Joy Reid indulged in some particularly ugly scapegoating/scaremongering this morning. On her MSNBC show today, Reid twice depicted the children of Trump supporters as a coronavirus threat to "your kids."
Reid's notion was that Trump supporters, "God love 'em," are gullible, credulous rubes who blindly believe anything the president says. And since President Trump has supposedly claimed that coronavirus is a "hoax," his supporters will ignore their children's symptoms, and send them off to school where they can infect "your kids."
Here is the transcript:
MSNBC
AM Joy
3/7/20
10:04 am ETJOY REID: These people, who believe Trump over facts, over science, over anything, but him. His Twitter feed, that’s the truth to them. These are people you go to work with, that you ride the bus with, they're the parents of your children’s classmates.
. . .
Trump supporters, who God love 'em, they believe anything that Donald Trump says. So you may have people who are willfully refusing to check that sniffle because they think it’s not true.
ALI VELSHI: It’s a myth that's meant to undercut Donald Trump.
REID: And they still go to school with your kids.
President Trump has not called coronavirus a hoax. To the contrary, the President has mobilized a team to combat the spread of the disease. And the administration is offering daily briefings on its efforts.
What Trump has called a hoax is the attempt by Democrats to politicize the disease. Reid unwittingly gave a good example of the phenomenon with her scaremongering this morning.
Note: Reid played a clip of a woman wearing a Trump hat telling a reporter that she doesn't believe cororavirus exists, and distrusts anything Democrats say. But there is no indication that this is a widespread belief. Nor can President Trump be held responsible for any given person's misguided thinking. Would Democrats like to held liable for the wacky convictions of many of their supporters?
