Something I keep thinking about is that coronavirus could have been a huge gift to Trump and the Republicans. They act like it was his 2008 financial crisis, but really it was more like 9/11 - something that could have boosted their favorability in exchange for very little work.
All they had to do was nothing - stand back, let the CDC take the lead, use the playbook Obama left them, and take credit at the end. Hell, even Kushner's testing plan was apparently pretty solid before it was abandoned because they thought the virus would only hit blue states.
And it's not as if they didn't know how bad things were going to get. Republican senators were selling their stocks. Trump himself, we now know, was telling people how dangerous the disease was.
But instead of taking very simple, mostly low-maintenance steps that would have paid off enormously in terms of favorability - not to mention lives saved - they opted to ignore the disease and hope it would go away. I don't get it.
I know that Trump is stupid and that Republicans are ideologically opposed to making the lives of Americans better. I know that they're racists and the way coronavirus hit POC communities left them at best indifferent. But I still can't understand this decision.
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