As He Spreads COVID Across The South, Trump Threatens To Defect If He Loses The Election

Fargo Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

Friday, at one of his super-spreader rallies in Macon, (the exact center of Georgia). Bibb county has had 6,424 confirmed cases and 186 deaths. Georgia has started spiking again. But Trump wasn't very empathetic. Instead he started whining about all the pressure the campaign is putting on him and that he could be losing to Biden. He then threatened to defect to another country. "Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life-- what am I going to do? I’m going to say, I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics! I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know." Is he planning to move his operation from Florida to Russia? Or some other country? A Twitter poll yesterday indicates people think it'll be Russia.

And Macon wasn't the only place where comforting people for lost loved ones wasn't on the menu. AP reporters Aamar Madhani and Zeke Miller wrote that Trump no longer addresses the pandemic at all when he can avoid it. He doesn't meet with the task forced any longer, let alone go on TV with them. They wrote that "In the week since he emerged from coronavirus isolation, Trump has demonstrated new determination to minimize the threat of the virus that has killed more than 215,000 224,000 Americans and complicated his chances of winning another four years in the White House."

“The light at the end of the tunnel is near. We are rounding the turn,” Trump told supporters Friday at an event in Fort Myers, Florida, one of many moments during a week of campaigning when the president tried to play down the virus threat. “Don’t listen to the cynics and angry partisans and pessimists.”

In word and action, he is pushing an optimistic outlook even as coronavirus infections are spiking in Europe and public health officials are raising alarm that the infection rate in the U.S. is climbing toward a new peak.

In the past week he has spread misinformation about the virus, undercut the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and kept up his practice of shunning mask use. The effort to diminish the virus has gone into overdrive as Democrats try to frame the race for the White House as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the worst U.S. public health crisis in over a century.

The U.S. economy is still roughly 11 million jobs short of recovering all 22 million jobs that were lost when the pandemic struck in early spring. The nation averaged more than 50,000 new coronavirus cases per day over the past week. National and battleground public opinion polls suggest that Trump faces stiff headwinds in his bid for a second term.

...Earlier in the week, Trump undermined the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has at times contradicted the president’s commentary about the virus.

“He’s a nice guy so I keep him around, right?” Trump mused at a rally in North Carolina, adding of the studiously non-partisan Fauci: “He’s a Democrat... He’s (New York Gov. Andrew) Cuomo’s friend.”

On Friday, what many people have begun think of as the "Trump virus, infected another 71,687 Americans. Yesterday, another 54,232. States with anti-mask governors who follow Trump's advice rather than the advice of scientists and public health experts, are among the states driving the new wave of contagion and death. Seven Trumpist governors whose states are spiking the worst, Friday and---> Saturday:

• Greg Abbott (R-TX) +5,791---> +4,070 (29,914  cases per million Texans)
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL) +3,449---> +4,044 (35,035 cases per million Floridians)
• Mike Parson (R-MO) +1,939---> 2,440 (26,198 cases per million Missourans)
• Kim Reynolds (R-IA) +1,790---> +843 (33,684 cases per million Iowans)
• Brian Kemp (R-GA) +1,609---> +1,534 (31,965 cases per million Georgans)
• Kevin Stitt (R-OK) +1,472---> 1,195 (26,915 cases per million Sooners)
• Bill Lee (R-TN) +666 (mark of the Beast)---> 2,646 (33,114 cases per million Tennesseans)