Once states across the country began “reopening,” President Donald J. Trump scheduled his first 2020 re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.   

Then, to celebrate Independence Day, Trump scheduled yet another rally at Mount Rushmore, in Keystone, South Dakota, on July 3. 

A Trump rally

Although health experts expressed fears about large gatherings during the Coronavirus pandemic, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said people would “not be social distancing” during the celebration:

“In South Dakota, we’ve told people to focus on personal responsibility….Those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we won’t be social distancing.”  

According to a July 3 story by NBC News: “Eager to move forward and reopen the economy amid a recession and a looming presidential election, the White House is now pushing acceptance. ‘The virus is with us, but we need to live with it,’ is how one official said the administration plans to message on the pandemic.” 

On June 30, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before the U.S. Senate: “We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around.” 

Fauci warned that the infection surge across the South and West “puts the entire country at risk.” Much of that increase was being fueled by young adults testing positive for COVID-19. 

Anthony Fauci

Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

But Trump wanted children to return to school—and not through virtual classes at home.

And he wasn’t asking parents to send their children back to school after summer. He was ordering them to.

On July 8, 2020, he tweeted that he might withhold federal funding from schools that did not resume in-person classes that fall:

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!” 

And moments after making that threat, Trump said the guidelines of his own Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) for safely reopening schools were too expensive and impractical.

CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia

Among those guidelines:

• Schools should have markings on sidewalks and walls, that mark off six feet, and signs reminding students of protective measures.
• Masks should be worn by students and faculty, “as feasible,” and especially when keeping a distance isn’t possible.
• Sharing equipment, games and supplies should be avoided. If that’s not possible, they should be cleaned after each use.
• Playgrounds, cafeterias and dining halls should be shut. Students eat in their classrooms.
• Rooms should be well-ventilated.
• Schools should allow sick staff members to “stay home when they are sick, have been exposed, or caring for someone who is sick,” without being punished for staying home.

Many Americans asked: “How can President Trump demand that children return to school in the midst of a deadly plague? Especially when we don’t have adequate testing facilities—and, most importantly, a reliable vaccine?” 

There was an answer—and it was brutally ugly. 

On July 10, Paula Reid, White House correspondent for CBS News, provided the answer on the PBS program, Washington Week:

“And just speaking with White House advisers, I’m told the president knows that in order to get parents back to work you need to get kids back to class, and for the president a lot of this is about hoping that that would give an economic boost to the U.S. ahead of his reelection in November.” 

For which he could then claim credit. 

Just as the ancient Canaanites sacrificed their children to the god Moloch, so President Donald J. Trump expected his followers—and opponents—to risk their children’s lives for him.  

On August 10, CBS News reported:

“Nearly 100,000 children tested positive for the Coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics finds. Just over 97,000 children tested positive for the Coronavirus from July 16 to July 30, according to the association.”

By October, no vaccine had been invented. Nor had a national system of testing or contact tracing. 

Hospitals began overflowing with COVID cases. Doctors and nurses were overwhelmed with fatigue. Many of them had become COVID victims.

On October 20, more than 70,450 new coronavirus cases were reported in the United States in a day for the first time.

On October 25, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union”: “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.”

By October 28, more than 8.8 million Americans had been diagnosed with COVID, and at least 227,673 had died from it.

Meanwhile, Trump kept barnstorming the country in a relentless re-election effort. Although infected with COVID-19 in September, he refused to wear a mask in public. His rallies reflected this same contempt for public health, with most attendees refusing to wear masks and/or socially distance.

Critics dubbed these rallies: “Super-spreader events.”

During the 2016 Presidential race, after winning the Nevada primary, Donald Trump infamously celebrated his victory: “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”    

A February 24, 2016 USA Today story covering this event carried the headline: “Donald Trump loves the poorly educated—and they love him.”  

Donald Trump

As a result, countless numbers of them believed Trump’s lies that they had nothing to fear from COVID-19. And they continued to disobey recommendations from the country’s foremost experts on infection disease: Wear a mask when you go out in public, and stand at least six feet away from others.

Those whose advice they ignored included Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022.

Risking dismissal for speaking the hard medical truth about Coronavirus, Fauci was one of the few high-ranking government officials willing to contradict President Donald Trump’s ignorance- and lie-riddled statements. 

For example: Trump loudly touted hydroxychloroquine, used for treating malaria, as a miracle cure for the Coronavirus.

Yet Fauci dared to point out there had been no scientific trials of the drug for its effectiveness against COVID-19. Moreover, given the medical condition of some patients, it could even prove fatal.

Anthony Fauci

This put him squarely in the crosshairs of Trump’s chorus of Congressional cheerleaders. 

Among these: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). At a House subcommittee hearing about the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Greene screeched at Fauci: “You know what this committee should be doing?  We should be recommending you to be prosecuted.

“We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci!” 

On April 23, Trump offered his own suggestions for how COVID-19 might be prevented or cured. His proposed remedies: Ultraviolet light and disinfectant. 

Medical experts found Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks no laughing matter. Several doctors warned the public against injecting disinfectant or using UV light.   

“It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK,” said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics. “I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.”

Faced with public ridicule, Trump canceled a White House press briefing for the first time since Easter weekend. 

Instead, on April 25, he issued this tweet: “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had urged Americans to wear masks and keep at least six feet from their fellows. And most of the nation’s governors had issued stay-at-home orders that banned large gatherings—including visits to parks and beaches.

Yet Trump openly encouraged defiance of those orders.

