Trump’s America is filled with ‘selfish rubes’ who ‘can’t handle even modest adversity’: columnist

Americans were blasted for selfishness and whining in a new column by Rick Newman.

"Did you whine in 2020? Were masks too much for you? Did the coronavirus pandemic cause intolerable inconvenience? Congratulations, American Snowflake—you can't handle even modest adversity," Newman wrote at Yahoo! Finance.

"If you lost a partner, friend or family member to Covid-19 in 2020, you had a truly awful year. More than 300,000 Americans died of Covid in 2020, and when you multiply that by the 20 or 50 or 100 people close to each one of those souls, it's a ghastly toll. Millions of others suffered economic hardship from lost jobs or reduced income or a family business that gave out as everybody's work and spending habits changed. The economic pain is real, too," he explained. "But selfish rubes defined 2020 more than anybody else. President Trump led this march of folly by repeatedly denying the severity of the coronavirus, then contracting it himself. Trump went to the hospital and got specialized treatment unavailable to most Americans, then returned to the White House with the pomp of a war veteran returning from a battlefield victory. But Trump's injury was self-inflicted and what he was really celebrating was medicine saving him from himself. Other Covid victims weren't that lucky."

He had particular scorn for Representative-elect Marjorie Greene (R-GA).

"Many Americans felt their freedom threatened in 2020, by a demonic new torture device known as a mask. 'Masks are oppressive,' said Marjorie Greene, who won a Congressional seat in Georgia in November. She vows to break the mask requirement on Capitol Hill when she arrives in January, and she encourages other members of Congress to do the same, so she'll have some company in the Covid ward. On social media, she promotes the hashtag #freeyourface, so the virus can attack your lungs more easily. If she were a soldier, she'd go to battle without a helmet or body armor, wearing comfy flip-flops instead of ponderous combat boots. Rules are for others," he wrote.

"We demand that health care workers take care of us when we fail to take care of ourselves. We ask others to bear risks so we can reap the reward. We value vanity over courage and we raise the "freedom" flag to justify laziness and self-interest. The coronavirus exposed our weaknesses in 2020, but it didn't cause them. We did," he wrote.