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Even with the shit hurricane that's swirled around Orange Man ever since he lazy-boy'd his way down the golden escalator, he'd have *still* gotten re-elected if he'd just admitted that COVID-19 was a real disease, that it was infecting and killing his own voters, and it was just political survivalism to do something about it - as easy as: "Folks, this is a bad disease. Just do what the doctors say, okay?" People innately trust doctors, and Republicans innately trust him. His base would have gone along with it. No question. But no. He couldn't do that. That would have meant admitting that he wasn't the boss of everything. That he couldn't yell an infectious disease into submission. That it was irrelevant which outsiders he wanted to blame. That he couldn't just will a cheap, quickie cure into existence. And once he barreled his way into the denialist fantasy cycle ("there is no disease" / "one day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear" / "it will all be over by Easter" / "it's all the patients' fault" / "they would have died anyway" / "it's a Chah-nese plot" / "it's a Democrat plot to make me look bad in an election year" / "the patient numbers are fake" / "we can improve the numbers by counting less" / "masks are for p00sies" / "here, drink this bleach and stick a UV flashlight up your butthole" / "use this horse paste, and if you die, it's not my fault"), and he got his base to take the bait, he couldn't back down or back out. Now, when he says "wear a mask and get vaxxed", his audiences boo him. Incumbents are typically re-elected, and incumbent Presidents are never prosecuted. Trump's path to re-election, and to his own political deliverance from the law, was made for him. Instead, he lost. And his loss in 2020, in the highest-turnout Presidential election ever, was his own doing - a national antibody reaction to a noxious host. If we are still enough of a nation of laws to imprison ex-President Trump for his crimes, then the unspoken crime for which he will bear the most guilt is his willful slaughter of the greater part of a million Americans, his solipsistic belief that a once-in-a-century virus was a mere political obstacle that could be obliterated, like all the others, in a torrent of lies.
