President Trump and his son recently had multiple tweets deleted by Facebook and Twitter for spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID-19. Their posts featured a doctor touting hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for COVID-19 and encouraging followers not to wear masks.
Hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be ineffective and potentially dangerous, and all evidence points to masks being one of the most effective ways to prevent infection.
This isn’t the first time President Trump and prominent Republicans have spread potentially-dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 or made it harder for communities to keep themselves safe.
Many Republican members of Congress have protested mask-wearing and economic shutdowns. Conservative media outlets have consistently spread misinformation, like attacks on Dr. Antony Fauci, anti-vaccine ideology, downplaying COVID-19’s seriousness, and anti-mask arguments.
The doctor that Trump tweeted “has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics,” according to the Daily Beast, including that some health issues stem from people “having sex with witches and demons in [their] dreams.”
Why have Republicans so uniformly come out in favor of bizarre anti-science ideologies that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and against COVID-19 safety precautions?
“This anti-mask rhetoric is mind-blowing, dangerous, deadly and polarizing,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco, told the L.A. Times.
Some powerful Republicans have gone further, attempting to prevent others from protecting their own communities. Despite a record-breaking infection rate, the Republican governor of Georgia sued the Democrat mayor of Atlanta for trying to institute a mask rule.
A similar debate took place in Arizona, where COVID-19 is also surging, between a Democrat mayor and Republican governor. Trump also made it harder for the Centers for Disease Control to collect and distribute COVID-19 data.
These actions have made controlling the spread of the virus much more difficult.
Republicans are forcing people back to work despite the risks, and pushing for schools to reopen quickly as well — even though health experts cautioned that both moves would increase infections.
Now that COVID-19 is surging in many Republican-led states that opened quickly and refused mask-wearing mandates, some Republicans are changing their tune, but it may be too late.
Analysts argue that Trump has a pathological need to never admit mistakes. Others say that Trump’s main concern is the economy, and that’s more important to him than American deaths.
But it may simply matter who is dying.
Many Americans have noticed that when the United States experiences a tragedy that primarily affects marginalized people — the HIV/AIDS crisis, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or now the COVID-19 pandemic — America is slow to respond.
President Trump’s recent, hesitant moves to support mask-wearing only came once “senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among ‘our people’ in Republican states,” reports the Washington Post.
Given their behavior, many analysts have concluded that Republicans only care about tragedies when they affect Republican donors and/or voters – and Trump’s advisor, Jared Kushner, is even being called to resign for ignoring COVID-19’s impact until it affected Republican states.