Paying one Trump tax
By 
Something future historians will puzzle over at length is how the only real achievement of the first Trump administration — and it was a gigantic one — morphed very quickly into something that Trump and his movement rejected completely:
An 8-year-old girl in Texas died Thursday morning of “measles pulmonary failure,” according to The New York Times, citing records it obtained.
A Trump administration official told the paper the girl’s cause of death is “still being looked at.”
This is the second death in the state linked to the ongoing measles outbreak. The first death was in an unvaccinated school-age child in February. A death in New Mexico remains under investigation.
The outbreak – now spanning Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and possibly Kansas – reached at least 569 cases Friday, according to data obtained from state health departments.
Texas has reported 481 outbreak-associated cases; New Mexico has 54 cases, and Oklahoma reported 10 cases – eight confirmed and two probable – as of Friday.
Cases in Kansas, which the state health department said may be linked to the outbreak, reached 24 as of Wednesday.
Experts said these numbers are most likely a severe undercount because many cases go unreported.
This is a specific version of the more general question of how it is that reactionary authoritarian political cults, that reject the very idea of science and expert knowledge, swept across the world early in the 21st century.