The damage is still being done

I had a brief chat with a Trump-loving neighbor who is fond of crackpot right-wing websites tonight.

I told her and a group of other ladies what the president and his task force had said tonight, and how it had predicted that we could have as many as 240,000 deaths from this thing, and how even the president had finally agreed that such was the case.

"Well, that's not so bad," she said.

I looked at her for a moment, stunned. "That's almost a quarter of a million people!"

"Well," she replied. "That many people die from the flu every year."

At least she's gotten her talking points down, even if she doesn't use them very effectively. Between 12,000 and 61,000 Americans die of the flu in a typical year. In a really bad year, it could be 80,000.

Now, that's a lot of people and the COVID pandemic could be much worse. Between the social distancing and other measures the state governors put in place despite a lack of leadership from the White House, we will likely avoid the up to two million deaths the president's task force says we would have faced otherwise.  But the exchange was ominous.

Just because President Trump has finally faced reality doesn't mean that his supporters and all those on the crackpot right who have been insisting all along that this COVID-19 thing is overblown are going to climb on board, too. A great many of those tinfoil hatters are going to continue to insist that the projections are inflated even if, God forbid, they are accurate. And then they will insist that the numbers aren't true, that it's all a conspiracy.

And Mr. Trump, of course, will tell us with a perfectly straight face that he'd been warning about how bad this was going to be all along. And despite not only having heard him say the opposite right up to the last few days, and echoing his position themselves, a very large percentage of his supporters will believe him.