US corporate culture is primarily one of absolute loyalism. Absolute loyalty is demanded and expected all the way up the management chain and it trumps (no pun intended) all else, including job competence. What some Americans may not realize is that this isn't universally true globally.<p>What we have now is a president who comes from and exemplifies this culture so his administration absolutely reflects that. Jeff Sessions recusing himself on the Russia investigation instead of blocking it even if it cost him everything, personally, was an unforgivable sin to an absolute loyalist.<p>So I guarantee you that the prime consideration for this pandemic (which it now officially is, according to the WHO) in the US government is how this impacts the GOP in general and Trump's reelection in particular. Nothing else matters.<p>Go back to, say, the Watergate era and you had behaviour by a president that even his own party ultimately found unacceptable. If Watergate repeated today, it would be "fake news", painted as partisan Democratic slander aimed at the administration and defended beyond all reason.<p>The sad and scary part of this is that we now have 40% of the population who will absolutely eat this up and refuse to believe anything that makes the president look bad. To be fair, there are absolute devotees on the other side too but objectively we've seen nothing to the degree of GOP blind loyalism on from the Democrats (yet).<p>There was a time when our representatives held higher loyalties to the institutions they represent because undermining those is incredibly dangerous. Those days seem to be a distant memory as we have a mass organized effort to disenfranchise those who tend to vote Democrat (under the guise of removing "felons" from voter rolls), a refusal by the Senate to take up legislation that would pass at a completely unprecedented rate, a Senate whose only priority is filling lifetime judicial nominees with more loyalists and the refusal to even take up a president's Supreme Court nominee with flimsily-constructed justification you know for a fact wouldn't apply if the situation was reversed.<p>This is the trait of dictators and despots. Why do you think Trump admires Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un?<p>So yes, it should come as no surprise that the planning, messaging and response to this pandemic is being seen through the exact same filter: how does this help or hurt Trump?<p>And it will kill people. I don't wish ill on anyone here but it's hard not to see the irony that the most at-risk groups of death from Covid-19 are, well, Trump's core voters and Fox News's core target market for fearmongering and dog-whistle racism.<p>Classifying public health responses is unprecedented. Yet as long as Trump's base (40% of voters) don't hold the government to account absolutely nothing will change. And the only time that's happened that I recall is the family separation for detained illegal immigrants. Has there been any other reversal of policy like this?