There’s a chance — a small one — that Donald Trump could have won re-election. Had his response to the COVID-19 outbreak been good, or even competent, or even barely-assed, he might have wormed his way into the hearts of more than simply his rabid and sometimes violent supporters. Alas, he’s Donald Trump, and his response was to mostly ignore it, to mock masks, to give absurdly bad medical advice. Maybe things would be different had he listened to his own wife.
As per CNN, a new book — The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by New York Times’ Peter Baker and CNN’s own Susan Glasser — claims that Melania tried to talk some sense into him as cases and deaths skyrocketed.
“‘You’re blowing this,’ she recalled telling her husband,” Baker and Glasser write. “‘This is serious. It’s going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you’re taking it.’ He had just dismissed her. ‘You worry too much,’ she remembered him saying. ‘Forget it.'”
And so, cases and deaths stayed high, in part because half the country — the Trump-voting half — were convinced by the president and his cronies that it wasn’t worth taking seriously. Even when vaccines became available, many didn’t take them. When Trump advised getting vaxxed, they booed him, even as deaths overwhelmingly affected his supporters.
As for Trump, he now rants to strangers in a resort where he now lives, all while fending off an ever-growing number of headaches that may leave him broke and/or in prison. But at least he can still run a third time from jail.
(Via CNN)