Hell No, We Won't Go (Back to Work Until There's Sufficient Testing, Contact Tracing, and Surveillance)!

President Trump’s monomaniacal focus on beginning to “open up” the country as of May 1 is indistinguishable from his obsession with getting re-elected, as he sees the health of the economy as the key to winning in November.  But since opening up the country means relaxing the restrictions that have helped flatten the curve of the coronavirus spread, and as the broad consensus of public health officials is that we generally won’t be ready to do so in mere weeks, we are witnessing the president’s willingness to risk American lives on a vast scale for the sake of his political fortunes.

The mass testing, surveillance, and contact tracing necessary to roll back the virus and allow Americans to begin returning to normalcy are much more than two weeks away.  Shortages of basic materials plague the testing of infected individuals, while antibody tests to assess who has already had the virus and thus may have immunity are at the very beginning of deployment.  Likewise, the personnel and networks needed for contact tracing are still far from being fully in place.

Ominously, while Trump and his team seem quite aware that the country is not fully prepared to move forward, and that a measured process is necessary, they are simultaneously working to ensure that if they have miscalculated, Trump will be sheltered from blame.  How?  By making sure that opening up the country on a recklessly early schedule isn’t actually seen as Trump’s idea.  The Washington Post reports that:

Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that f it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts.

At the same time, conservative groups like FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council are lobbying to relax coronavirus-related restrictions, while a US Chamber of Commerce return-to-work plan has apparently gained favor with decision-makers in the White House.  Businesses, like Trump, are eager to evade blame for possibly deadly decisions, and so are pushing “a liability shield for businesses that would insulate them from lawsuits if their employees get the coronavirus at work.”

This administration’s strategy of ensuring the president doesn’t get blamed if his own plan ends up killing people is horrifying and morally bankrupt.  Trump’s failures up to now, including his refusal to admit his culpability for the scale of this crisis, means it would be madness for Americans to view his goal of relaxed social restrictions with anything but the most extreme skepticism.  The notion of U.S. business leaders huddling with Trump advisers to ensure that millions of us keep making them a profit while boosting the president’s re-election prospects, even if the downside is that tens of thousands more American die, is as dystopian a vision of American politics and capitalism as you could imagine.  This isn’t leadership or democratic governance, it’s a predatory vision of the world in which the rich and powerful use ordinary Americans as pawns to drive profits and preserve political power.

Particularly maddening about these plans is that we are in such a dire economic situation because of this administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus for months now.  We are in this shitty place, with millions upon millions of Americans left jobless, because of the president’s horrific decision to dismiss the virus as a non-threat and to waste precious time doing nothing to prepare the U.S. to combat this disease.  Governors and mayors around the country had no choice but to implement strict lockdown orders to combat a virus that had been allowed to spread for weeks upon weeks without a nearly-adequate government regime of testing, contact tracing, and surveillance.  Despite the tens of thousands of Americans dead, the president now seeks to make us all pay a still higher price, to risk sacrificing more lives to get the economy going again.

Governors and mayors around the country need to resist administration pressure to relax social distancing measures prematurely, or to re-open businesses before adequate testing and other measures are in place to address the continued spread of the coronavirus (this Talking Points Memo piece has a good rundown of how in some ways we’re just returning to the point we were at several months ago, with a new outbreak of the coronavirus the obvious outcome if we repeat the same mistakes as before).  It’s also conceivable that American workers will need to engage in a massive campaign of civil disobedience if we are expected to return to work without such conditions being met.  Matt Yglesias has raised a compelling point about the class dimensions of the situation, in which white collar workers are allowed to continue telecommuting while retail and blue collar workers are expected to return to work, with all the dangers that entails.  This wouldn’t be fair, and it would justly provoke outrage and resistance, as well as hopefully solidarity from those lucky enough to do their jobs remotely. No one wants the economic pain to continue, but the consensus position of health and medical professionals needs to be our guiding principle, not the selfish requirements of deranged politicians and amoral CEOs. 

There Are Ways Out of the Coronavirus Crisis, But Who Will Implement Them?

Just as the fast and broad spread of the coronavirus across the United States is largely due to President Trump’s catastrophic failures of leadership, our country’s path out of this pandemic and attendant economic collapse threatens to unfold in a parallel arc of ineptitude and chaos.  As hard-hit parts of the country seem to be moving through the peak of the coronavirus, a critical mass of public thought and critical inquiry is beginning to focus on next steps, and a frightening picture is quickly emerging of cluelessness and chaos at the top.  The Washington Post reports on plans to move the nation forward, but they are originating from “a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits [. . .] pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: Ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.”  Together, these three strategies can “shatter” the transmission chain.

At the same time, the Post notes, the Trump administration is “fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak.”  This is very much a problem, since even if enough states were to move forward with coordinated plans, they will need federal funding to succeed, such as for hiring thousands of workers to perform contract tracing to locate people who may have come into contact with those infected with the coronavirus.  And even then, there’s a question of whether such a strategy would work if a critical mass of states were not involved.  As a Liberian doctor involved with ending the Ebola epidemic in his country puts it, “America must not just flatten the curve but get ahead of the curve.”  Yet without a national plan, the United States will remain behind the curve.  Not just incompetence but political calculation have entered into the president’s approach: administration officials tell the Post that “the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.”  This is a staggeringly cynical strategy, on top of being a complete abdication of duty on the part of the president.

But as Ezra Klein discusses at Vox, even the plans that various think tanks have drawn up along the lines that the Post describes will require daunting organization, resources, and patience. Unless the United States is willing to rely on mass surveillance to augment testing for the virus, the testing necessary to control and defeat the virus may require something on the order of 22 million tests per day, which the country is far, far from being able to do currently.  Yet plans short of this would result in a “yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.”  Under such circumstances, Klein notes, a rapid economic recovery simply will not happen — according to a former FDA commissioner involved with drafting one of the plans Klein reviewed, only 80% of the economy would return while the proposed regimen was underway, which would leave the United States in “an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.”

Reading these accounts of how we might move forward helps bring the size of this catastrophe more into focus.  In order to prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus once we’re past this first wave, we’re going to need a degree of organization and initiative that is clearly beyond the skill set of Donald Trump and his administration — and that’s assuming that the president will even consent to the consensus strategies that are emerging, which will be certain to confound his monomaniacal goal of getting the economy racing again.  Yet even under the best case public health scenario, with mitigation strategies enacted and a vaccine developed in a year’s time, it appears the U.S. economy will remain crippled.  In order to prevent mass suffering, we’re going to need hugely broadened legislation that funnels money to businesses and workers — such as this plan proposed by Representative Pramila Jayapal.  And so the major axes of political conflict for the foreseeable future come more sharply into view — between those willing to sacrifice American lives for the sake of re-starting the economy and those who prioritize public health, as well as a related debate over the degree to which the government should cover the lost income of businesses and employees as they remain sidelined due to the coronavirus.

