Wisconsin History October 2020
A speculative look back on this time from the not-too-distant future.
Note that as of this writing, no one has traced where President Trump’s Covid-19 infection began. Do not let anyone publish this as news, it is certainly plausibly true given behavior of certain people, but it is not yet known.
Update(October 3, 10:49 EDT): Since this was written we have learned that Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson(R) tested positive for Covid-19. Again what follows is speculation based on what has happened and what is likely.
History of Now (October 2020 from the perspective of time):
Wisconsin’s Republican legislators including Robin Vos, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (who was running for Congressman Sensenbrenner’s seat) along with allies in the state supreme court blocked all Covid-19 health policies. These actions made Wisconsin one of the worst places in the world for Covid-19 infections.
While it’s impossible to know why they and so many other Republicans chose a pro-Covid-19 strategy, they seem to have fallen for disinformation by foreign adversaries which was spread by FoxNews, Q-Anon and the president himself that the disease was “a hoax”, “just like the flu”, “not as bad as the cure” or that uncontrolled “herd immunity” (aka genocide) was a sensible strategy for a disease with an infection fatality rate above 5% for some categories and which killed more than 200,000 times as many Americans as Ebola did.
DNA and contact tracing showed that one of President Trump’s staffers caught Covid-19 at a September 17th rally in Marathon, WI, passed it along to others including Hope Hicks and ultimately Donald and Melania Trump, who tested positive in the early hours of October 2nd.
Sadly, president Trump’s rally also helped the already exponentially spreading disease go far beyond the point where testing and contact tracing could remotely keep up with its spread. Only after a landslide victory for Democrats did the Republicans understand the magnitude of their miscalculation extended beyond 200,000 deaths and the economic cost of so many lost and damaged lives. It also had a direct effect on their political future. The Republican party would lose power for a generation. Unbalanced, the Democratic party grew more extreme until in 2030 the Republican party was eventually rebuilt from an offshoot of what had been known as “Never Trumpers”, those Republicans who held to the core values of decency, personal responsibility and honor while watching the rest of their party turn into a personality cult that made McCarthyism look relatively harmless.
