Typical Behaviors.
As his lawsuits continue to fail, Trump and his right-wing media mouthpieces will eventually lower the volume — without ever turning off — the narrative that Democrats “stole” the election from him.
Instead, he will begin to whinge about how Pfizer’s announcement today, that their COVID vaccine shows a promising, 90-percent effectiveness, came too late to save his presidency. He will suggest that Pfizer did this to him on purpose, in some kind of mirrored mockery of the James Comey re-opened investigation announcement in 2016, because Big Pharma was just as biased against him as Big Tech, and none of them can be trusted. He will tell his followers that the unethical business practice of not giving him credit for this vaccine before the election deserves to be punished with boycotts and stock sales. If this vaccine turns out not to be the answer after all, which it absolutely might not, he will crow about how correct he is without a word of sympathy for how many thousands more have been infected, how many thousands more have died.
He will retweet a series of Laura Ingraham statements about how any vaccine is being oversold and that the pandemic was about to dissipate on its own regardless. He will retweet a series of Alex Jones statements that this vaccine, like other vaccines, will give your children autism and probably give you cancer. He will occasionally shout HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE! as if to brand it as his own Trump-endorsed competitor.
His most bereft and petulant faithful will absorb the new onslaught of misinformation much as they absorbed all of the misinformation he gave them before. They will refuse the vaccine the same way they refused the masks and social distancing, and as their neighbors fall ill and die around them they will dismiss them as having been weak and unfit to survive. Those who live in states governed by Trumpist Republicans will find this behavior not only condoned but celebrated as an expression of freedom, and as the virus continues to consume them they will point angrily at Joe Biden for his failure to snap his fingers and eliminate it with his Marxist ideals, while feverishly sharing across social media a fresh round of racist memes about Kamala Harris.
I have imagined an absurd parallel universe in which, during the Nazi blitz bombing of London, a significant segment of the populace defiantly turned all their lights on and gathered in central squares holding up banners that read DROP BOMBS HERE WE DARE YOU in German. They complained incessantly that the air raid sirens kept interrupting their radio dramas and pressured Parliament to turn them off. They were perplexed when Hitler’s forces overran their shores but assumed that it must have been something Churchill did wrong.
I will not dehumanize my political opponents. I cannot, for they have demonstrated exactly how human they are, how fallible, how fragile, how trapped in destructive patterns and cycles.
We may speak again when they have returned to their senses, but I will not pretend that their opinions and input are either welcome or valuable right now.
Creative Control 