Before Our American Resurrection, We're Going to Need an American Exorcism

So long as the Democratic leadership considers off-limits any investigations into the Trump administration’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the case for holding the president accountable will need to be based largely on what we’ve witnessed the president say and do, and reporting by news organizations.  Fortunately for the public, investigative pieces have been coming fast and furious for the past couple weeks.  I flagged a pair of essential Washington Post articles last week; this weekend, The New York Times has published its widest-ranging report yet on what went wrong with the president’s response.  Among other things, the Times provides further evidence that early on, members of the federal bureaucracy involved with public health issues were aware that the coronavirus was highly contagious, dangerous, and would surely spread to the United States.  Moreover, such information quickly filtered to the president.  Such evidence is crucial in making the case that the president was derelict in his duties, as it explodes his public contentions over the course of months that the coronavirus threat was a hoax and would not present a danger to the United States, and renders inexcusable the failure to mobilize our government to contain and mitigate the spread of the virus.

But beyond this, the article contains plenty of details about Donald Trump’s unwillingness to act in the face of overwhelming evidence that thousands of Americans lives would be lost if the government did not spring into action with mass testing, stay-at-home orders, and other necessary steps.  Time and again, the reporters document how the president made a choice to ignore the experts and basic common sense, and to evade a course of action that could have saved thousands of lives.  We know from other reporting that the president has been obsessed above all else during this time with protecting the economy from a slowdown or worse that he believed could undermine his re-election chances.  The Times article helps illuminate the basic folly of the president’s mindset, as it demonstrates the degree to which he remained unmoved by the prospect of mass death across the American population, not to mention the obvious economic destruction an uncontrolled epidemic would have inflicted even without shelter-in-place orders and the shuttering of businesses.  The portrait that emerges from this article and others like it is that Donald Trump was unable to process the gravity of the danger posed to American lives, was obsessed with the economic downside as a proxy for his political failure or success, and failed to prioritize the fight against this epidemic.

Donald Trump made the wrong call on the coronavirus, and many thousands of Americans have died as a result.  The virus and its toll are now, inevitably, the grounds on which the 2020 election will be decided.  The president clearly recognizes his own mistakes, which is why he is currently “seek[ing] to rewrite the history of the past several months,” as the Times accurately describes.  Having denied a deadly reality until it was inevitable that thousands of Americans would die on account of his ineptitude, the president now tries to embroil us all in his fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient Trump who saw the danger before anyone else, a great leader who “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and who has earned the American people’s everlasting gratitude for his decisive action.  These lies amount to an almost unbearable obscenity against our wounded nation, an offense to the dead and an affront to the living. There is no way forward for the United States that doesn’t involve a mass repudiation of this president and his party from all levels of government. There will be no American Resurrection without an American Exorcism first.

Good Riddance to Moldy-Brained Modly

Though Tuesday’s resignation of Thomas Modly as acting Secretary of the Navy has resolved a crisis for the Trump administration, I hope that the story of what went wrong on the USS Roosevelt and why its captain could not get clear direction on protecting his crew does not too quickly slip from public consciousness.  Basic questions remain as to how exactly the U.S. Navy and its Commander in Chief did or did not act to protect American service members as the coronavirus began to spread across the aircraft carrier.

Although the coronavirus crisis and Modly’s decision to relieve Captain Brett Crozier of command made this inextricably into a story about the Trump administration, another layer that shouldn’t be left out is the ongoing command and performance issues the US Pacific fleet has been experiencing for the past several years.  Investigative reporting outfit ProPublica had previously reported on these problems, and has published a new piece connecting this latest incident to their earlier findings. ProPublica had found “repeated instances of frontline commanders warning superiors of risks the fleet was facing — a lack of training, exhausted crews, deteriorating ships and equipment. Those warnings, all sent through the normal chain of command, were met with indifference.” And the story of Captain Crozier fits into this established pattern, so that the recent events surrounding the USS Roosevelt can be seen as a dangerous confluence between an already-troubled US Navy attitude towards dissent with a similarly-minded Trump administration.  Clearly, order and discipline are necessary in the military in a way that does not have an analogue in the civilian world; but the military, and by extension, its ability to defend the United States, is not at all well served when the top brass respond improperly to the needs of those under their command.  It should be a nightmare for all of us to imagine a military composed entirely of yes-men, unable to account for or correct their mistakes, and courting disaster in the process.

Return of the One-Trick Ponies

Just when you thought that our political moment could not become any more fraught or unreal, the ringleader of the right-wing militia takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has now popped up in Idaho, declaring the state’s stay-at-home order to be unconstitutional and urging armed defiance if necessary.  To rally the troops to his cause, Ammon Bundy called a meeting that incidentally demonstrated his own personal disregard for social distancing, as “dozens of people [sat] elbow to elbow” and “[greeted] each other with hugs.” According to Boise State Public Radio, “Bundy is threatening to lead a march on the homes of Idaho Governor Brad Little and the director of the state’s Department of Health and Welfare. He also says he’d like to form a human cordon around businesses staying open in defiance of the order.”  As with the Oregon standoff, Bundy appears ever eager to embark on a campaign of violence, remarking, “If it gets bad enough, and our rights are infringed upon enough, we can physically stand in defense in whatever way we need to.  But we hope we don’t have to get there.”

Tragically, not just Bundy but others in Idaho are standing up to the idea that the government can order quarantines to protect the public health, choosing to make this into a fight over a governmental assault on liberty instead.  As the New York Times reports, some state lawmakers and even a sheriff have taken up the cause.  All this, as Idaho now has more cases of coronavirus per capita than California, with Blaine County home to the highest per capita rate of coronavirus in the entire country.

 While it’s not entirely surprising that anti-government types might take offense at a shelter-in-place order, what stands out is the way they’ve decontextualized the mandate.  It’s gone hand-in-hand with unfounded assertions that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu — Bundy declared he’d like to get Covid-19 and be done with it — as a way to paint the state order as illegitimate.  And beyond this, absent is any well-merited criticism of the Trump administration’s documented, unforgivable failure to protect the country from a pandemic that has made such extreme measures as state-wide quarantines necessary in the first place.

