Trump supporters who reject masks and other mitigations are not stupid and/or crazy

 

Last Update: Saturday 11/18/20 

In 2016 candidate Clinton fueled candidate Trump's efforts to mobilize his base when she called his supporters "deplorable." This note will argue that similar characterizations in 2020 have fueled our fatal failure to manage the COVID pandemic.

Preface (new)

I posted this note last week as a plea to my fellow supporters of President-elect Biden to back away from some of their most condescending, deeply offensive attitudes about the supporters of President Trump. I changed the title of this note and added this short preface in the hope that these changes might attract more readers.  Without the fullest cooperation of President Trump's supporters, we cannot mediate the spread of the virus during the next 6 to 12 months before a safe, effective vaccine becomes widely available. We will not gain their cooperation if millions of us continue to regard them, all 73 million of them, as stupid and/or crazy. 

Context

Pandemic control does not follow majority rule. Presidents can be elected by slim majorities, but pandemic control requires commitment by an overwhelming super majority, e.g., commitment by 90 to 95 percent of the population to adhere to the most important social mitigation procedures. Recent polls indicate that most people claim to follow the most important procedures -- they wear masks, they distance, and they avoid crowded places -- most but not all. Week after week, President Trump's hard core supporters, a sizable minority, showed up at his crowded rallies standing shoulder to shoulder without masks. 

Therefore as soon as candidate Biden is sworn in as President Biden, he must embark upon a new campaign as president of all of the people, a campaign to persuade Trump's hard core supporters to become the final contingent required to create the overwhelming super majority the U.S. needs to finally gain control of the virus. Otherwise President Biden's most well considered plans to restore the nation's economic health will fail ... until a safe and effective vaccine becomes widely available.

Candidate Biden won because he ran a cautious campaign, a campaign whose most important message was that he was not Trump; he was not conflict. He represented a sincere commitment to return to some kind of normality wherein people could strongly disagree about issues, yet still maintain productive relationships. His greatest appeal was to the many millions of voters who dreaded the continuation of an economy that was broken by our mishandling of the coronavirus, an economy that will remain broken until the virus has been brought under control. 

Not being Trump might have been sufficient to win the election; but not being Trump will not be sufficient to gain control of the virus. Dr. Fauci and the other members of the White House task force plus the CDC leadership were not Trump; nevertheless they committed a series of unforced errors of the first magnitude, "unforced" meaning errors of their own invention that were not the result of pressure from Mr. Trump.

Any short list of their most damaging blunders would have to include (a) their confusing recommendations about masks; (b) their catastrophic recommendation that the entire nation be locked down at the same time in March 2020 when there were fewer than 20,000 cases of COVID infection in the entire country; and (c) their failure to make special efforts to reach out to young adults -- the principal carriers of the virus and the principal victims of the economic collapse that resulted from the lockdown. These policy pratfalls should provide unforgettable reminders that well-intended bumblers can be just as dangerous as an irresponsible president.

• Readers who are puzzled or offended by my characterization of Dr. Fauci and his policy-level colleagues as well-intended bumblers are referred to the detailed analysis of their recommendations that I posted on this blog in August 2020 and have updated from time to time since then ==> "Where do we go from here?"

Why didn't they believe "the science" ????

Why did so many of President Trump's supporters, especially the White males that showed up at his rallies, seem to think that the virus was a hoax or just a very nasty flu? Why did they believe President Trump's lies? 

Whereas candidate Clinton called candidate Trump's supporters "deplorable" back in 2016, the tacit unspoken assumption of most of the liberal media in 2020 was that President Trump's supporters didn't believe "the science" because they were either crazy or too stupid to understand "the science". So the liberal TV pundits rolled their eyes and sighed whenever they showed videos of the large crowds at Trump's rallies standing close together without masks. 

In sharp contrast to this condescending rubbish, I suggest that the attendees' disbelief was a plausible reaction to the policy pratfalls of the task force and the CDC. Therefore President Biden must not only disavow President Trump's often repeated lies about the virus; he must also disavow the well-intended blunders of Dr. Fauci and friends.

Who are you going to believe -- the unflattened national curves of the task force? ... or ... your lying eyes???

I downloaded the following heat map from the NY Times COVID website on November 8, 2020. The spots on the map show the average number of new COVID cases per day per 100,000 people in the past week. Dark spots indicate higher numbers of new cases.  When this map was generated, about 10 million people had been infected in the U.S. since the pandemic began in early 2020. Most but not all states contain at least one dark spot that indicates substantial numbers of new infections and therefore substantial subsequent hospitalizations and deaths. Note: Clicking the map will cause it to pop up in a separate window. The reader's browser can then make the map as large as required to display the spots in greater detail.

