Donald Trump during reported conference call with campaign staff from his namesake hotel in Las Vegas: “People are tired of Covid. I have these huge rallies. People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots. Fauci is a nice guy [but] he’s been here for 500 years. Fauci is a disaster. If I’d listened to him, we would have had 500,000 deaths.”

Trump was throwing around the same “people have had enough” and “free the states” crap back in April-May-June, and this attitude is what led to much more infection and basically where we are right now. If people had hung tough last spring and early summer and behaved like the population of West Hollywood does as a rule, and if there hadn’t been so much anti-masker sentiment among the Karens and belligerent red-hats and if there hadn’t been so many super-spreader events like the recent motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota…if more people had worn masks, washed their hands and behaved like reasonable adults, the country would be in a less infected place right now.