HOAX: Trump’s Endless Obsession with Politicizing the Coronavirus

So far this election cycle, Donald Trump has been asked four times to describe his agenda should he be reelected to a second term. And four times – most recently two days ago – he failed to articulate a coherent vision for the future or even a compelling reason to vote for him. That might have something to do with why he’s trailing so badly in every poll.

Donald Trump, Coronavirus

How hard could it be for Trump to lay out a plan for finally getting the coronavirus pandemic under control, restoring the jobs lost due to his incompetence, advocating for the welfare of working Americans, and repairing the nation’s relationships with international allies? Not that Trump is capable of doing any of that, but you would think that his press operatives ought to be able to craft an image makeover for PR purposes. You would think.

What makes this task so difficult for Trump is that he can’t be relied upon to focus his increasingly feeble mind on anything that isn’t either directly beneficial to him personally or injurious to his perceived enemies. Evidence of this mental fetishism that consumes Trump was provided in a Friday morning tweet that raised an old issue seemingly out of thin air:

The likely trigger for Trump’s latest tantrum was a “Trump Hoaxed America” Twitter ad that featured a string of his paranoid “hoax” accusations. It covered matters that he has repeatedly dismissed as hoaxes, such as climate change and the investigations into his unsavory connections to Russia during the 2016 election. More to the point, the ad also included Trump’s infamous outburst that the coronavirus was just another Democratic spawned hoax. Hence his enigmatic tweet. Here’s the ad that Seems to have gotten under Trump’s thin skin:

For the record, What Trump said at his cult rally on February 28, in Charleston, South Carolina, (video below) was that…

“Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? … Think of it, And this is their new hoax. But you know we did something that’s pretty amazing. We’re fifteen people in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great.”

Trump’s complaint that he wasn’t referring to the pandemic as a hoax is specious at best. He included it in a list of other alleged hoaxes, not flimsy assertions about political rhetoric. And the notion that “politicizing the coronavirus” was the actual hoax doesn’t even make sense unless he means to say that it wasn’t politicized.

However, for the sake of argument, let’s concede the point and move on to the rest on Trump’s comment. Immediately following his hoax assertion Trump bragged that there were only fifteen people in the United States who were diagnosed with the coronavirus. Then he praised himself for the number being so low and insisted that “We’re doing great.” That was nearly 5,000,000 cases and 160,000 deaths ago.

So whatever fictions Trump wants to sell to Fox News and his cult disciples, there is still the unmistakable presence of a deliberate hoax. It’s the one that Trump and his Republican confederates have manufactured for five months pretending that he has everything under control, that the virus isn’t harmful, and that it’s going to disappear magically any day now. And this isn’t just a garden variety hoax. It’s a hoax that is killing people. And it’s a hoax that, at this late date, no one in their right mind still believes.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.