Republican hopes for a comeback are collapsing

It’s a dandy.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/republican-hopes-for-a-comeback-are-collapsing/

Snip
Republicans believed the state of Texas would be the national model to prove Donald Trump and his supporters in right-wing media correct about the coronavirus. Trump and conservative pundits have continued to champion conspiracy theories painting the virus as being deliberately exaggerated by Democrats in order to power down the economy and sink the president’s re-election chances. They’ve said that it’s fine to lift the pandemic restrictions, even in places that haven’t met any of the criteria laid out by public health experts for safer economic reopening....

In early June, when the state went to “phase 3,” Abbott kept up the clap-happy talk, saying, “The people of Texas continue to prove that we can safely and responsibly open our state for business while containing COVID-19 and keeping our state safe.” He promised that officials “will continue to mitigate the spread of this virus, protect public health, and get more Texans back to work and their daily activities.”

Twenty days later, Abbott was singing a much different tune, going on KBTX-TV and begging people to stay home....

But this catastrophe cannot be laid solely at the feet of Trump and his delusions. A huge part of the problem was that Republicans, for all their chatter about “the economy,” have always been far more invested in gutting the social safety net and slashing taxes than in the genuine economic well-being of Americans. Reopening fast was largely a dodge used to justify the Republican refusal to pass more bills to protect workers and businesses from economic catastrophe, since those bills would require increased government spending and, most likely, raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for it.