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It may not be on 5th Avenue, or with a firearm, but Trump’s insistence at holding his Tulsa rally in the middle of a pandemic has claimed its first well-known victim. Prominent black businessman and co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, Herman Cain, has succumbed to a strain of COVID19, according to his website.
Cain, along with approximately 6,200 people, were in attendance at Trump’s late June rally in Tulsa and it is where he is said to have caught the virus. Like a modern Jim Jones, Trump’s diehards flocked to him despite warnings from health officials, and lo and behold, they died hard. Or rather quite slow and painfully over a month as is common with COVID19 victims. Cain himself had high risk of the virus due to his previous health issues, including Cancer he had recovered from, yet was apparently undeterred. The Trumpvirus infected him long before the Coronavirus and he paid the ultimate price.
Trump himself had bragged in a 2016 campaign speech that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [he] wouldn’t lose voters”. We will see in November if that remains to be true as Trump’s actions and inactions could be responsible for nearly one-hundred-thousand additional American deaths and counting. If his poll numbers at the point of this writing are any indication, it is looking unlikely.
Regardless, Cain’s death is not likely to improve Trump’s ratings with the black community, which has always been abysmally low. At the very least this tragic case of karma might warm republicans up to the seriousness of this virus, which has now infected over 4.5 million worldwide. Though perhaps it is not best to get one’s hopes up.
