9/16/20: Did Trump just declare war on blue states?

Here’s another stupid thing Trump just said and, typical for him, his words contain troubling meta-meanings.

According to Axios, “President Trump said in a press conference Wednesday that the U.S. coronavirus death toll ‘is very low … if you take the blue states out…’”.

Let’s think about that. Once upon a time, American Presidents thought of themselves as President of all the States. George Washington fought to create a union. Thomas Jefferson governed to strengthen the union. Abraham Lincoln sought to preserve the union, Wilson and FDR to protect and defend it. Even Ronald Reagan saw his job as representing the country, which is to say the 50 states and U.S. territories.

Kiss all that goodbye. Trump just “took the blue states out,” not just from the coronavirus death count, but from the country he purports to lead. Blue state deaths are not of Americans, but of Democrats, of sinister, anti-American radicals—people he doesn’t like or care about. “If you take the blue states out…”.

Look, to “take something out” also means “to kill, destroy or disable it,” as in “the mob boss ordered his goons to take the witness out.” At this very moment, insane far right paramilitry groups, such as the so-called “proud boys,” are arming themselves as fast as they can, holding paintball drills, planning, planning, planning for their violent activities pre- and post-election. Like dogs, they keep their senses attuned to signals from their fuehrer, Trump. And he just told them, “If you take the blue states out…”

Trump didn’t complete the sentence. He didn’t have to. If you’re a rightwing paramilitary white nationalist, you know the rest of it. “If you take the blue states out, I’ll be very grateful. You’ll help me save America—our America—from them: the foreigners and terrorists, from ANTIFA and the fags who are coming after your children, from the meddling social scientists who want to destroy your way of life, from the atheists who would burn your Bibles, from the Blacks who want to invade your suburban neighborhoods and build slums, from the Mexican hoards who are rapists and criminals, from—” well, from whoever is the enemy-du-jour in Trump World.

What can one even say about the callousness of Trump’s words? “If you take the blue states out…’”. Besides, Trump’s statement is objectively false—surprise, surprise! As Axios points out, “The big picture: New York (D), New Jersey (D), Texas (R), California (D) and Florida (R) have to date reported the highest number of deaths from the virus in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University. These are the states with the largest populations in the country. (And) red states and battlegrounds, such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Arizona and Michigan were also in the top ten (states with the worst COVID cases), USA Today notes.”

“If you take the blue states out…” As usual, Trump can’t even get his propaganda straight, unless he’s pre-conceding election results that turn Texas and Florida blue, not to mention Louisiana, Mississippi, Arizona and Michigan.

Maybe Trump’s onto something! Could any of those states turn blue? Here are the latest poll results, courtesy of FiveThirtyEight:

Arizona: Biden 50%, Trump 44%

Florida: Biden 43%, Trump 42%

Michigan: Biden 53%, Trump 44%

Texas: Biden 46%, Trump 46%

Mississippi: Trump 53%, Biden 43%

Well, there’s never been any hope for Mississippi, a state burdened by some of the worst rates in America of disease, poverty, adultery, births-out-of-wedlock, opioid use, and school dropouts. (Maybe Democrats will start saying, “If you take Mississippi out of the country, our national health and wellbeing rates will rise dramatically.”) For Trump to be so utterly, damnably wrong about blue states and COVID isn’t surprising: he’s damnably wrong about most things. For his base to accept such preposterous ignorance also isn’t surprising: they’ve accepted his crap from day one and aren’t about to change. What is surprising, though, is that he manages to get away with these monstrous lies, not so much because a craven media lets him—although they do—but because today’s monstrous lie is smothered by tomorrow’s even more monstrous lie which is obliterated by the next day’s monstrous lie, until, according to The Washington Post’s latest count, Trump has told more than 20,000 lies, a “tsunami of untruth” unprecedented in American history.

In a sense—a very real sense—Trump has declared war on blue states with his fake coronavirus allegation. Of course, he’s been declaring such a war in stages for years. We’re not going to have a date like Dec. 8, 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt formally declared war on Japan. Trump’s war on blue states is more like the Vietnam War: it accretes slowly, incident by incident, over time, until one day, the shooting is for real, even though Congress never used its powers under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution “to declare war.” History does not record “The Vietnam War began on such-and-such a date.” Nor will history record that “Trump’s war on blue states began on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020.” But it did. That’s the date Trump admitted (although he didn’t really intend to) that blue states are his enemy, and he’s prepared to “take them out” using any means necessary.