Trump and His Republican Allies Are Making a Huge Miscalculation

[MineralMan]

Trump apparently thinks he can mask the COVID-19 pandemic with some sort of economic recovery. He also appears to think that the virus is simply going to go away in time for the November election. People like DeSantis in Florida are going along with his plans.

Trump is wrong. Clearly, the pandemic is going to continue and the death toll and number of people in the ICUs are going to continue to rise. "Open the schools!" he says. Some Red states will do just that, to appease Trump, and will reap the results, which will sicken even more people who are vulnerable to serious illness and death.

Trump is making a bet, but like the person dumping $5 tokens in the slot machine, the house is going to win it all in the end.

The miscalculation that Trump and his cohort are making is going to backfire spectacularly, I predict.

Sadly, though, his selfish miscalculation is going to cost many thousands of lives before November. Many of those lives could have been saved. The deaths will be on Trump's shoulders.

RESIST!

[malaise]

1. He should end up in prison with mother's boy

This is madness

[Maeve]

2. He figures odds like he ran his casino

[lagomorph777]

3. Yeah, that worked out great for him.

[DBoon]

9. "the house is going to win it all in the end."

Except when Trump runs the casino

[Maeve]

10. Because he still was thinking like a sucker

Smart casino owners know there are limits. tRump? Not so much (not at all)

[lagomorph777]

4. Either the country goes along with his plan, millions die, and he loses, or....

...we refuse to go along, millions switch their allegiance and he loses.

He loses either way. The first way, America loses too; the second way, we begin to recover.

[Quixote1818]

5. I think everyone has known this for some time. nt

[MineralMan]

11. Apparently not everyone...

[PatSeg]

6. And he also thinks that he

just say anything and people will automatically believe him, even though they may be sick or jobless. Trump deals in perception and there apparently isn't anything too absurd to throw out there like "we are number one in testing in the world" and "the reason we have more cases is because we are so good at testing". I don't think he believes the virus is simply going to go away, he believes he can convince people that it is or will.

I can picture him ranting because people aren't believing his ridiculous lies and he will take that as some kind of betrayal.

[Moostache]

7. It is even more insidious than the surface level appears...

This entire "strategy" of ignoring the virus, pumping out disinformation, and gas lighting the public on it started AS SOON AS the demographics showed the virus disproportionally impacting poor and minority communities over white communities. This is as racist and evil in its origins as the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis studies or the Nazi experiments in the concentration camps. It has an unmistakable racial component to it that is stomach churning and purely evil.

These are crimes against humanity to allow this virus to rampage unchecked across the country - infecting millions, subjecting some survivors to a lifetime of health issues and killing thousands - based on political calculation, bad information and a total lack of understanding science while simultaneously working to undermine experts. Trump deserves a trial at The Hague; and when found guilty, he should be hanged. It will never happen, but the least that should happen is the total destruction of the "Trump" name for the next 6-7 generations, minimum.

[Victor_c3]

8. Sadly, I think many thousands of lives is an underestimate

Sadly, I believe the number will be at least 500,000 dead by November.

According to the CNN COVID tracker, we’re currently on a trajectory that leads us to doubling the number of infected every month and the CDC published a death rate of 4.3% recently.

We’ve got roughly 4 months until the election. I’m just assuming we double the number infected twice during that time and maintain a 4.3% death rate.

Scary stuff. I wonder how much longer this is going to go on.

I guess you’re right with many thousands, but it might be many hundreds of thousands

[MineralMan]

12. 500,000 Is Many Thousands

I phrased it that way to cover all possibilities, from tens to hundreds of thousands.

[Victor_c3]

13. Yeah, you're right

I just got proud of myself for doing a little bit of the maths and had to try and look smrt in front of everyone.

[D23MIURG23]

14. "Miscalculation" makes it sound like there was a thought process.

Trump decided that caring about stupid shit like viruses was for libruls back in February*, and because of that he's never really tried to do anything about Covid-19. He's taking his usual approach to issues he doesn't like: deny reality so hard that it changes. He did the same shit with climate change.

The difference here is that you can't just muzzle the medical establishment and make an issue go away when the issue affects the entire world, and more than 130,000 of your own people have died in less than 6 months. This just shows the depth of his incompetence and unfitness for his office.

We told you so, GOP, and I hope you all die from it. Just desserts for inflicting this piece of shit on our country.



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*Or maybe back in 2016 when he saw that Obama had plans and infrastructure in place for a possible pandemic.