If and when Trump is declared the loser of the election, I fear for what will happen with the covid-19 situation. Yesterday saw yet another new daily record of 116,255 new cases. Daily deaths again broke the 1,000 mark with 1,124 and the seven-day average of deaths also rose to 869.
Our daily update is published. States reported record numbers of tests (1.5 million) and cases (116k). Hospitalizations continue their sharp rise. The death toll was 1,124. pic.twitter.com/z3gxwP6EaC
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) November 6, 2020
It has long been clear that Trump does not give a damn about the pandemic and its adverse effects on people or indeed on anything at all except the stock market and unless it affects his own interests. When he talks about the pandemic at all, it is to complain that people are talking about it instead of about him, that it is not a big deal and will go away by itself, or to level baseless allegations that the numbers are being inflated and that doctors are somehow profiting off it by blaming deaths on covid-19 even if the cause was something else. This is a terrible slur against the medical profession who have to risk infection every day in treating people with the disease.
If he finally realizes that he has lost and has to go, you can be sure that even the cursory attention that he has paid to the pandemic will disappear. So for the next three months, even as the number of cases and deaths rise, the administration will do nothing. While the fact that he has done so little about the pandemic so far means that he cannot do much less, there are other damaging things he might do. Trump may carry out his threat to fire Anthony Fauci with whom he is angry for challenging his own baseless rosy outlook that the disease is going away by itself and no doubt blames him for contributing to his loss. He may urge his followers to be even more defiant of the basic safety precautions being urged on everyone and thus make the problem worse. Compounding the problem is that the arrival of cold winter weather and the holiday season will result in people spending more time indoors with more people and thus is expected to increase the number of cases.
Being the narcissistic, vindictive, and conscienceless man that he is, he may even relish the idea of the pandemic numbers rapidly rising from now until inauguration day on January 20, 2021 so that the incoming Biden administration will have a hell of a time bringing a rampaging disease under control, so that the can enjoy carping from the outside.
I do not have a good feeling about the next three months.
Grasping at straws: less than 2 1/2 months till inauguration on 1/20/21.
But yes, every day will deliver rude shocks.
If Trump fires Fauci, Biden can (and should) put him on the transition team and then rehire him.
Look on the bright side. He couldn’t do less about the pandemic than he already is, so we’ll just be going on like we have been all year. In fact, now that he lost, he probably won’t even care about the vaccine any more, so his administration is probably less likely to try to rush something out without completing all the safety trials.
It isn’t just Trump.
His cult is flipping out as well. They ran what I would term a siege on the counting location in Detroit. Their favorite weapons, that is Twitter and Facebook, are at this point steadily ramping up their moderation due to the ever more extreme rhetoric being vomited. Steve Bannon just got banned from Twitter for straight up demanding that the MAGA crowd behead Fauci and Wray then put their heads on pikes in front of the White House.
That said the news I just read is that the number of votes that Biden has over Trump in Pennsylvania is bigger then the number of votes remaining to be counted. So absent an upset recount or a court intervening it is Biden for president.
One of my doctors said yesterday that in his opinion the pandemic is now out of control in the US and can’t be stopped short of a vaccine.
Actually, rushing a vaccine is one of my fears for ways Trump might sabotage the country. Either out of a desire to have one last “deliverable”, one more thing he can point to and claim credit for, or perhaps a more malicious desire to see side effects begin to he reported as Biden takes office so he can blame Biden for it.
I could write the Tweets now. “Fake news democrats blew virus out of proportion to bring me down and in their desperation made our great pharmaceutical companies rush vaccine development and now more people are suffering from the vaccine than the coronavirus”.
Let’s face it, he’s never let such petty concerns as the sequence of events limit him before. He blamed Obama for not having a sufficient testing system in place to test for a virus that wasn’t known to humanity during his term and took credit for a veteran’s bill Obama signed. Blaming Democrats for “operation warp speed” is very on brand.