 And beyond Idaho, across a range of states, GOP governors seem to be burnishing their conservative bona fides by taking a stand against. . . taking a stand against the virus, instead suggesting that it’s not going to hit their states hard or that business interests need to weigh more heavily against protection of public health.  The total lack of interest in how we might have gotten to this point, and how the government may have failed us all, gives way to an ordinate interest in standing up for freedom of movement in the face of pointy-headed medical bureaucrats or, perhaps more to the point, in the name of embracing a denialism pioneered by the president himself.  The message that individuals are on their own, and the accompanying disregard for social solidarity, may find its armed incarnation in the western militia movement, but it’s also discernible in watered-down form when GOP politicians signal that individual Americans should not look to collective action to face down crisis.

Now Is The Time to Talk About the GOP's Betrayal of Its Base

A slew of reporting out this past weekend further illuminates the president’s unforgivable and catastrophic handling of the coronavirus crisis.  The Washington Post has a pair of essential articles, including one titled “Commander of Confusion” that details Donald Trump’s self-contradictions and attempts to evade blame for the U.S. response.  But “Commander of Confusion” turned out to be the mere amuse bouche for a investigatory piece out Saturday that tracks in vivid detail how the president’s incompetence has interacted with and fed a larger bureaucratic failure to deal with this crisis.  I don’t see how a fair-minded person can walk away from these stories, which capture both the United States’ vast potential to have dramatically minimized the impact of Covid-19, and the way this president frittered away our chance to deploy the full force of American medical power against this outbreak, and not be filled with rage, sorrow, and frustration.

However, this bitter knowledge and a grappling with profound betrayal and heartbreak are absolutely necessary if we are to have a chance of keeping this epidemic from being mismanaged still further.  There are many layers to the dysfunctional governmental response, but at its most basic, it’s a story of a president who wasted precious time spreading lies about the harmlessness of the coronavirus instead of mobilizing American government and society to fight it:

[It] took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

Recognizing Donald Trump’s failures to date is crucial not only for basic issues of accountability, but because the same mistakes and parody of leadership continue through the present, with all the danger they create for the public.  As just one example among many, the Centers for Disease Control recommended this weekend that Americans wear masks when out in public.  The president communicated this information at a news conference, but followed it up by stressing that this recommendation is only voluntary, and that he himself will probably not wear a mask.  The grotesquerie was two-fold: on the one hand, he seemed to object to the mask on some sort of bizarre aesthetic/too-cool-to-wear-it grounds, declaring, “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know.  Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.”  (This bizarre concern is all the stranger given that he is not meeting such visitors in the White House, due to the very epidemic that makes wearing a mask advisable in the first place).  But the greater dereliction of duty is in communicating to the public that the mask recommendation can safely be ignored.  Rather than help advance the public fight against coronavirus by advocating for the wearing of masks, he undermines it, endangering countless lives in the process.

And this is just one of dozens of examples, which are sure to increase in the coming days.

But the story of how the president has betrayed the American people by downplaying the coronavirus contains an equally disturbing, and potentially more politically consequential, story of how the president has effectively betrayed his own supporters.  And this story implicates not only the president, but members of his party who have remained silent in the face of his serial lies, distortion, and inaction in the face of the coronavirus threat.  The Washington Post reports that:

Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.

It would be terrible, and remarkable enough by itself, for a president to exploit the credulity of his supporters in a way that literally got many of them killed.  But Trump’s lies about the coronavirus threat have been seconded both by congressional Republicans, who have at best stood silent while he propagated all manner of disinformation, and by state leaders, including GOP governors, some of whom up to this very moment refuse to institute strict stay-at-home orders.  For both groups, loyalty to the president seems to have played a role in refusing to challenge his mangling of basic scientific reality.  In states like Florida, you can also see the GOP placing the interests of the business community over public health in resisting closure orders.  And some of the resistance has been aided by the epidemiology of this disease, which hit Democratic-leaning states like California and New York first, allowing GOP leaders to paint it as an urban problem distant from their rural constituents, and as a problem to blame Democrats for.

It’s really impossible to overstate how profoundly the GOP has betrayed its own supporters.  To act in ways that guaranty that more people will die from the coronavirus than otherwise isn’t just a bad political call, it’s a disqualifying one.  And while no one denies that we face a difficult choice between stopping the spread of the virus and shutting down large parts of our economy, the debate over what balance to find has already been resolved by the medical community and much of the political establishment: stopping the virus is a prerequisite to returning to anything resembling economic normalcy.  

Yet, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, but that seem rooted in a reluctance to be accused of politicizing this crisis and undermining the president, as well as in a belief that Americans can see for themselves the culpability of the GOP, the Democratic Party as a whole has collectively pulled its punches against both the president and the Republican Party — including in making the specific case to Republican voters that their party has let them down.  Such reluctance is a political catastrophe in the making for Democrats.  The president has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to control the news cycle and to pump disinformation into the public sphere.  Having assured by his unfit leadership that the dangerous challenge posed by the coronavirus metastasized into a pandemic projected to cost at least 100,000 American lives, he now seeks to avoid accountability while continuing the same inept leadership.  He is doing a profoundly shitty job, and the refusal to fully confront him on this fact shades into enabling his incompetence and excusing his errors.

Nonetheless, on Sunday, the Democratic house leadership doubled down on an attitude of minimal confrontation with the Trump administration, as Majority Whip Jim Clyburn indicated that a panel for overseeing relief funds will not examine the president’s initial response to the coronavirus.  Rather, that effort is to be conducted by another panel — but one whose work is to begin at some unspecified future point. Maybe, if Trump and the Republicans were willing to have an open discussion of their errors in handling the virus, the Democratic approach might be reasonable.  But even as I type this, the president and his party are engaged in an effort to deny and re-write the history of the past few months.  Donald Trump claims he has conducted a flawless response, denies he ever said that the virus would go away on its own after maybe infecting 15 people, max, and now presents the deaths of upwards of 100,000 Americans as the best case outcome of his heroic efforts, for which we should all be eternally grateful.  And the GOP backs this revisionism every step of the way.

This is not the behavior of a normal democratic party, but one that has rejected basic notions of competent governance and accountability.  It is behavior that, in fact, demonstrates that the GOP is no longer a party that subscribes to the basics of American democracy, which at its heart demands that our government be held accountable for its actions, and that citizens have access to the information required for such accountability.  Against this, the Democrats’ decision to play by some sort of unwritten rulebook in which you refuse to critique the president and his party in a crisis, is politically insane.  If the GOP is not to be held accountable for needless American deaths, and if the Democrats are unwilling to make the argument that they would have done a far better job than this president, then why on earth should Americans vote for the Democratic Party?  If the Democratic Party cannot be roused to outrage and action by mass death inflicted by the incompetence and ideological blindness of its political opponents, what is the point of the Democratic Party?  More to the point, who are these Democratic leaders to think they should be entrusted to guide the party through this moment, which is not just a medical emergency but a true political crisis?

