Voters from rural and provincial areas support Trump against the established US media
Roger Cohen is a New York Times’ columnist who recently gave an interview to Alexis Papachelas, who asked him the following question: “”Do you think this whole battle between autocracy and classic liberal democracy is going to be tougher after the crisis in a way?
Roger Cohen: I think it is. My concerns are even more immediate than that. I think that Orban’s move to rule by decree, totally unnecessarily, has illustrated that the coronavirus is a useful ally to dictators because it allows all kinds of extraordinary measures.
Who’s talking about Donald Trump’s wall today? Nobody. And there are barriers going up all over the place, so there’s no need to talk about a wall or whether there should be a wall; there are barriers everywhere, there are extraordinary measures being taken everywhere, there are people not being allowed out of their homes….
But the step from that to what Viktor Orban has done is not a huge one and when you get a character like President Trump, whose natural inclination is much more to be close to an Orban than it is to be close to a [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, when you get something like that and you have an election coming up in six or seven months, and already we’re seeing he’s opposing write-in voting, you saw what happened in Wisconsin – an election that shouldn’t have been held in those circumstances – and the way in the lockdown there’s a natural bias towards rural areas in which the Trump vote is strong – you know, you have a lockdown in towns and cities in the Midwest that would tend, perhaps, more Democrat, more [Joe] Biden, and then you don’t have it in rural areas. I mean, there are all sorts of things that led one, I think, to legitimate fears that this could be a compromised election or even that the election could be called off.”
What is Roger Cohen suggesting that should happen, that Trump declares a dictatorship, or will the Americans simply vote against him in the interests of Bill Gates and the other billions that fund the propaganda of death?
NGM