Trump was content to let people suffer from COVID-19 in blue states until infections soared among ‘our people’ in Republican states: report

Last week — with the number of new coronavirus infections surging in many Sun Belt states — reporters were quick to report a change in tone from President Donald Trump, who resumed his coronavirus press briefings, encouraged mask wearing (something he mocked in the past) and even canceled the in-person part of the Republican National Convention that had been planned for Jacksonville, Florida. Trump’s plummeting poll numbers have often been cited as a key reason for his change in tone, but here’s another one: many of the Sun Belt surges are occurring in either red states such as Texas and Georgia or swing states with Republican governors (Florida and Arizona, for example). And Trump is expressing a level of concern that he wasn’t expressing when the pandemic was killing so many Americans in blue states and blue cities.

Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, in a July 27 article for the Washington Post, examine the toll that Trump’s response to the pandemic has been taking on his reelection campaign. And the article discusses the abundance of dangerous COVID-19 increases in states with a lot of Trump supporters.

“In the past couple of weeks,” Parker and Rucker report, “senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among ‘our people’ in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said. This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.” Continue reading.