The situation is all the more unbelievable in that the coronavirus discredits the GOP not simply due to its failed response over the past few months, but because America’s vulnerability to the virus has been exacerbated by the anti-government principles that have been bedrock Republican values for literally generations.  At the macro level, our lack of universal healthcare is due in large part to the GOP’s basic belief that healthcare is neither the government’s responsibility to provide, nor something that every American deserves.  The same goes for other related issues, such our lack of guaranteed paid sick leave.  Now, Americans are dying because such policies were deemed by the GOP to be beyond the scope of American politics.  And at the level of economic relief, Americans are paying the price for GOP policies — such as newly-unemployed residents of Florida who are unable to apply for unemployment insurance because of a state system explicitly designed to deter claims, all in order to save billions for businesses (the Florida GOP is in a panic about being held accountable for this malpractice, which hardly sounds like the time for the Democrats to stand down from criticism).

With reality providing the ultimate judgment on the limits and failures of Republican politics and politicians, now is the time to make them pay a price for their lack of relevance to the needs of Americans — not months from now, after they’ve they deploy the vast propaganda networks at their disposal to lie and confuse Americans about what we’ve actually experienced.  Now, when their support for an unfit president is causing mass death on a daily basis.  Now, when their culpability can be hammered home for all voters to see.  Now, when it can make a difference between life and death for thousands of Americans.

Does Donald Trump Think American Sailors Are Enemies of the State, Too?

The story of the dismissal of Captain Brett Crozier from his command of a US aircraft carrier has only grown more troubling over the last day.  To review events so far: In late March, following previous failed attempts to get appropriate action from his superiors regarding a coronavirus outbreak aboard the USS Roosevelt, Crozier sent a broader communication asking that he be allowed to send the bulk of his crew ashore.  This message was then leaked to the media (by whom is not known at this point).  A few days later (this past weekend), Crozier was fired from his post for having sent the plea.

The optics were shocking – a naval officer punished for trying to protect the sailors under his command? – and the reasons provided seemed dubious at best.  Explaining his decision to dismiss Captain Crozier, Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly stated that Crozier had broken the chain of command and had cracked under pressure.  Modly’s action was an override of normal Navy protocols for handling concerns about a ship captain, and he essentially indicated to a reporter this weekend that he made this move at the suggestion of President Trump (though he described it as taking action before the president could insert himself into the matter).  

But today, events took a still darker turn.  In a remarkable in-person speech to the sailors of the USS Roosevelt (the vessel is currently docked in Guam), Modly escalated the list of accusations against Crozier.  Addressing the captain’s decision to send a communication to his superiors, Modly stated that, “If he didn't think, in my opinion, that this information wasn't going to get out to the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this," Modly said, continuing, "The alternative is that he did this on purpose."  Modly added that this was a “betrayal of trust, with me, with his chain of command.”

The big story here is the action of a Trump administration official to demonize a naval captain for trying to protect his crew from the coronavirus.  Remember, Crozier has already been relieved from command, even though there hasn’t yet been an investigation of his actions yet (which would be far more typical in such a situation).  So why has the acting Secretary of the Navy flown to Guam to talk directly to the crew of the ship whose captain he’s just defenestrated, not to reassure them that the Navy cares about their health and safety, but to ramp up the charges against Crozier, including the accusation of “betrayal,” which could subject Crozier to a court martial?

I think Paul Waldman gets it exactly right when he suggests that Crozier has been targeted so severely because he’s helped disrupt Donald Trump’s claim that he’s got the coronavirus under control.  After all, last month the Secretary of Defense had communicated to military commanders that they’d need to clear their coronavirus protection policies with him first – a policy presented as ensuring consistency across the US government, but which was clearly intended to spare the president from embarrassment should a general or admiral acknowledge the danger of the coronavirus at a time the president was still declaring it to be a hoax.

What has specifically escalated this whole situation in the eyes of the White House, and which this CNN article smartly notes, is that not only did Crozier’s plea for help leak, but that videos of his subsequent departure from the ship went viral – videos that show hundreds or even thousands of his sailors cheering for him, in acknowledgment of his efforts to save his crew.  I think it is this spectacle that has most unnerved the president and his cronies, to the point that Trump lashed out at him personally at a news conference this weekend.  The idea that anyone other than the president might be cheered is an affront to his sense of being at the center of the universe; the fact that Crozier was cheered for doing what Trump has failed at – to defend his charges against the coronavirus – makes the adulation of Crozier totally unacceptable.  What most Americans saw as a heartfelt display of loyalty and gratitude, the president and his gang saw as an enormous middle finger aimed at Donald Trump.  Any expressions of loyalty and gratitude, when not aimed at the president, are deemed to be treason and betrayal.

The fear and displeasure evoked by all those cheering sailors not only explains the need to kick Captain Crozier while he’s down, but also Modly’s otherwise inexplicable decision to take the sailors themselves to task (in person, no less!) for their support of their captain.  “Think about that when you cheer the man off the ship who exposed you to that,” he said in his speech today. “I understand you love the guy. It's good that you love him. But you're not required to love him.”  By “exposed you to that,” Modly appears to have been referring to the publicity that this whole story has garnered – but why the crew should be upset about the outside world discovering how the Navy failed to protect the health of its sailors doesn’t really make sense outside of the Trump propaganda bubble.  The crew cheered their captain because he was attempting to protect them; Modly’s attempt to browbeat them and to expect them to share his own indignation isn’t just bizarre, it’s positively Trumpian in its non-self-aware belligerence.

Modly has suggested that American security was compromised by adversaries learning of the illness aboard the ship, but this sounds like an excuse for a cover-up. The American people very much have a right to know when our nation’s military is being let down by its admirals and its civilian leadership. Modly might not like it, but the US Navy is not a private fiefdom to be run for the greater glory of the president.

I’m seeing a lot of commentary that Modly is not long for his acting secretary-hood, but that seems naïve.  Modly channeled his inner Trump in his ugly remarks today, likely in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his boss.  Why on earth should the president be displeased with what he said?

Was Navy Captain Fired For Crime of Taking Coronavirus Seriously?

You have probably already heard about the firing of US Navy Captain Brett Crozier in response to a letter to his superiors asking that the bulk of his aircraft carrier crew be moved ashore to prevent them from succumbing to the coronavirus, which had begun to spread aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.  Although the acting Secretary of the Navy claims that Crozier was fired for violating the chain of command when he wrote his letter, this is a case where context really is everything.  The Trump administration has consistently and catastrophically played down the threat of the coronavirus, and a naval officer drawing attention to how the military has been impacted by the virus threatened to undermine the president’s case that he’s done a perfect job handling this pandemic.  The direct line between serving the president’s interests and firing the captain has now been established by reporting that acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly was aware that President Trump wanted the captain relieved of command; this decision cannot be viewed outside the president’s ongoing campaign to evade responsibility for the coronavirus crisis. 

