Conspiracy! Nancy Pelosi is brilliant!
When things screw up, presume human folly and incompetence.
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
Attributed to Yogi Berra
My post yesterday described two poorly-timed election screw-ups, the Iowa caucus election count in February, 2020, and the New York City election count two weeks ago. Echoing the advice of a former Oregon governor, I said Democrats need to demonstrate governing competence because it is the party representing the value of positive government.
Errors, especially in elections, feed conspiracy theories because someone loses. There is a motive for misbehavior: Political power. People look for opportunity and weapon, the means to carry it out the crime. Thus rise conspiracy theories. In February, 2020, Bernie Sanders' supporters floated conspiracies regarding the Iowa debacle, saying Hillary and Pete Buttigieg planned it. Bernie himself did not push that theory, so the conspiracy talk ended. Trump claims multiple conspiracies in the November, 2020 election. He persists, so they persist.
College classmate Eliot Nierman, a physician who used this blog to urge people to observe COVID protocols and to get vaccinated, sent me a lighthearted comment in response to yesterday's post. He suggested a potential explanation for COVID. It was all a plot.
I think you have missed one of the biggest conspiracies--the Democratic COVID vaccine conspiracy! Realizing that the vaccine protects against COVID hospitalization and death and that Republicans distrust a government vaccine program, even one initiated by Trump, savvy Democratic leaders have secretly fanned the flames of the Republican anti-vax movement. The success of this is readily demonstrated by the increasing COVID death rate in Republican areas. Why just block your opponents from voting when you can encourage them to kill themselves off? Nancy Pelosi is brilliant!
He is joking.
Only in hindsight is it obvious that Trump, the Trump-oriented media, and GOP leaders and voters would decide to treat vaccinations as something "Biden is pushing down our throats." Fox News has guest after guest talking about the threat of Democrats trying to "force" a risky, questionable vaccine, likening vaccine providers to Nazi brownshirts. Guests talk about the tyranny of vaccinations. Republican Congresspeople brag about refusing vaccination.
It could have gone the other way. "Operation Warp-speed" appears to be a tremendous success. It took courage by the Trump administration. The government paid vaccine companies to ramp up the manufacturing capacity for potential vaccines, removing what would normally be a long delay getting from approval to production. This could have blown up in their faces, with accusations of "money wasted on speculation" had vaccines not worked. Multiple effective vaccines came to market beginning in December--far faster than expected. They are a tremendous success.
In October, prior to the election when it might have tipped the election balance, it could have been Trump-the-Hero, bragging about leading a triumphant Manhattan Project on the verge of implementation. He could have been Eisenhower, just prior to D-Day.
After the November election loss, focusing on his enduring legacy, Trump might have retained his claim on the vaccine, and bragged about them, saying the success in stopping COVID belonged to him and him alone, not Biden, and urging Republicans to take the Trump Victory Vaccine. His position all along was that masks were unwelcome and shutdowns of the economy were too costly a way to stop COVID, that the cure was worse than the disease. Vaccines were the all-American way to deal with COVID, and Trump did it. It would have made sense. It would have been on-brand for Trump.
He went the other way. Once Biden secured the election Trump and the Trump-oriented media saw that Biden was pleased with the vaccine, they turned against it.
Eliot Nierman's joke about the Nancy Pelosi's supposed multi-step conspiracy is funny because it is so implausible to think that Nancy Pelosi or anyone could have predicted that Trump supporters would willingly refuse a vaccine created under Trump's watch, and then endure a condition where some 98% of people appearing in hospitals from COVID are people who are not vaccinated. Who would have guessed that Biden praising vaccines produced under Trump's watch would stimulate such widespread vaccine refusal among Trump supporters?
Nancy Pelosi didn't plan this. Nobody planned this. Americans stumbled into this state of affairs, against all logic, and indeed against all self-interest for Trump personally and for Republican partisans.
When in doubt about things that seem strange, the rule of thumb is to assume ignorance and incompetence. Human folly is a constant. Conspiracies take planning.
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