• Late October
  

Now let's hop back to March 2020 at which time the White House task force recommended that the entire country be locked down at the same time, from continental coast to continental coast and all points in between. The New York Times published the following heat map that shows the location of the 17,935 known cases of the coronavirus in all fifty states on March 21, 2020, about a week after President Trump posted the guidelines recommended by the task force. The red dots indicate the hot spots, i.e., the locations where the virus was highly prevalent. The biggest dots mark the locations with the most cases.  

• Mid-March lockdown

The most significant features on this map are the spaces that are unmarked by dots, i.e., the locations of communities wherein the virus had not yet had significant impact -- few if any infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. As the reader can see, most of the map is unmarked by dots which means that the vast majority U.S. communities had not yet felt the impact of the virus by mid-March. Indeed, some communities would not experience significant presence of the virus until weeks later, some until months later, and others have yet to register significant presence seven months later.  By contrast, most U.S. communities felt acute economic pain from the closed businesses and high unemployment that followed within weeks of the task force's lockdown recommendations. At one point, over 30 million people were collecting unemployment benefits. 

Had the mid-March map looked like the late October map when over 10 million people had become infected, the task force might have been able to make a plausible (but still questionable) recommendation for a national lock step lockdown. Given that there were fewer than 20,000 cases of the virus in the entire country back then, when most people in most states asked their friends and associates if any of them knew anyone who had been infected, hospitalized, or died from the virus, or if their friends and associates had friends and associates who knew anyone who had been infected, hospitalized, or died from the virus, they received negative answers. But when they tuned into the daily task force TV presentations that focused on national curves that summed up all the cases in all fifty states, they invariably learned that the situation was getting worse and worse, i.e., the curves were not getting flatter. It was like tuning into national weather reports and learning about hurricanes and tornados out there somewhere in other states, then looking out the window and always seeing cloudless skies and sunshine. 

This disconnect gave rise to doubts. Indeed, some doubters began to believe that the pandemic was a hoax. Then doubts gave rise to distrust of the task force, the CDC, and "the science" as the local economic pain increased. This discrepancy between the immediate economic pain caused by the lockdown and the lack of pain from a nonexistent virus is well described by a NY Times article published in early June, "A Striking Disconnect on the Virus: Economic Pain With Little Illness", Michael H. Keller, Steve Eder and Karl Russell, NY Times, 6/6/20

It's not our dance ...

The understandable skepticism of Trump's White male supporters about the reality of the coronavirus as a public health hazard for themselves and for their families was inadvertently reinforced by frequent stories in the major media that emphasized that minorities and/or the elderly who had pre-existing health problems were the primary victims of COVID-19. Some examples are cited below:

• "7 Out Of 10 Patients Killed By COVID-19 In Louisiana Were African American", Lulu Garcia-Navarro NPR, 4/12/20
• "More than 80 percent of hospitalized covid-19 patients in Georgia were African American, study finds", Rachel Weiner, Washington Post, 4/29/20
• "Tribal Nations Face Most Severe Crisis in Decades as the Coronavirus Closes Casinos", Simon Romero and Jack Healy, NY Times, 5/11/20
• "The Striking Racial Divide in How Covid-19 Has Hit Nursing Homes", NY Times, 5/21/20
• "Patients with underlying conditions were 12 times as likely to die of covid-19 as otherwise healthy people, CDC finds", Lena H. Sun, Washington Post, 6/15/20
• "The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus", Richard A. Oppel Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Will Wright and Mitch Smith, NY Times, 7/5/20
• "Pandemic’s weight falls on Hispanics and Native Americans, as deaths pass 150,000", Reis Thebault and Alyssa Fowers, Washington Post, 7/31/20
• "Hispanic, Black children at higher risk of coronavirus-related hospitalization, CDC finds", Chelsea Janes, Washington Post, 8/7/20

One might easily imagine Trump's supporters interpreting these articles as meaning something like the following:

• "The coronavirus might be far more contagious and far more fatal than seasonal flu for "them", but not for "us". It's not our dance. Of course, we should provide extra safeguards for the elderly of all races, but we must never again let advocates for social mitigation jeopardize our economy and our jobs the way the task force did back in March 2020. We must not let the coronavirus ruin our lives."