America is dying to reelect Trump
By Glenn C. Altschuler, opinion contributor — 05/17/20 10:30 AM EDT
We should have seen it coming. This week, several media outlets reported that the Trump administration was pushing the CDC to revise coronavirus fatalities downward. The White House wanted to exclude from the totals individuals who did not have confirmed lab results for COVID-19 but were presumed to be positive and those for whom the coronavirus may not have been the direct cause of death. The next step, we can assume, will be a tweet by President Trump declaring that the death count (tabulated by the CDC) is “fake news,†part of a conspiracy by Democrats and the Deep State to defeat him in November by keeping the economy on its knees.
The death toll conspiracy has been a talking point by team Trump for quite some time. “Fatality numbers are inflated,†Fox News analyst Brit Hume declared on April 1. Six days later Tucker Carlson opined that “this epidemic is being credited for thousands of deaths that would have occurred if the virus never appeared here.†On April 15, when New York City officials complied with a CDC request to include probable COVID-19-related deaths in its count by adding 3,700 names, President Trump fumed, “rather than ‘It was a heart attack,’ they’re saying ‘It was a heart attack caused by this.’†Not surprisingly, then, a recent Ipsos/Axios poll found that 40 percent of Republicans believe the coronavirus death count is inflated.
The death toll conspiracy is part of a narrative designed to minimize President Trump’s responsibility for the public health debacle that has shut down the U.S. economy by blaming the Democrats. On Feb. 28, Trump called the coronavirus the Democrats’ “new hoax… their single talking point… Democrats will always say horrible things. Democrats want us to fail so badly.†Not for the first or last time, he added that his administration is “magnificently organized†and “totally prepared†to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. A few days later, Donald Trump Jr. accused Democrats of trying “to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people, so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning.†Vice President Pence defended Junior’s indefensible accusation as an “understandable†response to the “strong rhetoric†directed against the president. On May 14, Trump took a page from his son’s playbook. “Some people,†he said, want to keep the economy “closed for a long time… and watch the United States go down the tubes… It’s a political thing.â€
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https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/498170-america-is-dying-to-reelect-trump
