Lots of people were talking about this last night. At one of his Volksturm rallies, Trump touted taking the vaccine and his cultists booed. The fascinating closure of the reactionary mind is perfectly on display here. For all of our focus on Trump's unique awfulness as a president and simply as a human being, he was always more of a conduit than a generator of this shit. His salesman's instinct for telling the customer what they want to hear was his singular political talent.
What they want to hear is simply laughably absurd bullshit.
This is seen in the RINO phenomenon. Anyone who varies even slightly from orthodox is an apostate, a heretic to be burned at the stake. Could that include Trump himself? I think it could, providing Cult 45 has a new figure to venerate. Digby Parton's famous maxim during the late Bush years - "Conservative can never fail, it can only be failed." - shows the inability of reactionary politics to admit being wrong, needing to change or adapting. Ideologically, it's as much a dead end as Marxism.
There have been a number of stories about Rightist radio hosts dying of Covid. There are also the stories of dupes who have begged for the vaccine when they are on ventilators, which is of course too late. Roughly 1,000 people a day are dying of Covid in the US. Sadly, not all of them are going to be reactionary conspiracy theorists. Sadly, the reactionary conspiracy theorists are going to kill other people.
I do honestly believe that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis as creating massive backlashes with what are objectively pro-Covid policies, but then again it's Florida and Texas. In the rational model of the world that liberal democracy relies upon, the manifest failures - measured in human death - of Republican governance would banish them from the corridors of power for a generation. I have to hope that this can be true.
If it's not, if America is perpetually balancing between competent, empathetic governance of people like Obama and Biden on the one hand and Trumpist lunacy on the others, it may well be time to break this country up. I am not willing to live with these fuckers anymore.
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