Donald Trump Rallies Are Like Story Time — A Horror Story
Gather around, children. It’s Uncle Donald’s story time again.
In his first rally of the new year, former President Donald Trump didn’t offer much fresh material until he turned full demagogue over COVID-19 vaccinations and who was getting them — and who allegedly wasn’t.
Instead, he offered something that his base doesn’t really need, a fresh — and false — reason to resent people who aren’t white.
Backed by a huge crowd, speckled with the usual dozen or so Black people in “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts, Trump falsely complained about public health authorities, who supposedly are denying the COVID-19 vaccine to white people because of their race.
Actually he didn’t blame “public health authorities.” He blamed “the left.”
“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating … white people to determine who lives and who dies,” he said. “If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.”
Wrong, say the various fact-checkers whom Trump manages to keep quite busy.
First, white people are not being excluded from vaccines, health officials say, and besides there is a plentiful supply anyway.
Nor is there any evidence of white people sent to the “back of the line” for COVID-19 treatment as a matter of public health policy.
Trump appears to have twisted the facts in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece about New York state’s new treatment guidelines, not for vaccinations but for the dispensing of potentially lifesaving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals such as Paxlovid, which, unlike vaccinations, actually have been in limited supply.
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