Many have already pointed out the grotesque disparity between the president’s intervention in this case — firing a captain who tried to protect the lives of the sailors under his command — and his previous pardoning of multiple war criminals whose actions were incompatible with any recognizable American values.  For opponents of the president interested in combatting his claims that he’s a staunch backer of the American military, this latest action provides a bookend for making the case that he doesn’t actually have the least interest in defending either military lives or American interests.  While the U.S. military must always answer to civilian decision makers, a president who undermines its ability to conduct itself by basic American values — say, by abiding by the notion that we don’t kill unarmed prisoners, or that a captain has a duty to protect his crew from illness — dangerously undermines that military’s ability to do its job of defending the United States.  At this point, Trump’s claim that he is somehow an unparalleled supporter of both U.S. military power and its personnel has been pretty much revealed as a fraud, as well a particular insult to American service members.  

Last month, it was reported that Defense Secretary Mark Esper instructed military commanders around the globe to check in with him before making decisions on how to protect their troops from the coronavirus, in case those decisions “might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge.”  Given that the president’s attitude at the time was a combination of denialism and mendacity toward the threat posed by the virus, it was clear that this instruction was a way of telling the military not to take the coronavirus as seriously as it should, so as not to contradict the president.  In light of this previous instruction, which seems to have put political protection of the president over the safety of American service members, Crozier’s firing should spur investigations into whether other military commanders felt they were not getting the latitude they needed to protect their charges, and if so, to what degree that was driven by the interest of the upper ranks and their civilian leadership to protect and promote the president’s deranged vision that the coronavirus was merely a Democratic hoax.

There’s also an important reminder in this baleful story about democratic practices in a time of national crisis.  Of necessity, the federal and state governments need to assert powers they would and should not in ordinary times, from states issuing shelter in place orders to the federal government directing private industry to produce critical medical supplies.  But the requirement for rapid and centralized action doesn’t mean that bedrock democratic principles of deliberation, openness, and public consent are no longer applicable or important.  To the contrary: in such an emergency situation, where liberties are curtailed and sacrifices are demanded, vigilance, skepticism, and the tolerance of dissent are more crucial than ever.  In the case of Captain Crozier, it seems that regardless of whether he did or did not violate the chain of command, he acted the way a good democratic citizen should: he raised his concerns with those in power in defense of the greater good of the sailors threatened by the coronavirus.  The fact that his request was granted, with many sailors now transferred to shore facilities, shows that he made the right call even by the standards of those involved in his termination.

Under Threat From Coronavirus, Some Americans Are More Equal Than Othersam

The coronavirus pandemic is operating like an X-ray of the inequalities and injustices of American society, with differences in economic status outrageously correlated with the odds that one lives or dies.  Many white collar workers are able to work from home now that self-quarantine has become the dominant strategy for combatting the spread of the virus, while millions of workers in service industry jobs have no choice but to keep working and so increase their chances of falling ill.  Better-off workers have sick days to use if needed, while those less privileged have faced the impossible choice of either taking time off and being fired, or working while sick with a potentially deadly disease.  National legislation extending sick leave to all on a temporary basis can’t paper over what has already been so harshly revealed.  To go back to the way things were, with Americans having no guaranties to sick leave or health care, would be to embrace a system we have now seen, in undeniable, broken action, to be a machine for killing those not lucky enough to have the right job.

But what we’re seeing in the life or death inequalities exposed among Americans based on their socio-economic status finds its most vivid and extreme expression in the threat faced by our homeless neighbors in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.  According to reporting in The New York Times, “Once infected the chronically homeless are more likely to get much sicker or die because of underlying medical conditions and a lack of reliable health care,” in part because, as The Washington Post notes, the population is also older than other groups of Americans.  The Post also reports that basic hygiene, like washing hands, has become even more difficult than before for many without shelter, as restaurants and other locations they previously had access to are now closed.  The idea of self-quarantine is something of a joke when you don’t have a home, though organizations across the country are working to find solutions.  But even when the homeless are able to stay in shelters, the crowded conditions are ideal for the spread of a disease like coronavirus.  

The Times remarks that “[t]here are also concerns for employees at shelters — nurses, administrators, charitable workers — who, like health care workers at hospitals, could find themselves exposed multiple times if the virus were to spread among the homeless community.”  I have little doubt that before very long, the president and his allies will be seizing on this possibility as a way to scapegoat the homeless population as at least partially responsible for this pandemic; the idea that the homeless are sources of contagion has already been a theme of the president’s so-called thoughts on the homeless.

Long before now, the notion that thousands upon thousands of our fellow Americans have been condemned to live without shelter, without stability, without prospects for a better life, should have sparked sufficient national outrage that sufficient resources and energy had been invested to resolve this admittedly complex problem.  But now, with homelessness being a proxy for one’s chances of living or dying in the coming months, we have no further excuses for seeing it in its actuality: as the most profound and unforgivable violation of these Americans’ civil rights.  And not simply their rights to health, wellness, and life itself, but also the rights to thrive, to be part of their larger community, to participate in the politics and economy of our nation. 

Like a Vampire of Chaos, Will Trump Feed Off the Coronavirus Disaster He's Made?

Having observed and documented the descent of Russia into totalitarian rule under the dead-eyed Vladimir Putin, journalist Masha Gessen’s observations of our Trumpified America are both troubling and invaluable.  In a recent piece, she notes how President Trump is reacting to the coronavirus in predictable ways, a repertoire that includes lies, self-praise, threats, and stoking fear.  But while she shares the harshest critiques of the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, she warns that the fear and uncertainty that accompany the pandemic may strengthen his authoritarian approach to governance:

[A] pandemic [. . .] exerts terror. Terror is effective when every person in the population has a credible fear of suffering and dying [. . .] [A] population gripped by terror creates extraordinary opportunities for this President, who has been groping his way to autocratic rule.

The biggest gift the pandemic may give Trump is the opportunity to envelop an ever greater number of people in his reality. [. . .] Anxiety is ever the autocrat’s friend. Living in a fog where one either doesn’t know whom to believe or finds fact-based reality terrifying, more and more people may heed the clarion call of the con man-in-chief.

Beyond the anxiety induced by the disease itself, the extreme damage to the economy could, counter-intuitively for many of us, also strengthen the president’s appeal:

Other friends of the autocrat, counterintuitively, are a tanking economy and a scarcity environment. The inability to plan, to have the certainty of being able to feed one’s family today and tomorrow, produces more anxiety and fear of change. 

