Whiny little grifters.

Erick Erickson, a leading voice of the American conservative movement, lashed out last week at the protesters who have pushed states across the country to relax pandemic-induced restrictions. "When," he wrote, "did the conservative movement get filled with a bunch of whiny little bitches? Muh freedom! They are making me wear a mask. OMG I can’t go get drunk at my favorite restaurant. Give me liberty or give me coronavirus. Good grief. You people are grifty whiners."

It was full-on assault on Trump supporters, the kind barely seen from within the ranks of the GOP since those voters stormed the barricades and seized control of the Republican Party four years ago. Early on in the primary season, two-thirds of Republicans told pollsters they could never vote for Donald Trump. But they came around, perhaps telling themselves at the time, 'what could go wrong, what's the worst that could happen?' In the intervening years, there have been periodic moments of buyers remorse – such as in the wake of Charlottesville, and the President's stammering unwillingness to condemn Nazis marching in an American city – but by and large, Republicans who ultimately voted Trump into office have stuck by the President.

Erickson, on the other hand, was a Never Trumper from the outset and he stuck to his guns. The former editor-in-chief of the RedState blog and a prominent talk show host, he publicly branded Trump a racist and a fascist, and declared that he would "not vote for Donald Trump. Ever." 

It did not last. Apparently, everyone has their price, and the devout evangelical concluded last year that tax cuts, Neil Gorsuch, and moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem were a fair trade for giving the racist fascist a second term. "We cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump" Erickson concluded – a view that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz might disagree with – as he endorsed Trump's reelection bid.

In his Twitter tirade – posted on May 8th and subsequently deleted – Erickson went on to lambast those parading around state capitols bearing semiautomatic weapons and packing into restaurants and bars in defiance of public health edicts in language that seems particularly salty for one of the nation's leading evangelical intellectuals. "There's a global pandemic and the same president whose leg you like to hump has wanted you to shelter in place. Is your Cheeto Jesus wrong now? Rebel against him. Except you can’t. Because you’ve traded your values for a cult of personality and suddenly realizing the price you have to pay for a cult of personality where you’ve traded ideas for grift and Twitter bitching."

Erickson may badly want to believe that it was the President's supporters who were acting out, but actually it was Erickson himself. Far from wanting his supporters to shelter in place, Trump has consistently conveyed his disdain for state shelter-in-place orders, wearing masks and the like. Everyone – except, it appears, for Erick Erickson – understands full well that those pushing governors to end those orders, defying public health edicts, and flocking to restaurants and bars, are doing so with the President's full-throated support.

Erickson's rant was a triumph of self-delusion. The simple truth is that Donald Trump has not changed one iota from the man Erickson decried as a racist and a fascist four years ago. Nor have his followers. Those grifty whiners rallying against stay-at-home orders across the country are the foot soldiers of the Trump revolution. They are the ones who carried his banner from the Birther days. They channelled each other's rage and resentments as Trump bent the GOP to his will in 2016. Indeed, complaining about the unfairness of the world – the subject of literally hundreds of Trump's tweets over the past few years – is perhaps the core emotional bond that binds President and his followers. Everything is someone else's fault.

If Erickson likes the gifts that President Trump has bestowed upon him, it is to those whiny little bitches that he should show some gratitude. Perhaps the source of Erickson's bitterness is the realization that he has become one of them. If anyone traded their values for a cult of personality, it is he.

Racism and fascism aside, Erickson's central complaint from the beginning was that Donald Trump was never really a conservative, that it was just a persona that he adopted for political purposes. And, of course, he was right. The raucous applause for the President at his annual appearances before the Conservative Political Action Conference never reflected Trump's standing as a movement conservative, but rather the radical transformation in the meaning of the word "conservative" in our political lexicon. Once defined by a belief in small government, private enterprise, free markets, traditional values, and personal responsibility, it has come to be defined by Donald Trump's nativist isolationism, and whatever else he might utter or tweet in the moment.

With nearly 100,000 dead, only the most devoted of Trump's followers can fail to have misgivings about his capacity to lead. Those Republicans who fell in line – and who have relished the tax cuts and other goodies that came their way – have now gotten the answer to the question, 'what could go wrong, what's the worst that could happen?' He did not stumble into a war with North Korea or Iran, as many of them feared. They looked aside in the wake of Charlottesville, and regret each new moment when a Black man is killed jogging down the street, fearing how he might respond. They wish the man would stop tweeting. All that, as Erickson suggested, was ok; it was the price to be paid to get what they got. But not this. There is still no coordinated federal response to the pandemic in sight, there is still no leadership and there is no hope of moral uplift in our time of greatest urgency.

