Donald Trump famously observed that he wouldn’t lose his base if he were to shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue.
But Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t somebody.
Trump’s careless retweet of a statement backing his response to COVID-19 that included the #FireFauci hashtag is damage enough.
It’s hard to imagine that he would follow through, but if he did, well …
It would be par for the course for a guy who can’t seem to let well enough stand alone.
Trump is largely winning COVID-19 politically, and don’t @ me with numbers from this poll or that poll showing Joe Biden comfortably ahead.
It’s April. The election is in November.
A lot can and will happen between now and then.
And if you think through the most likely scenarios of what can and will happen, you’ll start to see that Trump could be on his way to a Nixon-thumps-McGovern landslide.
The response from the Trump administration to COVID-19 was late, and still a month in is embarrassingly lagging, but the most successful ever failson appears to be on his way to lucking out yet again.
After early estimates pegged the number of U.S. COVID-19 deaths as high as 2.2 million, it’s looking more and more that the death toll will come in at or bit under a normal U.S. flu season, as Democratic governors in several states continue to insist on measures to shutter residents as the number of unemployed is expected to surpass 25 million this week.
There would be unrest from the millions out of work even if the public health situation was actually as dire as we had been told it was going to be, but now that it’s decidedly not?
The backlash is coming, and you’re going to see Trump and his team play to the underswell of anger at the grassroots this fall.
The only way he screws this up at this point is doing something stupid like firing the guy who has become America’s Doctor, Fauci, who, yes, has been a wet blanket on Trump, shaking his head no when the president throws out his thoughts on this cure or that treatment, making the president take his medicine when he wanted to have the country open by Easter.
But then, Trump needs Fauci to be the wet blanket, to deflect critics from the left, who have lauded Fauci as being the sole voice of reason on the White House COVID-19 task force, and also from the right, to whom Trump can say, well, yeah, I was the guy who signed off on shutting things down, but I did it as this guy’s direction.
Actually firing Fauci only intensifies the critics on the left, and leaves Trump exposed on the right if he doesn’t follow through with a total reopening of the economy as soon as is humanly possible, which would be a disaster, given what we know.
Assuming Trump keeps Fauci on the team, the president can proceed with a phased resumption of economic activity along the lines of what is being implemented in Germany, France and China.
And assuming nothing goes wrong with the rollout of that strategy, Trump stays on course to a second term.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
