Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative and 2016 presidential candidate, blamed the “science denial Trump cult” for the death of Herman Cain from coronavirus on Thursday.
Cain, 74, was a successful entrepreneur who rose to political prominence in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. He died in an Atlanta-area hospital after battling coronavirus.
As Newsmax reported in its obituary:
He was admitted on July 1, two days after being diagnosed with COVID-19.
Ten days before, Cain had attended a rally for President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But it is not known for sure where Cain, chair of Black Voices for Trump, was infected. He had been on a whirlwind travel schedule in June, stopping in multiple cities.
However, McMullin declared that the “science denial Trump cult” was to blame for Cain’s death:
McMullin is a key figure in the “Never Trump” movement, a small faction of establishment Republicans who continued to oppose Donald Trump’s candidacy after he won the Republican nomination in 2016. McMullin ran an unsuccessful third-party campaign in the 2016 general election.
After Trump won the presidency, McMullin pushed the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, and defended intelligence agents who were leaking information about Trump to the media.
“I’ll tell you what their concerns are,” McMullin told CNN. “There concerns are that Donald Trump presents a threat to the country because of his — what they see as his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the relationship of his team to other Russian intelligence officers.”
Like Cain, Trump sought the presidency as an entrepreneur and outsider, though Cain’s campaign was derailed by allegations of sexual harassment from more than a decade before.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.