Trump doesn’t care how many of his own cult members he kills as long as he can blame Democrats.
For months, President Trump has been scrambling to deflect criticism for the breadth of the coronavirus pandemic toward whatever target might be available. During a news briefing Wednesday, he returned to one of his favorites: Democratic leaders.He pointed to a graph that the White House first unveiled in the spring, showing two estimated ranges of possible death tolls depending on the extent of efforts to contain the virus’s spread.
“This was a prediction that if we do a really good job, we’ll be at about 100,000 and — 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, and we’re below that substantially, and we’ll see what comes out,” he said. “But that would be if we did a good job. If the not-so-good job was done, you’d be between 1.5 million — I remember these numbers so well — and 2.2 million. That’s quite a difference.”
For what it’s worth, we are not below 240,000 deaths substantially. Instead, the country has seen at least 193,000 deaths, a figure that is probably an underestimation. For example, there have been 263,000 more deaths in the United States in 2020 than would have been expected based on the past several years. If those are attributable to the novel coronavirus, we’ve already moved out of good-job territory.
But of course, Trump wanted to reinforce that this was not his fault.
They will happily die for him.