'It’s a hoax. There's no pandemic': Trump's base stays loyal as president fights Covid
News that the president has contracted coronavirus prompted alarm, confusion and schadenfreude among Trump supporters
Chris McGreal in St Joseph, Missouri
Sean Patterson is not worried that Donald Trump has been
hospitalized with coronavirus because he believes what the president tells him.
“It’s a hoax. There’s no pandemic. As Trump said, how many millions die of flu?” said the 56-year-old truck driver outside the early voting station in St Joseph, Missouri – a stronghold for the president.
But then Patterson pauses and contemplates the possibility that Trump really does have Covid-19.
“If he’s sick, then they planted it when they tested him. It’s what they did to me when I went to hospital for my heart beating too fast. Two weeks later I got a cold,” he said. “It’s political. I don’t trust the US government at all. Who are they to mandate personal safety?
I listen to Trump.”
At the end of a tumultuous week even by the standards of one of the most turbulent presidencies of modern times, the disturbing if not entirely unpredictable news that the president has contracted coronavirus prompted alarm, confusion and schadenfreude in the heart of Trumpland.
St Joseph, a former frontier city where the outlaw Jesse James met his bloody end, voted overwhelmingly for the president four years ago. The polls say Missouri will go his way again next month. But with Trump struggling in key swing states, the news he has fallen sick to Covid-19 jolted an election already battered days earlier by the
most undignified presidential election debate in history.
'It’s a hoax. There's no pandemic': Trump's base stays loyal as president fights Covid