The Trump Death Cult: Mississippi, Florida and Arizona

"There Is No 2nd Wave" -Mike Pence by Nancy Ohanian

Mississippi is a hot COVID-mess. State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs told the Jackson Free Press that the state has to "prepare for an overwhelmed hospital system in which basic emergency care will be rationed." That's the entirely predictable result of idiots refusing to wear masks. Dobbs wasn't surprised and said Mississippi is "anticipating an absolute disaster coming into the fall because we're ramping up... "We have been seeing people taking on risky behaviors that we knew would lead to transmission. People are not paying attention to the guidelines we have. We feel pretty good that the social distancing guidelines that are actually in the executive orders, that are basically legally binding, are pretty strong. But we're seeing this sort of widespread abandonment of following those orders. And so it's been extremely frustrating to be quite honest. You can only do so much, but people refuse to do what can be done to prevent transmission."

Yes, there's only so much. Yesterday, a Brazilian judge ordered their Trumpist president, Jair Bolsonaro, to start wearing a mask in public like everyone else or face a $386/day fine.

On Tuesday, Mississippi reported 611 confirmed new cases (7,694 cases per million). Yesterday there another 526 new cases, bringing the cases per million to 7,871. Lucky for Mississippi, Trump isn't bringing his COVID-Death Cult Tour to Mississippi, nor saddling it with the GOP Death Cult Convention, which he forced on Jacksonville, Florida. Politico Florida reporter, Marc Caputo, looked at how Jacksonville, Florida's biggest city, is taking to the Trumpist convention. (Keep in mind, Duval County has been swingy, transitioning from red-ish to blue-ish. Trump is polling terribly... and Jacksonville voters don’t want Trump bringing his disease spreading convention to town. A new poll shows that 58% of Jacksonville voters oppose it and only 42% want it. 71% are afraid of contagion and 65% are afraid of social unrest. Predictably, most Republicans (81% favor it) and most Democrats (90%) oppose it. The bad news for the Trumpists is that 62% of independents are with the Democrats on this. And may well decide who gets Florida's 29 electoral votes.

"Jacksonville, a Republican-leaning city that essentially encompasses all of Duval County," wrote Caputo, "offered to host the event. That decision has dented the favorability of Mayor Lenny Curry, a Republican who has earned high marks for leading the Northeast Florida city in a bipartisan way as its coronavirus caseload remained relatively low compared to South Florida." The Mayor, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Señor Trumpanzee all have net negative approval ratings among Jacksonville voters now, Trump worst of all with a 61% disapprove number. Trump carried Duval by 1.4% in 2016 and now lags Biden by 7 points.

COVID-Don + COVID-Ron, coming to Jacksonville with sickness &  death

Florida is undergoing one of the worst second spikes in the country-- right up there with California, Texas and Arizona. Tuesday the state reported another 3,286 new cases and 4,819 cases per million (although Florida has been seriously challenged for providing misleading statistics to benefit DeSantis and Trump politically and their cases and deaths per million is likely much, much higher; many say Florida cheats as badly as China does). Yesterday, Florida reported another 5,511-- their worst day ever-- and their cases per million rose to 5,076.

As you probably know, Trump brought his death show to Arizona Tuesday where he spouted his fascist jargon at a Phoenix megachurch packed with young anti-mask extremists, telling them that they are guardians in a cultural war over the heritage of the country. "We’re here today to declare that we will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing intolerance."

Images from the event showed a large crowd tightly packed together, with almost no one wearing protective masks. There were no temperature checks for the estimated 3,000 cheering attendees who, like many of Trump’s staunchest fans, ignored a new local ordinance requiring them to wear a mask, despite a public-health plea from the Democratic mayor on Monday.

The coronavirus is out of control in the Grand Canyon State after its governor lifted a stay-at-home order last month, and the president is polling relatively poorly here against his presumptive Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Low attendance at Trump’s event in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday (only 6,200 of the venue’s 19,000 seats were occupied) made headlines and overshadowed the president’s comeback message. But on Tuesday, he recast that rally as a roiling success, calling it the “number one show in Fox history for a Saturday night.”

Trump started 10 minutes early-- uncharacteristic for a president who routinely begins rallies as much as an hour late. His appearance came as Fox News was airing an interview with the president’s former national security adviser John Bolton, whose tell-all book of his time in the White House makes damning accusations of corruption by Trump. Trump and his administration have condemned the book and tried to block its release.

Speaking to the young audience, Trump tapped into campus culture wars on free speech to draw a divide between his supporters and protesters fighting against racism and police brutality following the death of George Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Trump declared the students in the audience as the cultural defenders of not only his movement but also of American values as a whole, portraying Democrats as intolerant and “totalitarian.” He applauded the student activists in the crowd “who stand up for America and refuse to kneel to the radical left,” bashing the mainstream media and accusing “vicious” Democrats of stifling dissent but-- and without evidence-- accusing them of letting anyone vote, “even if they’re not citizens.”

The president condemned the removal of monuments for slave owners and Confederate leaders as a destruction of American history. He called the audience “smarter” than Democrats, who he said require “absolute conformity.”

“They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans,” the president said. “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology. The left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control."

...When he mentioned what he called “the plague,” the president dismissed it: “It’s going away,” he said.

“What a job we’re doing with testing. We did ventilators,” Trump said, attacking “the fake news people” for what he called misleading the public about how bad the situation is.

“We’re going to have a vaccine very soon,” he promised.

Later in the speech he made fun of the disease and its various names to rousing applause, including referring to it with his new xenophobic moniker, “kung flu.”

He took a jab at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who he said had danced “in the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco, long after I banned China from coming here,” in a reference to his travel ban on foreigners from mainland China at the height of the coronavirus outbreak. San Francisco’s Chinatown was founded in the 19th century, and many of its residents have families who have lived in the United States for several generations.

The November presidential election is the battleground for the future of the country, Trump said. The president charged his audience to get him reelected so they can defeat what he portrayed as the threat to America of a Democratic victory.

“This is the choice of two futures,” he said. “The left’s vision of disunity and discord, or our vision of equal opportunity and equal justice.”

The president included unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud via mail-in voting, claiming Democrats were trying to rig the election. Democrats have argued for more mail-in voting to prevent large crowds in polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

Arizona is doing extremely poorly and experiencing one of the worst second spikes anywhere. Tuesday they reported 3,593 new cases and 7,993 cases per million. Yesterday there were another 1,795 new cases and the cases per million had gone up to 8,240, third worst of the second spike states in better shape only when compared to Nebraska and Iowa, each of which is starting to get their pandemics under control while Arizona's continues completely out of control.

What about a second wave, rather than the second spike in the first wave that we are experiencing now? The Economist explains why the next wave may be much less virulent in many countries-- though probably not in Trumpland: