editorial commentary from NY Daily News...

Our country is reeling under the dual onslaught of COVID-19 and runaway
unemployment, but there’s one person who’s willing to give President
Trump high marks for handing the situation: Donald Trump. “I think in a
certain way, maybe our best work has been on what we’ve done with
COVID-19,� he mused in an interview this week.

Most Americans disagree with Trump’s generous self-appraisal. “Since
March 20, President Donald Trump’s net approval rating (approval minus
disapproval) for his coronavirus response has dropped 23 points,
settling at a new low of minus 9 this week,� reports Morning Consult,
which tracks public opinion on the crisis daily.

“The president’s failure to maintain public confidence in recent weeks
stands in contrast with a number of other world leaders, who benefited
from significant approval rating improvements in the wake of the
pandemic,� Consult adds. Other polls also show that Americans express
much more confidence in their governors than in Trump when it comes to
combatting COVID-19 and reopening the economy.

The truth is, COVID-19 is fast becoming Trump’s Vietnam War — the
defining debacle of his presidency. Even more than impeachment, it poses
a mortal threat to Trump’s reelection in the fall. He and his allies
know that, which is why the country should brace for a furious
propaganda campaign from Trump, GOP SuperPacs, Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell and the Republicans’ house organ, Fox “News.�

It will be a cynical exercise in instant historical revisionism. Trump
and his minions will recast his fumbling response to the virus as
decisive leadership that saved “millions of American lives.� It could
have been worse, we’ll be told, and that much will be true, because with
Trump at the helm it could always be worse.

The polarizing campaign to salvage Trump’s reelection prospects will aim
at inflaming the sense of cultural and economic victimhood that lies at
the heart of his appeal to white conservatives. It will feature his
signature tactics of scapegoating and deflection.

Notwithstanding Trump’s early and fulsome praise of Chinese leader Xi
Jinping’s response to the outbreak, GOP campaigns strategists are
assigning China the villain’s role. If this provokes even more militant
nationalism and anti-American fervor in China, a rising superpower, so
be it. For Republicans, what matters is holding onto the White House and
U.S. Senate, by any means necessary.

The president also has declared his intention to suspend all immigration
into the United States, thereby conflating even legal immigrants with
the “Chinese virus� as foreign invaders imperiling Americans’ health and
jobs. And because Trump can’t win on his own negligible merits, it’s
utterly predictable that his fall campaign will be a relentless smear
campaign against Joe Biden as the Manchurian Candidate of 2020.

The claim that Biden has nefarious financial ties to China is ludicrous,
but no more so than demanding that Hillary Clinton be “locked up� for
deleting emails. But what’s certain is that the Trump campaign will
contribute mightily this fall to what the Rand Corporation calls “truth
decay� — the erosion of facts and analysis in U.S. public life.

It’s not just Trump’s compulsive lying. Truth decay also stems from his
kill-the-messenger attacks on the media; from online conspiracy mongers
and talk radio tub-thumpers who regard our government as an diabolical
“deep state� plotting to strip the people of their liberties; and, from
Russian and China, which use troll farms to flood social media with
disinformation and crackpot theories.

This assault on the very idea of objective reality may be more dangerous
to our democracy than any pandemic. It replaces Jefferson’s marketplace
of ideas, where reasoned argument backed by empirical and scientific
evidence are required, with an epistemological free-fire zone in which
demagogues like Trump can cook up “alternative facts� aimed not at
informing people but reinforcing their tribal biases.

Only this time, it’s not working because hundreds of millions of
Americans have witnessed Trump’s feckless leadership and directly
experienced its consequences.

More than 1.2 million Americans have been infected and 75,500 have lost
their lives to COVID-19. That’s more than twice the number of deaths
recorded by the United Kingdom, which is in second place in fatalities.
No one expected the United States to escape the pandemic unscathed. But
neither was it inevitable that the coronavirus would hit America harder
than any other country.

That is on President Trump. Our government lost two crucial months while
Trump denied and dithered, dismissed coronavirus as just another flu;
prescribed quack remedies and predicted its imminent disappearance;
failed to galvanize national action to produce the equipment and tests
needed to combat the pandemic; passed the buck to governors, then feuded
endlessly with them; and, bemoaned the shutdown of the “beautiful
economy� he had hoped to ride to reelection in November.

So let the president brag. COVID-19 and a wrecked economy are truths he
can’t spin, and they’ll be fresh in voters’ minds come November.


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MAGA - Manipulating America's Gullible Assholes