Trump’s enablers have included the Republican Senators who were ready and willing to look the other way during his impeachment trial in the Senate, when all but one GOP Senator voted to acquit Trump of both charges against him. Those who voted in Trump’s favor include Maine’s Susan Collins, who claimed on February 4 that she thinks Trump “has learned from this case.” In a video that Collins’s Democratic general election opponent Sara Gideon released, which was re-posted by the anti-conservative group called The Lincoln Project, Collins’s dubious claims about Trump are compared with Trump’s subsequent reckless ignorance of the Coronavirus in the apparent name of salvaging his public image.
In a February 7 conversation with journalist Bob Woodward, Trump admitted the following about the Coronavirus:
‘And so, that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than… even your strenuous flus. This is more deadly… this is five percent [then-estimated fatality rate] versus one percent and less than one percent, you know? So this is deadly stuff.’
At a subsequent rally, Trump claimed that the virus might disappear by April, which it obviously did not do. There was no apparent evidence for his claim at the time, but he was willing to make it anyway in the apparent name of trying to maintain the public image of his administration.
Check out the Sara Gideon video below:
This video by @SaraGideon is extremely important.
Please watch and then share. pic.twitter.com/dw1HmRyOqp
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 12, 2020
Trump has consistently congratulated himself for a supposed job well done in responding to the Coronavirus, even as the death toll in the United States has continued to climb to staggering levels. These developments have unfolded after Collins suggested that Trump had learned his lesson during the impeachment — he’d obviously “learned” nothing, as the Gideon video clearly points out. Collins, however, has been unwilling to do much of anything to try and hold the president accountable.
Collins isn’t doing great heading into her general election match-up against Gideon. The Democratic candidate leads Collins by an average of 4.5 percent in polls, according to RealClearPolitics. Collins hasn’t led in a poll since July among those cataloged at FiveThirtyEight.
Check out Twitter’s response below:
