Have you noticed that Republicans aren't talking about COVID-19? Except mostly to dismiss it.
And they certainly aren't talking about it in relation to President Trump's handling of it.
If they say anything, it's usually something like, "The president has done all any president could do."
That's rich. Can you see either of our President Bushes or President Ronald Reagan standing before us and saying maybe ingesting or injecting bleach might clear the virus from one's system?
Can you see any of them directing or even allowing their administrations to suggest "herd immunity," which might as well be just another term for mass murder?
Can you see any of them attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease specialist, calling him a "disaster?"
Can you see any of them telling their campaign staff that people are "tired of" the coronavirus and want to be left "alone?"
Well, sure we are tired of being afraid of the virus. But mostly, Mr. President, we are tired of your gross mismanagement of it.
Gross mismanagement to the point that Canada extended its border closure for nonessential travel to and from the U.S. as a whopping 29 of our 50 states are seeing stark jumps in new cases and hospitalizations. Only two states - Vermont and Missouri - are reporting declines. On Saturday, Johns Hopkins University reported 57,519 new cases and 711 new deaths. Just Saturday.
The New York Times reported Monday on Trump's off-the-rails attack on Fauci during a morning call with his campaign staff, a call on which some reporters had been invited to listen.
Maggie Haberman of The Times reported that campaign manager Bill Stepien began the call by talking about metrics like the Republican ground game that he said supports the path he and others believe will bring Trump a victory.
Haberman wrote: "But Mr. Trump had other things on his mind. 'People are tired of COVID,' he complained about the coronavirus. 'People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong.'
"He called Dr. Fauci a 'nice' guy, but said, 'He's been here for 500 years,' and added, 'Every time he goes on television, there's always a bomb, but there's a bigger bomb if you fire him. This guy's a disaster.'"
That woke at least one Republican - retiring Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander. On Monday afternoon, Alexander tweeted: "Dr. Fauci is one of our country's most distinguished public servants. He has served 6 presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan. If more Americans paid attention to his advice, we'd have fewer cases of COVID-19, & it would be safer to go back to school & back to work & out to eat." You'll notice, however, that Alexander said nothing about the president.
Fauci was on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, and in the interview he dismissed Trump's claim that the end of the pandemic was "just around the corner." Fauci also said he was not surprised Trump himself became ill with the novel coronavirus, given the administration's failure to take basic precautions at White House events, including the nearly maskless and not-at-all social distanced superspreader announcement of Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court Justice nomination in the Rose Garden.
Then there was the Trump campaign ad that used a quote from Fauci. The ad made it seem that Fauci was praising Trump's virus response. But Fauci was quick to respond that the ad had taken his words out of context. He actually was praising the work of the coronavirus task force. He demanded the Trump campaign refrain from using him in future ads, saying it would be "outrageous" and "terrible" if he was featured in another commercial and it could "come back to backfire" on Team Trump.
Asked by The Daily Beast if his comments were a thinly-veiled threat to leave his post if he ended up in a new campaign spot, Fauci replied: "Not a chance. Not in my wildest freakin' dreams," he said, "did I ever think about quitting."
He said he thought it would backfire with voters. "By doing this against my will they are, in effect, harassing me," Fauci said. "Since campaign ads are about getting votes, their harassment of me might have the opposite effect of turning some voters off."
The Times has reported before that Trump bristles at mention of last month's poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll found that 68% of Americans trusted Fauci to provide reliable virus information while only 40% trusted Trump.
And on Monday, before Trump's comments about Fauci in the campaign call went viral, The Washington Post referred to the GOP silence about COVID-19 as "a key tell" of their election panic.
Post columnist Greg Sargent summed it up this way: "You cannot find a Republican admitting that Trump's disastrous handling of the novel coronavirus - the central issue in this campaign - is a big reason he's losing. For these Republicans, the very existence of Trump's authorship of this catastrophe cannot be acknowledged. So public revulsion over this sick and dying elephant in the room - and the role that's playing in Trump's travails - also cannot be conceded."
Here we are at almost 8.2 million cases of coronavirus in the United States and almost 220,000 deaths.
But instead of leading, Trump - and far too many Republicans - are choosing to look the other way.