Trump's reckless politicization of the coronavirus could help spread the disease among his most fervent supporters

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Because Donald Trump is a raging narcissist, he's incapable of comprehending events in any context beyond his own self-interests. As a result, he has so far refused to acknowledge that the coronavirus as anything other than a Democratic “hoax” designed to tank the stock market and hurt his chances in November. It is, he insists, “like the regular flu that we have flu shots for,” and claims that “a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat.”

Because most of the conservative press are corrupt and intensely partisan, they have run with this preposterous storyline despite the fact that stock markets all over the world have tanked and major American ports predict massive drop-offs in trade as supply-chains are disrupted by the pandemic.

Because a significant share of Trump’s base behave like cultists, it’s safe to say that a large swath of MAGA nation will take Trump's nonsense seriously, and reject the advice of experts to wash one’s hands regularly, maintain some social distance whenever possible and get tested for the virus and self-isolate if one experiences any symptoms.

Because of partisan geographical sorting, these people aren’t distributed evenly across the country. They, like the rest of us, tend to cluster in communities with other like-minded people.

Epidemiologists talk about the importance of “community mitigation” of pandemics. According to the CDC, community mitigation “aims to slow the spread” of an outbreak “through the use of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and through travel and border health measures. In the absence of medications or vaccines, community mitigation measures are the first line of defense against highly transmissible infectious diseases.”

Because of all of the above, it isn't at all unreasonable to expect the coronavirus to spread more rapidly in areas where Trump’s supporters tend to live than in areas where a larger share of the population trusts public health officials over the semi-coherent ramblings of the president*. If that scenario does come to pass—and it’s quite possible that Trump will be convinced at some point that it isn’t in his best interests to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak--more people in Trump country will contract the disease as a direct result of his reckless and instinctual politicization of everything.

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Unsurprising, but The Wall Street Journal reported this week ($$) that former Crooked Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's clemency "culminated a nearly two-year campaign to put the once-prominent Democrat’s case on President Trump’s agenda" on the part of a Republican operative who enlisted the help of, among others, Fox News, Rudy Giuliani and... Jesse Jackson.

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Trump's purge of officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader is continuing apace with the help of a 23-year-old college senior named James Bacon, who was hired "to be one of the top officials in [the White House's] powerful Presidential Personnel Office," according to Politico.

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CDC head Robert Redfield has come under fire for first deciding to leave Americans on a cruise ship that was quarantined off the coast of Japan with the coronavirus and then, after evacuating them on trump's order, sending a team to process the new arrivals that was unprepared and didn't take proper precautions to avoid contracting the illness and spreading it beyond the quarantine facility.

This should come as no surprise. As Laurie Garrett wrote when he was first appointed in 2018, "Redfield's early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial."

As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.

In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was "God's judgment" against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.

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The AP reports that Trump's relentless efforts to sidestep Congress's power of the purse is causing "rare Republican opposition to one of Trump’s priorities."

Lawmakers from both parties told Pentagon leaders on Wednesday that the Defense Department is undermining its own efforts to get military money by diverting billions of dollars for the construction of President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the committee’s top Republican warned Defense Secretary Mark Esper that overturning congressional funding decisions to shift money for the wall is an enormous problem that will have consequences.

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Pretty sure these stories are related:

Pew: "Naturalized Citizens Make Up Record One-in-Ten U.S. Eligible Voters in 2020"

DOJ press release: "The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases"

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From the 'continued alarm' file...