Trump’s failures, by creating instability and fear in the population, might make Americans more receptive to further strongman assertions by the president that he alone is able to help them amid the disorder.  This certainly runs against what a lot of people think, who assume his failures will turn voters against Trump.  For instance, many think the president will be undone by a cratering economy — and indeed, there is good evidence that the strong economy he has enjoyed during his term has provided a buffer against even worse approval ratings than he already receives.  Against this, though, we need to recognize that a broad longing for certainty and order out of a chaotic situation is not just a possible scenario ahead of us, but is an apt descriptor for how many Trump supporters saw their situation in the United States when they made the fateful decision to vote for this awful man.  Millions of white Americans saw the demography of the country changing and perceived their status in the country to be slipping away, which was sufficiently disturbing to them that an explicit racist with anti-democratic tendencies was seen as an acceptable, indeed, the logical choice.

A general tendency to underestimate the appeal of the president’s authoritarian politics to date has blinded a lot of Americans to the appeal, as Gessen suggests, that such politics can have in a worsening economy and destabilized social environment.  Certainly the Democrats as a whole have been slow to realize that Donald Trump and the Republican Party don’t actually believe in democratic politics anymore, if the basic tenant of democracy is understood to be that the majority should rule.  Democrats expect that competence will win out at the end of the day, but they still seem not to see how much appeal there is to a president and party that will make you feel powerful, revenged and restored in a country that no longer seems to place them at the top of the food chain.

The idea that the president might benefit from the coronavirus crisis seemed to receive some slight evidence a week or two ago, when, amazingly, a plurality of voters approved of his handling of the pandemic.  But it seems those who suggested these polls might reflect a “rally around the flag” effect in a time of national emergency may have been right, as the latest polling shows those numbers turning against him.  This provides some hope that most of us are not buying his bluff and bluster as a way out of this crisis — but I don’t think this necessarily means that he won’t still be able to cement his hold on his base through his usual bag of racist and authoritarian tricks. A huge question for me is how much this crisis might strengthen his appeal, as Gessen warns, or whether it might serve up such a dose of deadly reality as to expose unforgivably the president’s incompetence and indifference to even his base’s suffering. This pandemic would seem to threaten the blood bond between Trump and his white supporters — after all, he was elected to inflict cruelty on minorities, not his own voters.

Build the Case Now

For anyone interested in holding the president and the GOP to account for their murderous incompetence in the escalating coronavirus epidemic — say, a Democratic party that finally comes to grips with its mandate to protect the American people — this weekend has supplied more powerful evidence in the case against this administration.  The New York Times has perhaps the most comprehensive story to date about what went wrong with the U.S.’s ability to test for the coronavirus.  The article identifies inept leadership at multiple agencies involved, including Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Robert Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.  It’s also clear that individual mistakes compounded each other, adding up to a systemic failure.  But even this systemic failure might have been headed off by adequate prioritization and leadership from the White House; instead, neither was forthcoming.

Publicizing such facts should be a top priority for Democrats because, as in the case of inadequate testing capacity, the problem is still happening, and is overseen by the same people who fucked up in the first place.  We cannot expect better results if the same players are allowed to stay in charge.  And in terms of holding the Trump administration accountable for its unforgivable errors, establishing the truth of its deadly incompetence is a necessity.  As much as this crisis cements the illegitimacy of the Trump administration, it is also an existential challenge for the Democratic Party.  We are beyond even the most fundamental debates about what values should guide our country, to the basic fact of a president whose policies and lack of action have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans, with the death toll certain to rise far more.  This administration is responsible for an overwhelming loss of life, and the Democrats need to start act liking it if they want to avoid becoming accomplices to mass death.

Will Stancil has been tweeting about the asymmetry between the Democrats and the Republicans in their approach to disseminating information to the public.  He makes the extremely important point that while Republicans have a vast right-wing media apparatus to spread coordinated disinformation campaigns, the Democratic Party consistently shies away from countering this by mounting its own coordinated efforts simply on the party level.  Rather than hitting the president consistently and relentlessly, elected Democrats rely on the media to pick up the slack.  But of course this isn’t the job of the media, or at least mainstream media.  It is a strangely passive approach, and one that, in our current moment, seems almost like self-sabotage.  When the president is directly responsible for mass deaths across America, there is both a moral responsibility and a political imperative to trumpet that responsibility across the land.

That imperative is all the more acute as the president, his party, and his right-wing defenders are already engaged in a disinformation campaign to allow the president to shirk responsibility for even his most murderous decisions.  It has been going on for weeks now, ever since the president proclaimed the coronavirus threat to be a hoax and a Democratic plot to take him down — propaganda echoed by both the Republican Party and outlets like Fox News.  And as Josh Marshall writes today, the GOP’s broader strategy for evading blame for the pandemic even while failing to adequately fight it is coming into view.  He points to the example of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who refused lockdowns of Florida while the coronavirus spread throughout the state, but who has now ordered a 14-day quarantine on anyone arriving in the state from the New York area.  Marshall sees a larger narrative emerging, in which the president and his allies will scapegoat blue states like New York and California for sickening the nation with the virus — a strategy that will become necessary as it begins to also spread widely in majority-Republican states.

Against this, the Democrats need to provide a coordinated and savage narrative that highlights the damning facts of the president’s culpability in this crisis.  This effort will necessarily encompass holding the GOP to account for its refusal to critique or check this malevolent president.  They should not shy away from tying the failed impeachment effort to the present danger we face; after all, the GOP looked at irrefutable evidence that the president placed personal interest over the nation’s safety, and declared it all good.  To their credit, after all, the Democrats tried to remove this unfit president from office, while the GOP did everything it could to ensure he’d be around to preside over what may yet be the most catastrophic health and economic disaster in American history.  What might have seemed abstract about the president’s malfeasance in the context of national security questions a few months ago is now grounded in the frightening everyday of our collective lived experience.

No More Politics as Usual

If we’ve learned one thing from the past three years, it’s that letting Donald Trump get away with even the most outrageous acts doesn’t make him self-impeach, it makes him stronger.  When the Democrats stand by without the appropriate level of criticism or calls to action, passivity becomes validation of his authoritarian and inept ways, a signal to the American people that his behavior is not so outrageous that we need to try to do anything to stop him.

Sitting back now and simply watching Donald Trump’s murderous incompetence, twinned with likely malevolent intent, in not acting with anything resembling reasonable speed to the sickening of blue states like New York and California sends seismic shock waves almost too great to measure across American society – a message that no matter how heinous his actions, there is simply no point in trying to do anything about the president’s unfitness for office.  Certainly Democratic politicians as of today exhibit little interest in expressing the adequate outrage and leveling the appropriate charges – that the president is a monster, surrounded by a gang of accomplices, all of whom are guilty of a level of negligence that should result in their being banned from public office and polite society for the rest of their days. 

