Six months into the pandemic, President Trump and his Republican allies have transitioned from downplaying the severity of the virus to pretending it no longer exists at all. At last night’s Republican National Convention, speech after speech failed to acknowledge the virus — and, of the few that did, one spoke of it only in the past tense, as if it weren’t killing nearly a thousand people each day.
Fact check: it is. The average daily death toll to the virus has hovered around a thousand lives lost for all of August — nearly 1200 dying yesterday alone. But that truth doesn’t fit into the Republicans’ false narrative pretending President Trump acted decisively to stop the pandemic. So instead, Republicans are opting to rewrite history, rather than face the inconvenient truth that President Trump’s actions have resulted in the deaths of nearly 180,000 people in the United States.
Here is what people are saying about how the RNC is trying to gaslight Americans about the pandemic:
[Twitter, @atrupar, 8/26/20]
[Twitter, @Acosta, 8/25/20]
[Twitter, @kylegriffin1, 8/25/20]
- Vox: The RNC Keeps Referring To Covid-19 In The Past Tense. 1,147 American Deaths Were Reported Tuesday
- Buzzfeed: The Republican National Convention Is Creating A False Coronavirus Fantasy
- HuffPost: RNC Celebrates A Coronavirus Response That Didn’t Happen
- Washington Post: Trump Uses Republican Convention To Try To Rewrite Coronavirus History, Casting Himself As Lifesaving Hero
- ABC: RNC Praise For Trump’s Covid-19 Response At Odds With Months Of Missteps
- Slate: The Republican Coronavirus Strategy: Lie About Everything
- Vanity Fair: Republicans Put Covid In The Rearview On Night Two Of Trump’s Big Bash
- The Atlantic: Remember The Pandemic?
- Daily Beast: In Trump’s Republican Convention Reality Show, 179,000 Dead Americans Barely Rate a Cameo