"The coronavirus as Americans know it is not an equal-opportunity killer. The research arm of American Public Media reported on April 17 that 27 percent of those killed by COVID-19 to date have been African American, more than twice their share of the population. Grocery workers are dying in the dozens, at least 41 as of April 12, according to The Washington Post, with thousands more fallen sick."
As Frum notes, the political "calculus" of this, Trump's "Plan A" is to allow the deaths of those deemed "expendable."
But if, for some reason, this plan does not succeed in pacifying Americans, the outlines of a secondary, "Plan B" are already visible: to spark a cultural war against Democrats, and specifically Democratic governors who oppose his plan by ginning up the pliant masses of his ignorant supporters. As Frum notes, we are already seeing the disproportionate coverage our national media is affording to fringe right-wing protesters who, although vastly outnumbered by citizens perfectly willing to comply with social distancing restrictions put into place, are being characterized as an "organic" movement, much in the same way the media exaggerated the emergence of the so-called "Tea Party."
And of course, Fox News is ready to act as the administration's Josef Goebbels, magnifying these contrived, fake protests in furtherance of its agenda.
"As with the Tea Party a decade ago, so now with the anti-lock-down protests: Fox News acts as the co-author of the pseudo-events staged for its cameras, as in this fanciful graphic showing half the United States colored red in protest, as if the whole country were aflame rather than a few hundred oddballs.
As Frum explains, this is Trump's endgame, in a nutshell:
"For Trump, it's win-win. Either he pushes the country to trade poor people's lives for the pursuit of economic recovery, or he gets a cable-TV culture war to distract his supporters from the troubles he himself aggravated by his own negligence."
Only someone monstrously and thoroughly sociopathic, with no regard for American lives or basic decency, would adopt such a strategy. But that is exactly what we must expect from someone as fundamentally inhuman as Donald Trump. As Frum puts it: "In pandemic as in prosperity, the Trump way is to punish opponents, reward friends; accuse victims, protect culprits; demand credit, refuse accountability; protect preferred classes and groups of Americans -- and sacrifice the rest."
And anyone who expected anything less from this monster is simply naive.
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