I know most readers have better things to do than spend time in America's right-wing crazy media land; I do too. I don't have TV any longer, so can't watch Fox (thankfully), and I can't imagine actually listening to deranged morons like Rush Limbaugh. But I do follow the on-line "Drudge Report," which has had an outsized influence on the right-wing media for two decades, basically setting the terms of discussion and making issues salient (think of it as a much, much bigger version of this blog but affecting more than academic philosophy!).
Run by Matt Drudge, an eccentric recluse and high school dropout with a stable-full of standard know-nothing prejudices, Drudge championed Trump in 2016, and for most of his tenure. But starting earlier this year, Drudge began to sour on Trump--and this coincided with the arrival of the pandemic to America's shores. My hypothesis is that Drudge is, in addition to his other eccentricities, a hypochondriac for whom the arrival of a genuine health threat, together with Trump's obviously incompetent response to it, was the straw that broke the camel's back. This is good news for civilization, of course, since Drudge's steadily negative coverage of Trump will influence a segment of the benighted populace that neither Democrats nor the Lincoln Project will reach. At a minimum, it should dampen their enthusiasm for turning out to vote for the monster-child in November.
UPDATE: Reader Henry Cohen writes:
In "Matt Drudge's turn against Trump," you refer to Trump's "incompetent response" to the pandemic. Like "bungling," which I often see used to describe it, it seems inadequate because it is consistent with a good-faith response, which Trump's has never been. He covered up warnings he'd been given, seized PPE from blue states that needed it, urged people not to wear masks or practice social distancing, urged cities and businesses to reopen prematurely, and pushed the potentially fatal remedies of the malaria drug and drinking disinfectant. A sane person would know that all these acts would result in large numbers of deaths. Admittedly, Trump is not sane, but that doesn't mean that he was trying to prevent OR minimize the pandemic but botched it because of his incompetence.
Rather than "incompetent response," I'd say that his response has been to commit 156,000 reckless homicides, or words to that effect.
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