> But Trump, his party, and many many people in the West would care only for the political capital they could make from it, with potentially catastrophic result

> But Trump, his party, and many many people in the West would care only for the political capital they could make from it, with potentially catastrophic results that would make COVID look relatively minor. There are plenty of people who voted for Trump and other Republican candidates who have scientific and engineering backgrounds. If I had to try to characterize those people, in terms of what makes them different from the science and engineering people who tend to vote Democratic, it is that the Trump / Republican supporters tend to be the entrepreneurs or senior management people in private industry, while the Democratic supporters are often management and staff at institutions in or aligned with government, health, and education. It’s not fair at all to say that Republican-supporting science and engineering people care only for the political capital they can make. They actually want many of the same things as the Democratic-supporting scientists and engineers do— to prevent this from happening again. The difference is that in this case, the Republican-supporters wanted their viewpoints to be freely debated, not denigrated by the mainstream media and/or censored by social media.