And to ignore the president’s established ability, via the perversities of the contemporary media ecosystem, to manipulate reality and shift blame away from himself, in favor of the idea that the truth will simply become known to Americans and that they will judge for themselves what a terrible man he is, at this point amounts to politically suicidal malpractice.  The Democrats seem to be reading the polls showing a plurality of Americans support the president’s handling of the pandemic, and concluding that they had best not challenge him because of his apparent political strength, when in fact the opposite is far more likely to be true, and is morally required – that they do everything they can to communicate to the American people that the president’s disinformation campaign against even the existence of the virus, as well as his deranged and incompetent handling of the federal response, are unprecedented failures by an American president to do his duty and serve this country above his personal interests. 

Instead, day by day, despite hopeful media narratives to the contrary, Donald Trump simply and predictably gets worse and worse.  He threatens to undo the strict social distancing measures that his own months of inaction have made necessary. He suggests that state governors need to provide him with some benefit if they expect to receive medical supplies.  He incites hatred against Chinese and Latinos by rhetoric that suggests they bear particular malicious responsibility for the spread of the coronavirus.  He questions requests for ventilators from medical professionals.

We all have to fight starting far more viciously and savagely than we have until now.  It’s not often that you can say so, but we are in an actual life and death struggle.  We are very far from politics as usual.  People are dying because of the choices made by the monsters of the GOP.  We simply can’t wait until the next election; outright opposition needs to begin now, with the minimal goal of exposing and framing their inhuman behavior, and a maximal goal of changing that behavior.  The most basic thing we can start doing is describing the actions of the president and his party with brutal specificity and moral accuracy.

This opposition will be most powerful if Democrats and others are pushing an actual coherent vision as what we should be working towards in place of this death march treadmill the GOP and friends are so eager to push us all back onto.  We have no choice but to make this into a turning point toward great equality, social solidarity, and economic justice.  The political field is wide open for this sort of uniting, common-sense argument for where we desperately need to go as a society.  And it clearly starts with ensuring a medically-driven, fact-based fight against the coronavirus.

But if you want these ideas to be taken seriously, you need to deal with the party standing in the way – beating down the GOP goes hand in hand with moving any sort of positive vision for the future forward (as Jared Sexton vividly describes here, the GOP simply doesn’t think about the future anymore, only a present that they can exploit and plunder).  The Republicans and their goblin king are supremely dangerous, but particularly right now, they’re glass-jawed in their complicity in the mass suffering and economic distress now surging over our country.  Their race hatred and white nationalism had them obsessed with pretend enemies when all we really needed was basic epidemiological competence at the federal level.  Start hitting them and don’t stop, not until a Republican can’t get elected dog-catcher in this country.  Look at the fuss they’re making at one of the first ads that pin the coronavirus squarely on the president – already warning that networks might lose their license for telling the truth.  The truth makes them whimper, and their response is to grab for a tinpot dictator’s playbook.   Political annihilation is what they deserve and what we need.

Common Sense and Moral Outrage Can Defeat the Let-Them-Eat-Coronavirus Gang

Against the president’s unspeakably sick notions that America’s first and only priority is to make sure he wins re-election, and that the government must do all it can to propitiate the stock market, even at the  potential cost of millions of lives, we have the overwhelming force of moral rightness and basic facts on  our side – and both need to be deployed now as if our lives depended on it.  The willingness of many on  the right to consider accepting the deaths of countless Americans based on a deluded vision of  shortening the economic pain appears driven by a combination of avarice, cruelty, a eugenics-inflected  view of the most vulnerable members of our society, and, in the apparent willingness to sacrifice elderly  parents in the process, unresolved issues of the tragic Greek persuasion.  

We have to joke a little, because otherwise we might begin to scream in horror at cost-benefit  analyses from the president that would have us think of deaths from coronavirus as akin to the random toll of car crashes, deaths from flu, and other needless losses at the hands of drunk drivers and an unfair medical system.  It is a belief system that looks at America and doesn’t see people or families who  together form a society of love and solidarity, but only units of production, employees to be squeezed or  marks to be bilked, like some mad widget factory owner in whatever Dickens novel you care to choose.   In short, they don’t have a different moral system than the rest of one so much as lack one entirely, and we need so say this in unison if we want to break their plans to sabotage the lockdown before it’s had a  chance to be effective. 

As far as the basic facts being on our side, the best thing I’ve read today is this piece by Ezekiel Emanuel, where he gives us the bad news: we have a couple weeks left to stop this epidemic from becoming an  epic catastrophe – and also the good news: there’s a path forward to stopping its spread that doesn’t call for sacrificing our fellow Americans or gutting the economy.  He acknowledges that keeping the economy from crashing is completely valid, but also stakes out the overwhelming reality – that there can be no  healthy economy without stopping this epidemic.  And he sees a way to stop the virus while limiting U.S.  deaths to as low as 100,000 – horrific, but far short of the figures in the millions that could occur even under non-worst scenarios.  They include a national shelter in place policy; an accelerated testing program; ramped-up production of necessary medical equipment; and increasing hospital staff, including training non-medical professionals to assist in vital jobs.  Everything he proposes sounds like common sense, and none of it involves sociopathic talk about how many seniors need to be sacrificed per point of GDP.  It simply involves our government getting its act together, making the right strategic choices, and  implementing.  As we are beset by talk of America being open by Easter, if only enough Americans are  willing to let themselves die in Christ-like sacrifice, Emanuel’s ideas and those of other health professional can provide a benchmark by which the public can assess whether what our government is doing to stave off disaster is rational and purposeful, or whether it’s acting in ways that fail us all.

As Coronavirus Challenge Grows, White House Doubles Down on Madness

On a day of relentless bad news, the most chilling thing I’ve read is that President Trump has apparently grown impatient with the nation-wide lockdown orders aimed at checking the spread of coronavirus.  Viewing them primarily through the parlous effect they’re having on the economy, he has indicated that he will review the lockdown guidelines after they’ve been in place for 15 days — a countdown clock that began ticking last week.  According to Reuters, he told reporters that states with lower rates of infection might allow people to resume going to work.  In this, he disregards the reality of his administration’s failure to allow adequate testing for the virus; we can really have no idea how many people in such states are actually ill from or currently incubating COVID-19.

