Trump's Super-Spreader Event-- Bringing The Hate To Freeland, Michigan

RealClearPolitics' current Michigan polling average shows Trump down by 4.2%-- but the poll includes a made up poll by Republican Party disinformation group, Trafalgar (that has Trump up by 2 points, the only poll out of dozens this year showing Trump winning in Michigan. Even Rasmussen, also a Republican polling firm, showed Trump down by 8 points-- 51% to 43% on Thursday. Without cheating, Michigan is unlikely to be in Trump's column in November.

Detroit News poll this week

On Thursday, Michigan reported 983 new COVID cases, bringing the state's total to 120,846, which translates to 12,101 cases per million Michiganders, significantly below the national average of 19,904 cases per million residents. 6,894 Michiganders have died of COVID, 690 deaths per million residents. Trump's event Thursday is sure to result in hundreds of more cases in a state that has been successfully flattening the curve but not allowing events like the one Trump just hosted.

In Freeland, about 5,000 people came out to bask in the ugly divisiveness and hatred Trump employs at his rallies. No social distancing no masks. The super-low-IQ crowd seemed happy with Trump's excuses for the revelations in Woodward's book that he lied about the pandemics danger. Excuse #1: Bob Woodward is a "whack job." Trumpist goons tracked down local NY Times reporter Kathy Gray and kicked her out for reporting on Twitter that the crowd was basically maskless.

Reporting on Trump's latest super-spreader event for the Detroit News, Craig Mauger wrote that "Trump took credit for rescuing an already revived auto industry and told his supporters their votes 'will save America' as he roared back into Michigan for his first campaign rally in the state since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 'After the last administration nearly killed the U.S. auto industry, I saved the U.S. auto industry,' said Trump, making a questionable claim as he took direct aim at Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden. After winning Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016, the Republican president is hoping for a repeat on Nov. 3. Much of his speech Thursday night outside of an airport hangar in Freeland focused on what he considered his accomplishments related to the state and criticisms of Democratic leaders in office here... 'No president has done for Michigan what President Trump has done for Michigan,' said Trump at one point, before adding, 'I am going to remember Michigan.'"

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told CNN he was "pretty puzzled" and "rather disheartened" by Trump’s crowded campaign rally in Michigan-- at which few of the several thousand attendees could be seen wearing face masks and virtually none appeared to be practicing social distancing.

After Trump's rally, Fauci's boss, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins told Sanji Gupta and Anderson Cooper: "How did we get here? Imagine you were an alien who landed on planet Earth, and you saw that our planet was afflicted by an infectious disease and that masks were an effective way to prevent the spread. And yet, when you went around, you saw some people not wearing them and some people wearing them. And you tried to figure out why, and it turned out it was their political party. And you would scratch your head and think, 'This is just not a planet that has much promise for the future, if something that is so straightforward can somehow get twisted into decision-making that really makes no sense.' As a scientist I'm pretty puzzled and rather disheartened."

I've been saying since April that it's going to take a million deaths before the Trump crowd-- personifications of the word "idiot"-- can be persuaded to take the pandemic seriously. It's a shame that it won't just be a million Trumpists who die, but normal people as well. I may have been wrong; it could take 2 million. Yesterday Time Magazine reported that "Among the world’s wealthy nations, only the U.S. has an outbreak that continues to spin out of control. Of the 10 worst-hit countries, the U.S. has the seventh-highest number of deaths per 100,000 population; the other nine countries in the top 10 have an average per capita GDP of $10,195, compared to $65,281 for the U.S. Some countries, like New Zealand, have even come close to eradicating COVID-19 entirely. Vietnam, where officials implemented particularly intense lockdown measures, didn’t record a single virus-related death until July 31."

At this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response. COVID-19 has weakened the U.S. and exposed the systemic fractures in the country, and the gulf between what this nation promises its citizens and what it actually delivers.

