Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked onstage after a parade of pyrotechnics at former President Donald J. Trump’s rally outside Atlanta last week and immediately invoked a name that became a bugaboo of the right and a subject of wild conspiracy theories during the coronavirus pandemic: Bill Gates.
Mr. Gates, Mr. Kennedy informed the crowd, had “been indicted in the Netherlands for lying to the public about the Covid-19 vaccine.” Thousands of red-hatted Trump backers roared their approval. In fact, there had been no indictment; according to the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, a judge in the Netherlands ruled that a civil suit accusing Mr. Gates of “vaccination damage” may go forward.
The next night, at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in a different Atlanta suburb, former President Barack Obama blamed Mr. Trump for thousands of coronavirus deaths. More Americans would be alive today, he said, “if we had had a competent administration” that was “trying to do things better instead of talking about injecting bleach into your arm.”
As the most divisive American presidential race in recent history barrels toward a close, many Americans have developed what Wendy Parmet, an expert in public health law at Northeastern University, calls “amnesia” about the coronavirus pandemic. The economy, immigration, abortion and threats to democracy now top the list of voters’ concerns.
But anger and anxiety about Covid-19 are woven into all those issues, simmering underneath as a proxy for the larger debate over trust in government that has shaped the 2024 race.
Last week’s dueling rallies in Atlanta, home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offer a case study in the lingering effects of the pandemic on American politics. They tell the story of two Americas, red and blue.
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