If it were simply the president alone floating such a deranged relaxation of measures, it would be bad enough.  But there’s strong evidence that this is a strengthening position among right-wing commentators, political allies of the president, and some corporations.  Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, tweeted that, “I think it is soon becoming time to have old and/or sick people take every precaution and healthy people go back to work forever changed w(ith) new habits in a grimmer reality.”  In a similar vein, former Goldman Sachs CEO tweeted, “Extreme measures to flatten the virus curve is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”

Both Schlapp’s and Blankfein’s comments are irresponsible in the way they submerge the serious risks posed by community spread and ignore the impossibility of assessing who is sick and who is healthy, given the lack of sufficient testing capability. Who are the “healthy people” Schalpp is talking about? Even young people can die from this virus.  But even darker is the way they, like the president has begun doing, insinuate that there are health risks from the economy being so severely slowed down — it’s a venture into medical territory about which they are supremely unqualified to opine.

Yet most terrible of all is the sinister elevation of the economy above all other concerns, even above life itself.  At The Nation, Jeet Heer captures this perfectly, writing, “What they are arguing for goes beyond Social Darwinism and is, in fact, a kind of cult capitalism. The existing system is viewed as so sacred that it is worth sacrificing innumerable human lives to keep it going.”  Indeed, Jeer’s entire column about this frightening new strategy of calling off the lockdown prematurely is necessary reading.  Among other things, he cites how opposition to government intervention in the economy by conservatives and corporations is leading them to oppose the very measures that would help the economy now, in place of the doomed plan of sending workers back to the office too soon: “a combination of universal basic income, mortgage, and rent forgiveness, bailouts for small business and a Keynesian booster shot at the end of the pandemic.”

The president’s mad desire to declare victory over the coronavirus before we’ve really even begun to fight it is all the more nightmarish in light of his culpability in allowing things to get this bad, this fast.  If his administration had taken the coronavirus threat seriously, we would have had sufficient tests prepared to have a real chance at containing the virus.  Instead, as the threat grew, the president did everything he should not have: he told people it was a hoax, that it would go away, that we did not need to be concerned.  Always of paramount importance was his re-election and his obsession with the stock market and its imperfect relationship to the health of the economy. 

Having helped bring this catastrophe upon us, he now considers asking us to ignore its horror in support of his re-election campaign, with a false return to normalcy that, under current circumstances, would supercharge the spread of the virus.  His obsession with re-election over actually being president will get millions of us killed.

With Millions of Lives At Stake, It's Time for Trump to Step Aside

In the realm of politics right now, there may not be a more serious and necessary task than ensuring that the president is held to account for his grotesque mishandling of the U.S. response to the coronavirus threat, and that the Republican Party is also properly judged for its complicity in this disaster.  As I wrote last week, in an utterly perverse way the president is somewhat shielded from a proper examination of his incompetence by the direct result of that incompetence: a growing deadly pandemic for which we are dangerously unprepared, and that has much of American locked down and anxious if not scared shitless.  Yet it’s impossible to overstate the severity of the president’s offense: through his incompetence, many thousands, and potentially millions, more Americans will die from this virus than if the United States had had a competent and sane chief executive.  To avoid grappling with this fact amounts to accepting that the president is free to allow the infliction of untold death and suffering on all of us, free of consequence.  If we allow him to get away with this, there is literally no evil he and his allies will not hesitate to inflict on our country in the future.

Identifying the president’s mistakes is essential as a matter of basic accountability; the need to do so immediately, rather than after this crisis passes, is required in part because he has already embarked on a mission to rewrite the history of his culpability and to assign blame elsewhere.  He had already told us that “I don’t take responsibility at all,” but now he’s also claiming that he was aware of the threat the pandemic posed from the start, and that he did everything necessary to stop it.  These are bald-faced lies, but they are repeated not just by the president during his daily briefings and tweets, but by his political allies and right-wing propaganda outfits like Fox News.   Likewise, he has embarked on a campaign to blame China for the virus as a way to evade responsibility for the botched federal response; he has also suggested that Latino immigrants have vectored the disease into America, with his administration issuing ominous warnings about how immigrants in holding facilities pose a threat to border agents.  Opponents of Donald Trump cannot just assume that Americans will simply realize the truth of his culpability, not when there’s such a daily onslaught of distortion in defense of this president.

Nonetheless, even as Trump and his allies invoke racist defenses of their collective incompetence, damning facts continue to crash down on their heads like thunderbolts.  The New York Times details a government exercise held last year that simulated a response to a theoretical pandemic eerily similar to the one we are now facing.  The exercise revealed multiple shortcomings in U.S. preparations, including a realization that the U.S. “did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded” — problems that are facing us now in a moment of actual danger.  At a minimum, the existence of this practice run gives the lie to the president’s statements that we couldn’t have predicted a pandemic like the present one.

Even more upsetting is this report from The Washington Post, which discusses how President Trump and other officials were privy to warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies as far back as January about the threat posed by the coronavirus, but that “[d]espite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.” As one source tells the Post, “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.” It’s impossible to say if this particular official was aware of it, but the “blinking red” comments inevitably hearken back to descriptions of the warnings President Bush received prior to 9/11 and likewise ignored.

According to U.S. officials, a “key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis.”  In fact, some Trump advisers told him that the Chinese government was not being accurate in the coronavirus figures it was providing — yet the president essentially chose to believe the Chinese over his own intelligence agencies.  Among other things, the president tweeted in late January that “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus.  The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

The story also includes details that have been reported before, such as Trump’s reaction to CDC official Nancy Messonnier’s February 25 warning that coronavirus could result in “severe” disruptions to American life.  The president complained to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Aazar that her comments were scaring the stock market; learning that he made these comments despite high-level warnings from intelligence sources that corroborated Messonnier’s perspective further cements a picture of a president determined to ignore the warnings of experts, and obsessed with maintaining a facade of normalcy.

For literally months leading up to this present crisis, the president made a fateful choice on a daily basis: faced with the prospect of a pandemic that threatened American lives, he chose a strategy of protecting his image over protecting Americans, and so refrained from the mobilization that would have protected countless lives.  In doing so, he has lost any possible claim to authority in leading us through this crisis.  Yet the same man who made this murderous calculation now appears before us almost daily, spreading lies and disinformation about U.S. efforts to combat this pandemic, both out of an ingrained incompetence and desperation to evade responsibility for his past bad decisions. Such a president will continue to derail the American effort against the virus, as he prioritizes a self-promoting worldview that downplays the threat of the coronavirus.

And so the point we have reached is both absurd and deeply sinister.  As the death toll mounts and fear spikes across the land, Trump will have an increasing incentive to deflect responsibility from his own unforgivable mistakes, which will only magnify his incompetence and the danger to millions of Americans. To look away from his unfitness for office now is to make ourselves complicit in our own mass suffering. We need to be demanding his resignation, or, save that, his removal from any responsibility in fighting this epidemic.