Gaslighting is telling people that Covid isn’t a threat even though you know it’s not and you deliberately cooked the books to sell that delusion. Gaslighting is telling people you’re supposed to be responsible for governing that a vaccine that was never shown to stop the spread of a disease does, in fact, do that. Gaslighting is telling people that you must personally assess your own risk to a collective, public health crisis with the paltry tools that have been provided, then strip away or sabotage every last one of those tools so they cannot provide even a sliver of usefulness to anyone but the most bad faith interpretations.
All of these things are things both Amerikkka’s fascist wing and liberal, fascist-enabling wing have done and are currently doing (if they’re not outright ignoring it). To anyone with a pulse, there is no meaningful difference, and indeed they are so often intertwined.
Also, Marx was based.
Nothing disingenuous about it. Biden’s entire shtick was about following the science and doing the right thing (and being able to win over Republicans on controversial issues, that was the whole reason why we couldn’t gamble on anyone else) and he almost immediately tossed that out and adopted his predecessor’s “ignore it and it’ll go away” attitude. The White House pushed a vax-only approach which was proven to be ineffective before he even took office and then went out to brunch. For fuck’s sake, the man had to be publicly shamed into sending out masks and tests during a surge his feckless ass engendered because he pretended the pandemic was over in April 2021, when less than half of the adult population got their first round of shots.
I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt considering how poorly even the states that did give half a fuck in 2020 were managing and there is no doubt that it is a complex job, but once you start mimicking the guy you lambasted a few months prior for exacerbating the problem (not to mention spending the next year and a half prematurely stripping people of basic protections and the ability to reliably test and track within their own communities), you lost what little sympathy I could muster. For all intents and purposes, he owns all of the deaths from the day he stepped into the Oval Office. Worst of all, it’s both set the tone for how future leaders will be able to respond to crises, as well as reinforced the notion that our government is ontologically incapable of providing anything for its own citizens besides more terror.
As for which one of these shitstains is more apathetic: Trump gave me more cash (and it wasn’t means-tested), suspended my student loan payments, afforded me a rent moratorium if I had lost my job, and didn’t end federal mask or testing mandates for traveling because his buddy at Delta Airlines whined to him in a letter. Nothing spells “apathy” like going on 60 Minutes amid yet another surge in cases and saying “the pandemic is over,” or cutting off extended UI prematurely, or instructing cities to use their unused Covid funds to give to the pigs.
If Trump was smart enough to even utter the words “wear a mask” at any point in 2020 he would still be in office today. This is not an endorsement, for the record. I don’t doubt Trump would have done all of this and worse eventually as well, but the difference is that his callousness was consistently met with resistance and vocal opposition. For Joe Biden, whose callousness is every bit as harmful, there is no effective resistance, no organized campaign to combat the president’s anti-science blathering. We all have to get over it and live even more precariously in this shithole lest we be accused of helping Trump win again.