Medium: “Example: In 1988, he paid $408 million for the Plaza Hotel and spent millions making it gaudier. Seven years later, his creditors sold it for $325 million. And yet he styles himself a business genius.
Genius or no, he is suddenly doing something very smart: in interview after interview, he endorses vaccines and boosters. He’s even called political rivals who refuse to admit they’ve been boosted “gutless.”
Why?
My guess is that somebody has done the math for him.
The math that says: “Uh, sir? Your voters are dying in droves.”
…
Recent C.D.C. data cited by Kaiser Health News shows vaccine-resistance highest among whites. Earlier polls showed growing divisions along party and even religious lines (86 percent of Democrats vaccinated vs. 60 percent Republicans; 90 percent of atheists vs. 57 percent of white evangelicals). By September, the pattern was clear, according to David Leonhardt of The New York Times: Covid death rates were about three times higher in counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
Since the AP did its study, about 270,000 Americans have died of Covid. If, say, 95 percent of those dead were unvaccinated, that’s 257,000 unvaccinated Americans gone.
How many of them were Trump voters? It’s impossible to know, but the Delta wave pushed average daily deaths over 1,000 a day in late August and they’ve stayed there. Those battle lines were clear by September. So it’s a good bet that the vast majority of deaths of the last two waves have been.
As of this week, about 1,800 Americans a day are dying of Covid; the C.D.C. expects that number to rise above 2,600.
Virtually all are adults. If 95 percent were unvaccinated and we assume that 75 percent of those were Trump supporters, that’s 1,300 to 1,900 of his voters being subtracted from the rolls every single day.”