Denying Reality Is Finally Biting Republicans in the Ass

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Politico reporter Dan Diamond on President Trump’s listless attitude toward coronavirus testing:

My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.

Republicans have made a habit of denying reality over the past couple of decades. Climate change doesn’t exist. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The Great Recession was all because of reckless government loans to black people. Hillary Clinton was responsible for Benghazi.

Trump, of course has taken this to new heights. His inauguration had the biggest crowds in history. Five million people voted illegally in 2016. Russia had nothing to do with election meddling. Wind turbines cause cancer. China pays for his tariffs. Etc.

You can get away with this for a while, especially if you have Fox News and talk radio to back you up. And the longer you get away with it, the more convinced you become that it will always work, that everything in politics is marketing. So eventually you go too far: you try to deny the reality of an epidemic that even your most fervent supporters know is real. You double down by quoting obviously bogus testing numbers. But unlike your previous delusions, this one has real consequences: since testing and tracing are the backbone of infectious disease control, a lack of testing makes the epidemic even worse.

The United States was never likely to control the coronavirus as well as places like China and Singapore, which tolerate centralized control in a way we just don’t. At the same time, we’re also richer than these countries and could afford to spend far more money on things like free testing, income assistance so sick people would stay home, and subsidized medical care so people would seek help in the first place. But that would have made the coronavirus pandemic more visible, not less, and that’s something neither Trump nor his conservative allies were willing to abide. They’re so used to denying reality and getting away with it that they just couldn’t believe they were finally faced with a situation where it might not work.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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