By Brigitte L. Nacos
As the Covid-19 death toll moved towards 5,000 this week and U.S. President Trump announced that a total of between 100,000 and 200,000+ Americans not surviving the pandemic would be “a win,” Trump’s favorite media stars continued to minimize the health crisis and instead blamed and attacked their usual selections of enemies of the people. As they tell it day-in and day-out, the Coronavirus is not a major problem, if any. In short form, this is their take: the fake news media hype the virus into an existential threat and the collective far left/democratic/liberal/socialist deep state exploit this hoax to realize their un-American agenda and to oust the heroic president whose early actions (closing the borders to Chinese travelers) prevented a real health crisis.
Not long ago, President Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh, the far-right talk show host, the Medal of Freedom, praising him for “decades of tireless devotion to our country.” Well, the devoted patriot Limbaugh told his listeners the other day that our economy is being destroyed under the guise of saving life. Tell that to the families of the 5,000 victims of covid-19! Tell that to the many thousands of men and women, young and old, poor and rich on respirators fighting for their lives! Tell that to the many thousands of medical doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers, and other emergency personnel who put their lives on the line without sufficient personal protection equipment.
Limbaugh is not the only one among President Trump’s soul mates in the media whose vitriolic rhetoric has not weakened in the face of the current crisis. Instead, they have sharpened the gap between the conservative Trumpian “us” and the unpatriotic “them” who threaten the reactionary “Make America Great Again” and “America First” agenda. It is telling that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading scientist on infectious diseases and advocate of strict defense measures against Covid-19, needs now beefed up security in response to death threats. For the far right, he has become the face of the “deep state” simply because he tells Americans the facts and the truth.
Every day, every hour, every minute the numbers of infected and dead Americans and people around the world grow in spite of the Covid-19 hoax conspiracy theories. The media personalities who denounced for weeks and continue to condemn the grim assessments and recommendations of leading scientists may well have influenced those Republican governors, mayors, county executives, and other decision-makers who were slow in adopting or continue to refuse social distancing measures into their respective communities.
As for the Covid-19 deniers, it becomes clearer every day who the real enemies of the American people are!
Less clear is whether and how those prominent virus deniers in Trumpian propaganda orbit and their beloved President reconcile their unchanged Covid-19 views with the recent changes in Trump’s public positions, namely the recognition of the fast spreading virus as lethal threat and more urgent problem than the economy and the stock market.
Whatever the outcome of the contradiction between Trumpian opinion makers and their hero turns out to be, it will affect our country’s struggle against the deadly virus in our midst--and its costs in terms of lives saved and lost.
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