(no subject)

[timelets]

I think the probability that at some point Trump will say that he is personally responsible for defeating the coronavirus is 100%.

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[tijd]

Some of the Republican senators running for re-election in 2020 may owe their previous election in part to the Ebola scare, which Trump single-handedly started before the 2014 midterms.

The air ambulance crossed the Atlantic for the first time on August 1, 2014, to pick up Brantly. At that same moment, somewhere in a skyscraper in New York City, Donald Trump opened his Twitter app.
“Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S. Treat them, at the highest level, over there. THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS!” Trump tweeted first, at 8:22 a.m.
Thirteen hours later, as the air ambulance prepared to bring Brantly home, Trump added: “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!”
An analysis by the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy later found that Trump’s tweets represented a turning point, the moment when fear of the deadly virus began to infect the American public. <...>
Trump kept tweeting. In all, the self-admitted germaphobe tweeted about Ebola nearly a hundred times over the next three months. He was among the first to call for a travel ban between the three West African countries and the United States, a call later adopted by Republicans running in the fall midterms. He advocated against sending thousands of American troops, a decision public health officials in Liberia later said helped stem the tide of the outbreak.
And when a Liberian man fell ill days after arriving in Dallas to meet the son he had not seen in a decade, Trump warned: “IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE!” He later falsely accused the man, Thomas Eric Duncan, of having signed false papers. He advocated that Duncan be prosecuted, just days before Duncan died.
Brantly and Writebol walked out of the Emory hospital three weeks after arriving, cured of the virus but haunted by the physical and mental toll it had taken. Months later, visiting the Ebola response team at the White House, Brantly told the assembled staffers about his ordeal.
“I went to Liberia because I was called by God,” Brantly said. “I became deathly ill. I was alone, I couldn’t touch my children or my wife. I was going to die. And my government came to get me and saved my life.”
Around the room, the White House staffers wiped tears from their eyes.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/386616-how-ebola-entered-the-american-consciousness-a-trump-tweet

Of course, the Media was there to help spread the hysteria.

In early October, the GOP developed a plan to make the federal government's response to Ebola a central part of its midterm elections strategy. Television media played into Republicans' hands, helping to foment panic about the disease. Following the diagnosis of a handful of U.S. Ebola patients, the major broadcast networks ran nearly 1,000 segments about the virus in the four weeks leading up to the elections. Coverage of the disease plummeted in the two weeks following Election Day, with the same networks running fewer than 50 total segments.
https://www.mediamatters.org/msnbc/report-ebola-coverage-tv-news-plummeted-after-midterms

Thanks to the successful fear-mongering, Republicans took control of the Senate, Mitch McConnell became the majority leader and got a chance to control the nomination process for the Supreme Court, and Trump’s twitter account got its recognition as a political force.