The attempt to prove Trump colluded with Russia failed. The impeachment and subsequent acquittal in the Senate left Trump more popular. The pandemic of COVID-19 however, is the event the media and the Democrats have been looking for to kill off a Trump re-election.
The media, the Democrats, and some Republicans have loathed President Trump since he got the Republican nomination in the 2016 election. It blew into full blown psychotic hatred after he beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. They never could conceive of a President Trump. I didn’t want him as President either but I didn’t share the same hatred and fear of him.
They tried to take him down almost immediately with the Russian collusion baloney. Two years of the Mueller investigation and all the leaks from that fiasco that ultimately resulted in NOTHING.
Then the phone call to Ukraine. Leaked by a so-called whistleblower. A whistleblower that had no first hand knowledge of anything he/she/they were alleging. They pushed through impeachment on that basis knowing the Senate would not convict and remove him from office. They expected that hanging impeachment around his neck would be the anchor that would sink his campaign. It didn’t. He came out more popular than he went in.
Now, we have COVID-19. If you read all the news reports, the virus that causes it, SARS-COV-2, results in mild symptoms of a fever, cough, and trouble breathing for about 80% of people infected. Another 15% have more serious symptoms. The remaining 5% are serious enough to be hospitalized but less than half of them are at risk of death. And most people at risk of death are those above the age of 60 with already compromised immune systems.
The virus has probably been in the United States since late 2019. China tried to hide the problems they were having with the virus and allowed free travel from the area. There are 11 million people in Wuhan and it is a business center that have people traveling about all over the world. The virus has been out and it will remain out and perhaps most of us will contract it at some point like we do a cold or the seasonal flu.
The media started to report infections as if The Plague was unleashed across the world. We would hear daily counts of 5 more people confirmed infected here and 10 more there. Mind you, not 1,000 here or 2,000 there. But single digit infections in many cases. They started to realize that the more they created this anxiety in the public the more the eyeballs were drawn to their TV screens and web sites.
Federal regulations in place long before Trump took office prevented doctors and hospitals from testing and/or developing their own tests to confirm infections. This didn’t stop the media and the Democrats from blaming Trump for any kind of response.
To be fair, President Trump hasn’t helped his case. He downplayed the virus too much in his public statements. I don’t think he realized how ripe the public is to be whipped into a frenzy over nothing. His speech to the nation on March 11, 2020 was uninspiring to say the least. Evidence of that is the plunge in the stock market today.
They tried to kill Trump’s re-election many times since his election. Like a vampire he came back to life every time they thought they had him down. COVID-19 could be the silver bullet that puts his re-election in the grave.