Member-only story

Three Reasons Why COVID-19 May Help Trump Get Re-elected

Brett Pelham
6 min readApr 10, 2020

--

Image Courtesy of Element5 Digital at Pexels

Spoilers: Trump now has an excuse for all the messes he’s made, and having death in the back of the mind makes people politically conservative. You already knew the third reason.

In case you just awakened from a lengthy coma, the American COVD-19 pandemic is growing exponentially worse. That’s right. This microscopic virus — about 1/8 the width of a typical bacteria — has defied Donald Trump’s rosy predictions and killed thousands of Americans. In fact, epidemiological science tells us that the number of Americans dying of this disease is far greater than the official COVID-19 death tolls. See Rhea Moutafis’s story for the details. It’s only going to get worse.

If you are politically progressive, you might think that one bit of good news in the coronavirus disaster might be Trump’s political undoing in November. This virus has put Trump’s perfect storm of arrogance, ignorance, and indifference on full display for weeks. As Lee Fang reports, most world leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by doing everything in their power to stop the spread of the virus in its tracks. Many world leaders also stockpiled life-saving medical equipment — in case measures like testing and social distancing fell short. Trump’s first response to COVID-19 was to deny that the pandemic would affect Americans at all. As late as March 17, Trump…

--

--

Brett Pelham
Brett Pelham

Written by Brett Pelham

Brett is a social psychologist at Montgomery College, MD. Brett studies health, gender, culture, religion, identity, and stereotypes.

No responses yet