Is Ronna McDaniel Ignorant or Evil?

McDaniel, the GOP Chair, shamelessly shills for her boss

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, with no sign, as of this writing, of it abating, a favorite talking point among many Republicans is that Donald Trump has saved two million lives. This belief is captured in this tweet posted yesterday (!) by McDaniel:

Yeah, THIS alright. THIS is an outright lie that the Trump administration has been propagating for months. To quote Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist who co-authored a paper in March on the likely effects of Covid-19, “In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in [Great Britain] and 2.2 million in the US.” Translation: If the United States government had done nothing from the outset — and who would think that any government would do nothing? — two million deaths would result. In other words, this number was never meant to be taken as a real-world projection because it was understood that the United States government would surely make some attempt to mitigate the effect of this virus. Or to quote Jacob Sullum, “Although those horrifying numbers got a lot of attention, they were never plausible…because they…