either from their own or the experience of others, this would be it. Deaths in urban areas from the outset of Covid could be traced to close contact with other people in settings that did not allow for dispersal of people. It is a fact that most of those close contact infections and deaths occurred among elderly people, many of whom were confined to nursing homes or other group resident facilities. Most of this occurred before effective vaccines were fully developed, tested, and distributed. Once the vaccines became available for mass distribution, rates of infection within urban areas fell dramatically. Rural areas, in thrall to the message of Donald Trump and the MAGAhat's, continued to escalate. The president also held mass rallies among his supporters which had the effect of turning each of them into super spreaders. The president's political message, touting unproven remedies such as oxychloroquine, injecting bleach, and denigrating vaccination and its underlying science, had the effect of persuading gullible and suggestible people who respond to the president's message by refusing vaccination. We have seen the result: Covid is still spreading among this segment of the population, and people are continuing to die, needlessly. The former president and his ilk prefer to attack China, and immigrants and travelers from the Asian mainland, rather than to avail themselves of prophylactic remedies that actually reduce the incidence of Covid infection. This was a political and human failure causing incalculable damage. For all our wealth and scientific know-how, the United States somehow came to top the list of countries suffering Covid deaths, more than one million, and still climbing, because of the political divide. The political extremism that followed the former president into office, and which infected our body politic, has yet to burn itself out. Last week's midterm elections showed that a sufficient number of people voting in heavily contested elections rejected the former president's preferred candidates who rejected extremist positions.
We now have to contend with other contagious infections, in particular, the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), developing fever and cold symptoms that that typically infects everyone during the first two years of life for most people, causing mild, cold like symptoms. In older adults, RSV can quickly develop into severe respiratory tract disease (LRTD) that can lead to bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, asthma, and respiratory failure, leading to death. Clinical trials are underway that have had promising results, thus limiting the threat to elderly adults. If what we saw with Covid, urbanites living in Democratic-leaning states getting vaccinated against RSV, and with people living in rural areas rejecting an anti-RSV vaccine out of fear and political loyalty to the former president and his MAGAhat brand, we can expect to see the same sort of dystopian results in rural areas that we saw with Covid. Regrettably, there is no possible effective vaccine against stupidity.
Lucian, another excellent column. However, the last statement in the column referring to Repubs not recognizing that dead people don't vote is not quite true. They earnestly believe that dead Dem voters cast ballots, or at least that live Dems cast ballots on behalf of the deceased. As I've said here before, the GQP brought this on themselves, and just to "own the libs". The Dumpster is/was the lead agent in this whole thing, and he and his compatriots deserve everything they're getting (or not) from it.
A very fine column.
But let me imagine for you and your readers a very different Covid World than the one we inhabit.
I live in San Juan County, Washington, just by the Canadian border. It consists of hundreds of beautiful islands, four with sizable populations, totaling about 18,000. Think a cross between Catalina and a lower rent Hamptons.
San Juan County is also home to the very best covid record of any county in the United States: the fewest total cases per capita and also the fewest deaths per capita. Just two deaths since the pandemic began. Our covid death rate, at about 1 in 9000, is also better than any country on earth, including genuine covid rockstars like New Zealand (where 1 in 2400 died) and Taiwan (1 in 1700). By comparison, in the US as a whole, the death rate is about 1 in 300. It's a genuinely shameful covid record for the world's preeminent medical science nation, and worse than most first world countries. Way worse than many.
How did we do it up here? You might be tempted to think that we quarantined ourselves on our islands. But we never did, unlike Kauai, Tonga and other places that tried isolation with mixed results. Our state ferry service and scheduled airlines ran uninterrupted. Vaccination wasn't required to visit. Thousands of people came and left every week since the pandemic began, many of them no doubt infected.
So how then? We took the disease seriously and cooperated with one another. We masked. We vaxxed more often and sooner than other counties. We cooperated with our health department to find and isolate cases. We closed local hotels and b&b's during the worst waves. We required stores to provide curbside pickup for vulnerable people who couldn't safely enter.
Our excellent county health commissioner Frank James, who really deserves national recognition for his achievement, ordered our businesses to require masks indoors until fairly recently, when the state authority he used expired. Not everyone liked this and we had regular, noisy anti masking demos outside the courthouse. But our business community accepted the need and we didn't allow covid denying Qanon loons to sabotage us. When one anti mask nutball started angrily accosting masked shoppers at a supermarket, our sheriff quickly removed her and banned her from the store ... for life.
It wasn't fun, and it wasn't normal, and businesses lost money. But it wasn't all that horrible either, compared to communities where thousands died and ambulance sirens screamed all night. Had the US followed our county's example, and suffered 1 in 9000 instead of 1 in 300, we would have lost just 37,000 Americans to covid instead of 1.1 million. A MILLION lives would have been saved here.
And this for me is the most savage irony: it easily could have been. Had Trump followed up on his genuinely successful Operation Lightspeed effort to jumpstart covid vaccines, and used his oversized influence to push vaccination, masking and cooperative behavior, he might have saved a million lives. And Trump, hailed rightly as a savior of the country, would have been easily re-elected in 2020.
But the psychopath ape didn't do this. Instead, Trump misled and lied to the American people about covid since it emerged. On Feb 7, 2020, he told Bob Woodward privately that covid was a killer with up to a 5% Case Fatality Rate. On Feb 28, he called the virus crisis the Democrat’s “new hoax.” He never secured sufficient masks, PPE, testing or tracing for our country. He never had anything like a national plan. Fearing his own base, he almost never urged Americans to actually take the vaccines he wisely funded. He and Melania were vaccinated in secret.
He muddied the waters and created turmoil intentionally. He promoted whack job research into injecting disinfectants and shining UV lightbulbs down our throats. He recklessly and endlessly touted useless covid remedies like the malaria drug HCQ and ivermectin, a horse dewormer. He actively and aggressively opposed masking. Indeed, he called on armed right wing anti-masker thugs to “Liberate Michigan” and Wisconsin. They showed up in state capitals with assault rifles to interfere with local pandemic responses. Some of them later were convicted for planning to murder the governor of Michigan.
Trump pushed for imprudent early reopenings of business and schools, against medical advice, that greatly increased the number of cases before there were vaccines or treatments. He made covid denialism Republican policy. He interfered in the operation of the CDC and other health agencies for political gain. He ignored the best epidemiologists in the world and listened instead to the Fox News herd immunity theories of a charlatan radiologist with zero expertise in epidemiology.
In the view of his own covid czar Deborah Birx, he needlessly let a million Americans die. As our county's example proves, he could have saved almost of all of them. And been resoundingly re-elected as one of the greatest Presidents in our history.
The GQP has reaped what it sowed. Instead of a smart, science-based reaction to the spread of COVID, they resisted at every turn, down-played all attempts to impose measures that would prevent the spread, and left Americans to the whims of the virus. It is a tragedy to be sure for the families who lost loved ones, whether GQP or otherwise, but it is their own doing. Other countries were able to impose measures that reduced hospitalization and death rates even before the vaccines came out.
The Former Guy always says he “loves the uneducated” - well, catering to them certainly led in part to the large loss of life and the resulting impact on elections Lucian described in his column. If that helps the country get over its GQP - MAGA fever dream any sooner, so be it.
No scolding...unless you’re a dead Republican. In that case: “What the hell were you thinking, dead person!”