WHAT WILL BECOME OF PRESIDENT TRUMP AND HIS LOYAL FOLLOWING?

 

                               …The Washington Post Journalist, Jennifer Rubin.

 

Republicans who think enabling Trump’s lies and self-delusions is harmless should think again.

 

Jennifer Rubin, is an award winning journalist for the Washington Post.  First, you must understand that Ms. Rubin is what one would call, an old-fashioned conservative Republican.  She is not a Trump supporter and she believes in the normal views of former Republican conservatives.  She wrote the following in The Post:  “ Imagine getting tossed overboard in the middle of the ocean, but refusing to grab on to a lifeline because you choose not to “believe” in the ocean. That is essentially what large numbers of Americans are telling pollsters. The Pew Research Center reports: “Overall, 60% of Americans say they would definitely or probably get a vaccine for the coronavirus, if one were available today, that’s up from 51% who said this in September.” However, there is a “19-point gap between the shares of Democrats (69%) and Republicans (50%) who currently say they would get vaccinated for the coronavirus.”

As you would suspect from those Trump supporters, people who think they are not at risk and who are skeptical of the vaccine-development process, they are far less likely to get a vaccination.  Only 37% of Republicans are “very" or “somewhat” concerned about even getting a serious case of Covid-19. 

What is most stunning, with roughly 200,000 new cases a day and 3,000 deaths per day, only 43% of Republicans think Covid-19 is a major public health threat, while 84% of Democrats are saying the same.

Now, before we take polling as gospel, we should acknowledge that some Republicans may be dismissing Covid-19, while they downplay the need for vaccinations when speaking to pollsters.  That would be out of some misbegotten tribal loyalty to an ignorant president and those crazy MAGA Covid-deniers. But that only makes the problem worse.

If Trump was greatly successful in dealing with Covid-19, as the president and others often claim, the disease would not be a major risk.  But If Trump was correct that masks and stay-at-home orders are akin to tyranny, then Covid-19 cannot be much of a threat, right? No one should be all that surprised by these poll numbers. Tribal identification for those belonging to a bogus operation that lives in some other reality, they reject science and define political loyalty as their willingness to support Trump.  This means you must be willing to put yourself in danger to avoid disagreeing.  Those denials, conspiracies and flat-out lying replace any reason, or even the instinct for self-preservation.

You can, therefore, understand the difficulty of getting these so called Republicans to accept more remote threats like climate change.  These would be political results that undermine their faith in Trump. If the MAGA crowd can be convinced that Covid-19 is not a big deal despite all the mass casualties, they will surely cling to the notion that elections do not matter and should be overturned if things do not go their way.  And that, in turn, poses a dilemma for Republican politicians such as Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who need to keep at least one foot in the real world.  Such as, “the election isn’t rigged, and you need to vote” and one foot in the Trump bubble: “where the elections are rigged, thus there’s no point to vote”.

Republicans who think enabling Trump’s lies and self-delusions is harmless should think again. They are systematically destroying their followers’ rational, sometimes lifesaving capacity to make decisions. That may result in even higher death tolls, not to mention further erosion of their adherence to democratic elections. Republican voters are drowning in MAGA propaganda. The response from cowed Republicans is to keep throwing them anvils. This will not end well.

The reality is that the GOP that Ms. Rubin represents may never return to power as long as Donald Trump is being followed like the Pied Piper.  Perhaps, if all goes as it appears to be today, we can only hope that his continued pathological lying will lead his followers off the political cliff and into the political abyss.

We can only hope.

Copyright G. Ater 2020