Although America’s problems were widespread, they start at the top. A complete catalog of President Donald Trump’s failures to address the pandemic will be fodder for history books. There were weeks wasted early on stubbornly clinging to a fantastical belief that the virus would simply “disappear”; testing and contact tracing programs were inadequate; states were encouraged to reopen ahead of his own Administration’s guidelines; and statistics were repeatedly cherry-picked to make the U.S. situation look far better than it was, while undermining scientists who said otherwise. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told the journalist Bob Woodward on March 19 in a newly revealed conversation. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Common-sense solutions like face masks were undercut or ignored. Research shows that wearing a facial covering significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19, and a pre-existing culture of mask wearing in East Asia is often cited as one reason countries in that region were able to control their outbreaks. In the U.S., Trump did not wear a mask in public until July 11, more than three months after the CDC recommended facial coverings, transforming what ought to have been a scientific issue into a partisan one. A Pew Research Center survey published on June 25 found that 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said masks should always be worn in public, compared with 29% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

...Americans today tend to value the individual over the collective. A 2011 Pew survey found that 58% of Americans said “freedom to pursue life’s goals without interference from the state” is more important than the state guaranteeing “nobody is in need.” It’s easy to view that trait as a root cause of the country’s struggles with COVID-19; a pandemic requires people to make temporary sacrifices for the benefit of the group, whether it’s wearing a mask or skipping a visit to their local bar.

Americans have banded together in times of crisis before, but we need to be led there. “We take our cues from leaders,” says Dr. David Rosner, a professor at Columbia University. Trump and other leaders on the right, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, respectively, have disparaged public-health officials, criticizing their calls for shutting down businesses and other drastic but necessary measures. Many public-health experts, meanwhile, are concerned that the White House is pressuring agencies like the Food and Drug Administration to approve treatments such as convalescent plasma despite a lack of supportive data. Governors, left largely on their own, have been a mixed bag, and even those who’ve been praised, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, could likely have taken more aggressive action to protect public health.

Absent adequate leadership, it’s been up to everyday Americans to band together in the fight against COVID-19. To some extent, that’s been happening-- doctors, nurses, bus drivers and other essential workers have been rightfully celebrated as heroes, and many have paid a price for their bravery. But at least some Americans still refuse to take such a simple step as wearing a mask.

Why? Because we’re also in the midst of an epistemic crisis. Republicans and Democrats today don’t just disagree on issues; they disagree on the basic truths that structure their respective realities. Half the country gets its news from places that parrot whatever the Administration says, true or not; half does not. This politicization manifests in myriad ways, but the most vital is this: in early June (at which point more than 100,000 Americans had already died of COVID-19), fewer than half of Republican voters polled said the outbreak was a major threat to the health of the U.S. population as a whole. Throughout July and August, the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force was sending private messages to states about the severity of the outbreak, while President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence publicly stated that everything was under control.

Some incredulity about the virus and public-health recommendations is understandable given the reality that scientific understanding of the newly emergent virus is evolving in real time. The ever shifting advice from health officials doesn’t instill public confidence, especially in those already primed to be skeptical of experts. “Because this is a new infectious disease, a new virus, we don’t have all the answers scientifically,” says Colleen Barry, chair of the department of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I think that creates an environment that could potentially erode trust even further over time.” But the trust fractures on partisan lines. While 43% of Democrats told Pew in 2019 that they had a “great deal” of trust in scientists, only 27% of Republicans said the same.

Truly worrying are the numbers of Americans who already say they are hesitant to receive an eventual COVID-19 vaccination. Mass vaccination will work only with enough buy-in from the public; the damage the President and others are doing to Americans’ trust in science could have significant consequences for the country’s ability to get past this pandemic.

There’s another disturbing undercurrent to Americans’ attitude toward the pandemic thus far: a seeming willingness to accept mass death. As a nation we may have become dull to horrors that come our way as news, from gun violence to the seemingly never-ending incidents of police brutality to the water crises in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere. Americans seem to have already been inured to the idea that other Americans will die regularly, when they do not need to.

It is difficult to quantify apathy. But what else could explain that nearly half a year in, we still haven’t figured out how to equip the frontline workers who, in trying to save the lives of others, are putting their own lives at risk? What else could explain why 66% of Americans-- roughly 217.5 million people-- still aren’t always wearing masks in public?

Meanwhile, back in Freeland, some Democratic smart ass-- Republican dumb ass?-- played an old Credence Clearwater Revival anthem to rev up the maskless crowd of dummies, "Fortunate Song," a stinging condemnation of rich draft dodgers like Trump, written in 1969, when Trump was dodging the draft.

Some folks are born, made to wave the flag
Ooh, their red, white and blue
And when the band plays "Hail to the Chief"
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

It ain't me
It ain't me
I ain't no senator's son, son
It ain't me
It ain't me

I ain't no fortunate one, no
Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, y'all
But when the taxman comes to the door
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yeah

It ain't me
It ain't me
I ain't no millionaire's son, no, no
It ain't me
It ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one, no

Yeah, yeah
Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask 'em, "How much…