"I am proud to be a conservative..." Erickson concludes, "and deeply, deeply embarrassed by the whiny little shits bitching about the end of freedom as we know it... Can I get back a conservative movement that actually cares about ideas and is willing to litigate for freedom instead of crying on Twitter?" The answer, Erick, is no. That conservatism is dead. Going forward, it will be all Trump all the time, until this era passes. Those who believe otherwise are deluding themselves. Those whiny little shits? They are the conservative movement.

If Erick Erickson is beginning to have second thoughts about supporting the President, he should hold onto his hats, because it is only going to get worse. A lot worse. Faced with polling data that shows his campaign losing ground in key states, we have yet to see the worst of Donald Trump. In the face of a rising body count and data suggesting that older voters are abandoning him, Trump is already escalating his rhetoric in an effort to whip his base into a frenzy.

Forget outreach to the center, or perhaps setting political considerations to the side until after Labor Day to lead the nation through troubled waters, this is going to be a base election. And it starts now. This weekend, the Trump boys gave us a glimpse of what lies in store as the President seeks to have the election be about anything other than his own performance. Donald Jr. – the President's lead surrogate to his hardened supporters on the right – launched an attack on Twitter and Instagram accusing Joe Biden of being a pedophile. Eric – seen by some as the kinder, gentler Trump – followed with an appeal to those on the conspiracy fringe, reiterating the claim that the entire pandemic was a Democrat ploy to kill his father's reelection bid. Pedophilia and conspiracy theories? We have seen this movie before.

Like many other Republicans, Erickson has a decision to make; a decision about the future of the nation, and about his own integrity. As Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director, described it the other day, each of those Republicans has to come to grips with the compromises they have made to rationalize their support of this President. “You either come out on the other side with your dignity and your personal story intact, or you are reformed as Trump compost and you are fertilizer under his shoe. You have to make a decision, and it happens to everyone."

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Secure in his bunker, Trump calls his legions to arms.

Donald Trump has decided to move on. It has been barely eight weeks since the weekend in the middle of March when he decided to put his coronavirus-denial days behind him and embrace the role of a Wartime President, but apparently he has had enough.

Wars and pandemics are the kind of events that traditionally galvanize nations behind their leaders. The image of George W. Bush speaking into a megaphone from the ashes of the World Trade Center sent his approval ratings into the stratosphere, and, for a brief moment, it seemed like the pandemic might do the same for Donald Trump. It's not so hard, really: Tell the truth, acknowledge people's fears and anxiety, paint a vision of a path forward. I recall a friend of mine commenting after the President's first day leading the task force briefings that he actually seemed prepared to become the leader the moment demanded.

It was never destined to last. By the end of that first week, Trump had reverted to form, and before long those daily briefings became just one more platform for his war with the press, assailing his enemies, and trumpeting his own virtues. 100 Americans had died as of March 16th, when the President pushed Mike Pence to the side and took over the leadership of the Pandemic Tax Force. By the time he decided to move on from his Wartime President stint, 80,000 had died.

The facts surrounding the tens of thousands of people who needlessly died is hard to spin. Think what you will about the culpability of China's government for the global pandemic and economic depression looming in its wake, the magnitude of death and destruction experienced here at home lies squarely in Donald Trump's lap. While hosts on Fox News and Trump's army across the right-wing blogosphere continue to call out China's six-day delay in mid-January in informing the Chinese public and the world about the risks presented by the virus, the impact of that delay pales in comparison with the President's abject failure in the ensuing months to uphold his oath to preserve and protect the American people.

Faced with a crisis beyond most people's imagination, Trump has proven to be incapable of charting a path forward. Making tough choices and living with the consequences is an essential challenge of presidential leadership that is anathema to him. Charting a national strategy as the pandemic grew in force was inherently replete with risks – to choose a plan implied accountability for outcomes – and did not fit with his need to continually calibrate how any series of actions would play with his base, and the overarching imperative of enhancing his standing in political polls. Instead, time and again, he has found himself behind the curve, caught having to defend his past actions, or lies or digressions seemingly invented in the moment.

The President's refusal to orchestrate anything approaching a focused national response to the pandemic is often compared to the successful strategy employed in South Korea – a point emphasized by Mitt Romney at the Senate hearing this week in his harsh rebuke of Trump's testing tsar Admiral Brett Giroir. The two democratic nations identified their first cases of Covid-19 a day apart in mid-January. South Korea moved quickly to implement the internationally accepted public health protocols at the time to contain the spread of the virus, including testing, temperature taking, contact tracing, and social distancing. In contrast, while there was widespread discussion of these steps within the Trump administration – by early March, FEMA was prepared to implement a 21-day national shutdown – the implementation of a national pandemic strategy was suppressed by a president who preferred to jawbone the stock markets, while hoping that the virus would simply go away.