On April 17, he issued a series of tweets to his supporters, encouraging them to defy the law:

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

“LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” 

“LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

All these states had Democratic governors. Their residents were being urged to stay indoors, wear masks when they ventured outside and keep a six-feet distance between themselves and others. 

These states had been targeted for Right-wing protests—featuring large numbers of men and women standing close together, with most of them not wearing masks. They claimed their “freedoms” were being infringed upon. 

Trump saw the stay-at-home orders as a two-fold threat to himself:

1. He couldn’t return to his hate-filled rallies until these were lifted; and
2. The stock market wouldn’t start soaring again so long as the country was “locked down.”

Without his Nuremberg-style rallies and a roaring stock market, Trump faced the danger of being a one-term President. 

Since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the Right had demanded that even women who were pregnant due to rape or incest carry the fetus to term. Yet now that Right-wingers were being asked to wear masks in public—to protect themselves and others from a deadly plague—they had suddenly discovered the mantra: “It’s my body!” 

Writer Steven Pressfield summed up the immorality of these protests: “Why are we asked to wear surgical or face masks in public, to practice social distancing and to observe self-quarantining? Because these practices are not for the individual alone but for the protection of the whole [community].”

Washington Governor Jay Inslee tweeted: “The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19.”

Trump scheduled his first 2020 re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20 at the BOK Center.. 

Coronavirus is more likely to be transmitted indoors than outdoors, when masses of people are packed together and loudly talking—or, worse, shouting. Especially when they’re not wearing masks.

Masks were available for those who wanted them, but Trump made it clear that his supporters shouldn’t wear masks, as a sign of support for him. Thus, his egomania literally put the lives of his most devoted followers at risk.

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.

There was a time when most Americans considered doctors heroes, as men (mostly) and women who dedicated their lives to improving—and often saving—the lives of others. 

Television played a major role in shaping this image—not through documentaries but medical dramas.

In 1961, two such drama emerged as popular entertainment: Dr. Kildare (1961 – 1966) and Ben Casey (1961 – 1966).

As played by then-unknown actor Richard Chamberlain, young intern Dr. James Kildare tries to learn his profession and deal with patients’ problems.

Early on, his superior, Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Raymond Massey), warns him: “Our work is to keep people alive. We can’t tell them how to live any more than how to die.” Kildare ignores the advice, and this forms the basis for stories, many with soap-opera themes.

Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey in “Dr. Kildare.”

In Cult TV: A Viewers Guide to the Shows America Can’t Live Without, John Javna describes his character:

“Dr. James Kildare, the first bona fide TV hero of the 60s, symbolized the best hopes of this new era. Young, intelligent, committed, the evil he fought was disease. His weapons were a good education and a willingness to care about people….

“Americans were turning to science for salvation, and doctors were often the new gods.”

Ben Casey, on the other hand, brought other weapons to the medical drama: As a no-nonsense neurosurgeon (Vince Edwards), he was intense, aggressive, and never failed to display a hairy chest. He refused to go “by-the-book” when he thought he was right, often risking dismissal to save his patients.

The portrayal of doctors as heroes was promoted heavily by the American Medical Association (AMA). The organization created a committee in 1955 to ensure that these shows presented a positive image of physicians and accurate medical information. 

Logo of the American Medical Association

Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare were soon followed by other popular medical dramas, including:  

• Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969-1976)
• M*A*S*H* (1972-1983)
• St. Elsewhere (1982-1988)
• ER (1994-2009)
• Grey’s Anatomy (2005-Present)
• House (2004-2012).

Medical dramas evolved over time, moving from shows that presented idealized images of doctors to shows that delve into the complex realities of modern medicine. Current trends include:

• Utilizing medical consultants and doctors to ensure realistic portrayals of procedures and medical terminology;
• Addressing current social and ethical issues within healthcare, such as pandemics, mental health, and patient advocacy;
• Exploring the emotional depth and personal struggles of healthcare professionals. 

But for millions of Right-wing Americans, the medical profession generally—and doctors in particular—have become hated and feared targets. 

Republicans’ animosity toward the healthcare system can be traced to 1964, with the passage of Medicare. This has proven the most durable achievement of Lyndon B. Johnson’s one-term Presidency.

And even while it was under debate, Republicans—such as Ronald Reagan at the start of his political career—furiously attacked it as the initial step toward socialism.

But it was President Barack Obama’s signature plan to give every American access to healthcare, the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—universally known as “Obamacare”—that pushed the Republican party into overdrive. 

The reform effort became a lightning rod for Right-wing groups like the Koch-brothers-financed Tea Party. In 2010, a massive Rightist turnout cost the Democrats the House of Representatives, and threatened Democratic control of the Senate.  

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Florentine statesman and father of modern politics, could have warned him of the consequences of this—through the pages of The Prince, his infamous treatise on the realities of politics:

…There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.  

For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.  

Niccolo Machiavelli

This proved exactly the case with the proposed Affordable Care Act.

Its supporters have always shown far less fervor than its opponents—with House Republicans voting more than 70 times to repeal, delay or revise the law.

Critics like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin lied outright that the Act would implement “death panels.” In an August 7, 2009, social media post, she wrote:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society.”

Right-wingers pundits and their followers quickly agreed. On his syndicated national radio program, Rush Limbaugh said of Palin, “She’s dead right.” 

Despite Republicans’ lies and threats, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010.

The rift between the Republican party and the medical establishment grew wider between 2020 and the present. This has been fueled by Republicans’ relentless opposition to abortion, birth control  and transgender healthcare.

And, increasingly, Republicans—and their voters—attacked the very foundations of science itself.