Republicans’ war on science generally and the medical profession in particular erupted in early 2020—when COVID-19 arrived in the United States.
President Donald Trump first learned of the virus on January 3, 2020. Then he went golfing on January 4, 5, 18 and 19.
On January 19, the first Coronavirus case appeared in the United States.
Coronavirus
The catastrophe that followed was the inevitable result of a confluence between natural disaster and an evil and incompetent administration.
Upon taking office in 2017, Trump gutted the permanent epidemic monitoring and command groups set up inside the White House: The National Security Council (NSC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In 2014, following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Barack Obama had created the White House Pandemic Office, run by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC).
Neither the NSC nor the DHS epidemic team was replaced.
The global health section of the CDC was decimated, and had to reduce the number of countries it was monitoring from 49 to 10.
Pathologically jealous of Obama, Trump—a lifelong racist—tried to destroy every vestige of Obama’s legacy as the first black President of the United States.
Chief among these actions: Making repeated efforts to undermine—and ultimately destroy—the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare.” Under this expanded, Federally-subsidized insurance program, 28 million Americans who previously could not afford medical care now began receiving it.
Nor was Trump the only Republican to mount such an all-out war on medical science. Virtually every Republican member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives backed his every lie about the dangers of COVID-19—and his assault on the medical establishment.
Americans were further endangered by Trump’s having imposed a hiring freeze in 2017 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a result, nearly 700 positions remained vacant there.
CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia
In 2018, two years before COVID struck, Trump pushed Congress to cut $15 billion from national health spending—and cutting the global disease-fighting budgets of the Centers for Disease Control, National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.
From January to early March, 2020, Trump and his allies within the Republican party and Fox News Network repeatedly assured Americans they had nothing to fear.
On February 28, Trump told a cheering crowd of supporters: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”
And acting as Trump’s propaganda arm was Fox News Network. 
As late as March 9, Trish Regan, host of Trish Regan Primetime on the Fox Business Network, attacked not the virus but those who did not share her fervent embrace of Donald Trump.
“We’ve reached a tipping point,” said Regan. “The hate is boiling. Many in the liberal media are using Coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the President, despite the virus originating halfway around the world.”
To make certain no one in the television audience missed the point, an electronically generated caption read: “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.”
Then, on March 14, Fox Business Network announced that Regan’s program would be on “hiatus” until further notice. The reason: Her comments had “triggered” an avalanche of criticism—from Coronavirus victims, their families and people angered at being blatantly lied to.
During the vital months of January and February, 2020, Republicans refused to challenge Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously—before it gained a foothold in the United States.
The reason: They had utterly tied themselves to him since the 2018 mid-term elections, where many moderate Republicans lost their seats.
Accompanying Republicans’ hostility toward medical science was their disdain for higher education.
An August 20, 2019 story in Forbes noted that a Pew Research survey, conducted in July, had found that “67% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents say higher education is having a positive effect on the country compared to only 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning participants.”
Furthermore, “The percentage of Republicans attributing a positive effect to higher education has steadily eroded from 58% (2010), 53% (2012), 54% (2015), 43% (2016), and 36% (2017). Among Republicans, 59% now say higher education has a negative effect on the U.S., compared to just 18% of Democrats.”
In March, 2020, an NBC News poll found that only 30% of Republicans said that they would actually listen to the advice of doctors to stay away from large, crowded areas to avoid Coronavirus.
These are the same people who got their version of reality from Right-wing sources like Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh
On his March 27, 2020 show, Limbaugh dismissed Coronavirus as “the common cold,” then added: “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”
This is the same Rush Limbaugh who said, in 2015: “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”
In February, 2020, Limbaugh—a longtime and heavy cigar smoker—announced that he had Stage Four lung cancer. He died on February 17, 2021.
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REPUBLICANS’ LATEST TARGET–DOCTORS: PART TWO (OF SEVEN)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on September 26, 2025 at 12:09 amRepublicans’ war on science generally and the medical profession in particular erupted in early 2020—when COVID-19 arrived in the United States.
President Donald Trump first learned of the virus on January 3, 2020. Then he went golfing on January 4, 5, 18 and 19.
On January 19, the first Coronavirus case appeared in the United States.
Coronavirus
The catastrophe that followed was the inevitable result of a confluence between natural disaster and an evil and incompetent administration.
Upon taking office in 2017, Trump gutted the permanent epidemic monitoring and command groups set up inside the White House: The National Security Council (NSC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In 2014, following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Barack Obama had created the White House Pandemic Office, run by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC).
Neither the NSC nor the DHS epidemic team was replaced.
The global health section of the CDC was decimated, and had to reduce the number of countries it was monitoring from 49 to 10.
Pathologically jealous of Obama, Trump—a lifelong racist—tried to destroy every vestige of Obama’s legacy as the first black President of the United States.
Chief among these actions: Making repeated efforts to undermine—and ultimately destroy—the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare.” Under this expanded, Federally-subsidized insurance program, 28 million Americans who previously could not afford medical care now began receiving it.
Nor was Trump the only Republican to mount such an all-out war on medical science. Virtually every Republican member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives backed his every lie about the dangers of COVID-19—and his assault on the medical establishment.
Americans were further endangered by Trump’s having imposed a hiring freeze in 2017 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a result, nearly 700 positions remained vacant there.
CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia
In 2018, two years before COVID struck, Trump pushed Congress to cut $15 billion from national health spending—and cutting the global disease-fighting budgets of the Centers for Disease Control, National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.
From January to early March, 2020, Trump and his allies within the Republican party and Fox News Network repeatedly assured Americans they had nothing to fear.
On February 28, Trump told a cheering crowd of supporters: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”
And acting as Trump’s propaganda arm was Fox News Network.
As late as March 9, Trish Regan, host of Trish Regan Primetime on the Fox Business Network, attacked not the virus but those who did not share her fervent embrace of Donald Trump.
“We’ve reached a tipping point,” said Regan. “The hate is boiling. Many in the liberal media are using Coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the President, despite the virus originating halfway around the world.”
To make certain no one in the television audience missed the point, an electronically generated caption read: “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.”
Then, on March 14, Fox Business Network announced that Regan’s program would be on “hiatus” until further notice. The reason: Her comments had “triggered” an avalanche of criticism—from Coronavirus victims, their families and people angered at being blatantly lied to.
During the vital months of January and February, 2020, Republicans refused to challenge Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously—before it gained a foothold in the United States.
The reason: They had utterly tied themselves to him since the 2018 mid-term elections, where many moderate Republicans lost their seats.
Accompanying Republicans’ hostility toward medical science was their disdain for higher education.
An August 20, 2019 story in Forbes noted that a Pew Research survey, conducted in July, had found that “67% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents say higher education is having a positive effect on the country compared to only 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning participants.”
Furthermore, “The percentage of Republicans attributing a positive effect to higher education has steadily eroded from 58% (2010), 53% (2012), 54% (2015), 43% (2016), and 36% (2017). Among Republicans, 59% now say higher education has a negative effect on the U.S., compared to just 18% of Democrats.”
In March, 2020, an NBC News poll found that only 30% of Republicans said that they would actually listen to the advice of doctors to stay away from large, crowded areas to avoid Coronavirus.
These are the same people who got their version of reality from Right-wing sources like Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh
On his March 27, 2020 show, Limbaugh dismissed Coronavirus as “the common cold,” then added: “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”
This is the same Rush Limbaugh who said, in 2015: “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”
In February, 2020, Limbaugh—a longtime and heavy cigar smoker—announced that he had Stage Four lung cancer. He died on February 17, 2021.
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