As illustrated in the graph here, the difference in the outcomes between South Korea and the United States from the point in January when the first cases of Covid-19 were identified has been staggering. As of today, we have suffered 85,000 deaths in a population of 331 million, while South Korea – a far more densely populated nation with 51 million people in an area the size of Indiana – has had only 260 deaths. South Korea might be a fair comparison or it might not be – some have argued that Asian countries had an advantage, as a series of similar flu epidemics over recent years have sensitized their populations and politicians to the importance of taking pandemic threats seriously – but suffice it to say that no other nation has suffered the scale of unnecessary deaths as ours.

The simple truth is that South Korea is more the rule than the exception in terms of strategy and results. In the months since January, when the world was informed about the threat posed by the coronavirus, small nations and large took the threat seriously. From the central African nation of Rwanda – just two decades removed from one of the most violent civil wars in recent history, yet able  nonetheless to implement a cohesive national strategy – to advanced industrial nations like Germany, Canada, South Korea (and, yes, Sweden) nations took that information and acted on it. There was no mystery about the tactics that countries deployed – testing, monitoring temperatures, contact tracing and social distancing – the defining issue was leadership.

Those who developed a national strategy and acted early have fared comparatively well. Those who tried to ignore the threat or kicked the can down the road for political reasons did worse. If the United States had taken action early and achieved South Korea's mortality rate per million population, 1,700 Americans would have died and 81,000 deaths would have been avoided. If one believes Germany or Canada are more reasonable comparisons, 40,000 to 50,000 deaths would have been avoided.

At the Senate hearings this week, Rand Paul pointed to Sweden as a model of how the United States could have responded, or could opt to respond going forward. Unlike most other countries in Europe, Sweden chose to adopt what has been widely viewed as a laissez faire approach to the virus. Paul's questions reflect a degree of misunderstanding of how Sweden responded. As noted above, Sweden did respond early to the virus threat by instituting widespread testing and contact tracing early on. The distinction was that in lieu of mandates and shutdowns, Swedish epidemiologists and government officials asked the public to voluntarily practice social distancing, work at home when possible, and curtail leisure travel, with the objective of instituting practices that would be sustainable over the long-term. It was not an approach built around a libertarianism ethos, as Senator Paul and others have suggested, but one built on the belief that Swede's would follow those directions and seek to do the right thing.

In terms of outcomes, the number of deaths per million in Sweden would project to an additional 30,000 deaths in the United States. The larger point is that the Swedish approach reflected a deliberate national strategy, in contrast to the United States where the President has not only opted out of having a national strategy, but reveled in his ability to instigate protests against the strategies that individual states employed in the absence of federal action or leadership. There is no small irony in hearing Rand Paul and other conservatives lash out at state-level action. One might imagine that proponents of federalism and states-rights would celebrate states taking the lead in confronting the pandemic, rather than cheering the President on as he has actively sought to undermine the actions of democratically elected state governments.

Listening to Boris Johnson this weekend thoughtfully laying out a systemic approach to reopening the British economy – along with the now well-worn steps of testing and contact tracing – was a reminder of the leadership that we do not have. Johnson may have modeled his political rise after that of Donald Trump, but when it came time to bring his nation together as it struggles to overcome the pandemic and rebuild the British economy, he realized that it was time to part ways from his erstwhile mentor. Even as Donald Trump grudgingly acquiesced to the recommendations of his public health advisors to encourage social distancing, wearing masks and the like, he has made every effort to signal to his base his defiance of those recommendations. At his varied White House events since the global outbreak emerged, he has resisted those protocols at every turn. And his base has received the message, as conforming to those practices – to wear or not to wear a face mask – has become a statement of whether one stood with the President, or with all those who have been working so assiduously to bring him down.

This week, however, gave the lie to Trump's pretenses. As the coronavirus found its way into the West Wing, the famously germaphobic President was quick to insist on adherence to those practices to protect himself that he has so assiduously worked to impede across the country. In the White House today, every person is tested for Covid-19 at least daily; everyone has their temperature taken regularly; and contact tracing of those infected has become the norm. In his public appearances, the President continues to project the pretense of casual indifference to the virus – it is just the flu, after all – while behind the scenes he demands adherence to all of those public health practices that might have saved tens of thousands of lives, and mitigated the depth and duration of the economic downturn that is now upon us.

"We have to be warriors,” Donald Trump said the other day as he called on Americans to be willing to take risks to restore the economy in the coming months. Those words marked the depth of his cynicism and hypocrisy. It remains a mystery how his followers fail to understand this simple truth: this President is no warrior and the only interest he has in mind is his own. When he calls on them to take risks, there is no "we" about it. As he calls on his them to defy the most basic recommendations of his own experts, to eschew the practices now protecting him in the White House, and to put their lives and those of their families at risk, he will not be manning the ramparts beside them. He will be snug at home, protecting himself in an increasingly tight cocoon of those protective measures he has for so long deemed unnecessary for the rest of us.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.