The final stages of the Trump campaign have involved a lot of flailing. He tried running against imaginary anarchist hordes; when that didn't work, he tried running against Hunter Biden's laptop; now he's running against evil doctors 1/ 
Trump's claim that the pandemic is basically being fabricated by money-grubbing physicians is grotesque; but it's not as random as it may seem. The shifting politics of doctors are a window into how both America and the GOP are changing 2/ nytimes.com/2020/10/30/us/…
Doctors used to be very Republican. Back in 1961 the American Medical Association urged doctors' wives (hey, it was 1961) to bring their friends over to hear Ronald Reagan denounce Medicare 3/
But these days doctors tend to be Democrats, for several reasons: they're often women, they're generally employees rather than small businessmen, they're burdened by med school debt 4/ wsj.com/articles/docto…
Also, medicine isn't and can't be an ordinary business. Doctors are required to swear some version of the Hippocratic Oath, and while they may not always be saints, we do expect and often get a higher ethical standard than from many other professions 5/
There is, after all, a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors but not about heroic real estate developers. A doctor known for sharp practices who repeatedly bilked his patients would have his license suspended, not become president 6/
Which brings us to the modern GOP: hostile to science and expertise of all kinds, exalting the profit motive, accusing anyone claiming to stand for higher principles other than religious faith of "political correctness". Trump isn't an outlier; he fits right in 7/
Oh, and I should mention that there's a remarkable association between modern conservatism and the hawking of quack nutritional supplements 8/ brickhousenutrition.com/pages/benshapi…
So Trump's war on modern medicine isn't just a convenient excuse for his pandemic failure. It's another battle in the right's long war on rationality and those who defend it 9/
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