So the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put out a report with detailed guidelines on how the states can re-open as safely as possible. The report was supposed to be published on May 1, but Trump shelved it. The stock market just loves when he does stuff like that. The hell with the lives of the non-rich. What matters is the welfare of the rich and Trump’s re-election. The rest of us can just die. He doesn’t care, and if anybody around him shows signs of caring, he’ll fire them.

Trump has told the CDC to shut up. He thinks Americans want him, not the truth. From the May 4 issue of the New Yorker, The Pandemic Protocol by Charles Duhigg: A former high-ranking CDC official said: “We could have saved so many more lives. We have the best public-health agency in the world, and we know how to persuade people to do what they need to do. Instead, we’re ignoring everything we’ve learned over the past century.”

Trump’s original idea was to let COVID-19 “wash over” the country, killing as many as it liked. He knew the super-rich would buy themselves isolation and safety, but business would continue to make them richer, ensuring his re-election. From the start of his 2016 campaign, too many credulous Americans have fallen for his con job, thinking he cared what became of them. Many still can’t admit they were fooled. He doesn’t even care about his most committed followers, urging them to be “warriors” in his battle against truth and science. They crowd in the streets unmasked and are bound to bring the deadly pandemic home with them.

Please don’t celebrate the inevitable sickness and death among Trump’s volunteers (or paid agitators). For many years, they have been lied to by corporate-controlled, right-wing media — Fox, Clear Channel, and Sinclair; by cynical, ignorant preachers; and by a showman who has mastered every con artist trick without the disadvantage of a conscience. They aren’t warriors. They are sheep being led to slaughter. Racist sheep, misogynist sheep, but sheep.