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The pandemic persists, despite Trump’s sidestepping

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Videos stream across social networks of men and women who refuse to put on a face covering in food stores and other public places, throwing things in some cases and screaming about their “constitutional rights” and how “I woke up in a free country,” as if the Constitution guaranteed your right to be a superspreader of the COVID-19 virus.

Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr only added to the confusion in a Constitution Day appearance at Hillsdale College on Wednesday by comparing the pandemic lockdown to slavery. I wonder how he feels about “no smoking” signs.

But back to the vaccine question, Biden stepped up to offer his side of the “Whom Do You Trust” narrative by insisting simply that, if a vaccine is announced, we should trust the scientists, not the politicians.

And Trump volleyed back in a typically Trumpian way. He accused his Democratic opponent of being the political and cynical anti-science, anti-vaxxer in the argument.

We have seen this “You’re another” countercharge before, most memorably when Hillary Clinton described him as “Putin’s puppet.”

Lightning quick, he responded reflexively, “No, you’re the puppet!” making the event sound like a tongue-twister contest.

 

But this time, the pandemic brings an issue that hits Americans literally where they live. Trump has tried to shift the conversation to “law and order” issues, conjuring up images of suburbs supposedly under siege by urban marauders.

But the death toll continues to rise, and the pandemic keeps coming back — along with the president’s remarkably clumsy attempts to get ahead of it. Instead, he just seems to dance around the subject, even attempting this week to make it a “blue state” problem, even as the states with the highest positive rate, according to a New York Times database, tended to be states that Trump won in 2016.

Whom do you trust? As the clock ticks away to Election Day, fellow voters, consider that question as if our lives depend on it. They might.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)


(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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