Can someone please tell me I am misreading these tweets? This is a screencap from the president’s Twitter feed right now. The bit about Virginia is obviously in response to gun control, but Michigan and Minnesota?
Maybe I’m missing something else that explains these remarks, but it really sounds like he’s chiming in with the dingbat protests in those states, and denigrating their governments’ shutdown orders. Is he honestly encouraging people to defy state shutdown orders here? Am I wrong? Maybe I’m wrong.
Just a few weeks ago we were asking in exasperation why the White House wasn’t leading the charge with a national shelter-in-place order. Now, he seems willing to do worse than nothing at all: now it seems he is even fomenting dissent against the state policies that are keeping people alive.
And this is alarmingly needless on the Trump scale of being an asshole. Normally he attacks things he views as opposition: he already trashes the governors, but it’s because those governors are making him look bad by needing help that he fails to provide. But here we simply have stay-at-home orders that are working for him, preventing six-figure death tolls, and for no reason other than dopey red-meat tribalism he decides to rail against them.
I swear to God this guy is siding with the virus.