Meatpacking Industry Treatment of Workers Looks Worse and Worse

A pair of new stories, published by Vox and Mother Jones, broaden our understanding of how the coronavirus has devastated workers at meatpacking facilities around the country.  As I noted a few days ago, the crowded working conditions of the operations have combined with corporate negligence to create a firestorm of Covid-19 outbreaks, with more than 3,000 workers testing positive over the past several weeks and more than 15 workers dead.  Companies have closed at least 20 plants, leading to warnings of meat shortages and spurring President Trump to sign an executive order last week that the facilities remain open.

Unfortunately, although the president’s order includes the government providing protective gear and guidance for workers, there is skepticism that there will be follow through on this front.  According to the Washington Post, safety experts worry that the move will circumvent local officials from being able to protect employees via plant closures, and will also interfere with other federal guidelines requiring space between workers. 

An order that prioritizes keeping plants open over worker safety ignores the reason why plants have closed in the first place: because thousands of employees have been exposed to the coronavirus at their meatpacking jobs.  And so this order amounts to a mandate that workers continue to risk their lives for the sake of the meat companies and the nation’s food supply.  Yet, on the latter point, I have not seen anyone argue that we would see anything worse than shortages with the current regime of closures.  I have also not seen any convincing arguments that we are in such desperate circumstances that companies should not be forced to do everything possible to protect worker health, including an assurance of personal protective equipment, adequate social distancing, paid time off for both sick workers and those without symptoms but in quarantine, a slowed production tempo, and, yes, closures if such measures prove insufficient to stop the spread of illness at a facility.

It is difficult to see this as anything but the president intervening heavily on the side of the meatpacking companies against workers’ health and safety rights.  The Vox and Mother Jones stories I mentioned add devastating new details to the extent of these companies’ negligence and betrayal of their workers; they make for heartbreaking, infuriating reading.  In light of the many accounts of employees forced to choose between working with Covid-19 or being fired, not being allowed time off to self-quarantine, and being lied to about the dangers of the production line, there is sufficient evidence available to suggest that corporations like JBS USA, Tyson Foods, and Smithfield Foods have been effectively acting in a criminal manner toward their employees.  The bad faith of the president’s executive order is made clear by the lack of any accompanying call for accountability for their actions to date.  You cannot read these reports and not see this as an enormous national scandal, requiring congressional investigation and likely criminal inquiries.

“The food supply chain is breaking” was the attention-grabbing statement Tyson Foods’ chairman included in a full-page newspaper ad published in newspapers last week, but a more accurate phrasing of the situation would be that it is companies like Tyson Foods themselves that have been breaking the food supply chain, by failing to take adequate measures to protect their employees from the coronavirus.  Meatpacking industry assertions that worker safety is their top priority are contradicted by multiple worker accounts, not to mention the basic fact of the shockingly high number of coronavirus cases among employees.  Time and again, companies and facilities dismissed worker concerns, lied to them, and treated them as disposable.  The facts are shocking and enraging, and should galvanize Americans to pressure our elected representatives to hold these companies to account.  These workers have risked their lives to feed us; the least we can do is help stop their bosses from working them to death.

GOP Contempt for Minorities and Working Class is Clear in Premature Re-Opening Push

It sounds like the premise for a dystopian sci-fi novel, yet the lead paragraph of this must-read New York Times story captures a central conflict of the coronavirus crisis in the United States: “Efforts to quickly restart economic activity risk further dividing Americans into two major groups along socioeconomic lines: one that has the power to control its exposure to the coronavirus outbreak and another that is forced to choose between potential sickness or financial devastation.”

And as if with so much of our American story, this is a schism where race is key, with the Times noting that:

[this] push is likely to exacerbate longstanding inequalities, with workers are college educated, relatively affluent and primarily white able to continue working from home and minimizing outdoor excursions to reduce the risk of contracting the virus.

Those who are lower paid, less educated and employed in jobs where teleworking is not an option would face a bleak choice if states lift restrictive orders and employers order them back to work: expose themselves to the pandemic or lose their jobs.

That disempowered group is heavily black and Latino, though it includes lower-income white workers as well.

As Donald Trump pushes to re-open the economy, and governors from both parties begin implementing re-opening measures, this basic disparity in the resulting risk — between rich and poor, between whites and minorities — is something all Americans need to reckon with it, at least if we still aspire to be a just and moral society.  Lower-wage and minority workers have already been disproportionately affected by the economic fallout of the coronavirus, as well as by the disease itself, and would clearly benefit from a reopening.  Yet these groups would in turn face the highest health risks as businesses are allowed to reopen and they return to work.

Of course, states that are beginning to re-open are urging caution and self-protection for workers — but such precautions crash into two harsh realities.  First, states still lack the necessary testing and contact tracing ability to ensure that the virus does not begin to flare up again.  Second, the U.S. remains far short of adequate personal protective equipment for workers who need it.  Without these measures, which would represent the states and federal government doing everything possible to protect returning workers, we are simply asking them to take avoidable and thus unnecessary risks.  Ignoring the disproportionate effect on groups who have less power to influence such decision-making should set off alarms for all fair-minded Americans.

It’s bad enough that government at the state and federal levels would fail to acknowledge the disparate impacts on Americans by race and class that will result from re-opening measures.  But such willful blindness becomes simply malignant as we see various states insisting that workers who refuse to return to re-opened businesses will have their unemployment benefits cut off.  The Washington Post reports that Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and other states have issued such warnings, and that they have been most prominently issued by Republican politicians.  Officials specifically point to concerns that workers may prefer to continue receiving jobless benefits more generous than their wages; in voicing such fears, they draw on decades worth of right-wing propaganda that American workers are fundamentally lazy and will always seek to unduly exploit benefits like unemployment insurance.  But bringing up such – as of now, totally unfounded – concerns gives the game away, as the far more likely reason Americans would prefer not to return to work is that they fear for their lives.

Under these circumstances, it’s more important than ever for Republicans to paint a picture of workers — particularly lower-wage employees — as recalcitrant, child-like, and in need of goading to make them do an honest day’s work.  And when you stop to consider that the employees at whom these warnings are directed are disproportionately minorities, the racist undercurrent become undeniable and grotesque.  Adding insult to injury, such authorities are pro-actively scapegoating relatively powerless workers for America’s economic challenges under coronavirus: the underlying message is that if they don’t do their duty and go back to work, any continued economic problems will be their fault.

To admit otherwise — that all workers are free to make their own informed assessment as to risks and rewards, and that their decisions deserve the respect of their fellow Americans — would severely undercut the moral authority of state governments to pose such a harsh dilemma for millions of citizens.  As one AFL-CIO official put it, “These states are offering people the choice to endanger your life or starve.”  The fact that states are already issuing such harsh warnings offers support to those who suspect that in seeking a balance between public health and the economy, many states have opted in favor of the latter.

It's neither just nor tenable for one enormous swathe of Americans to be treated as ungrateful, disposable, and lacking choice, as meanwhile vast segments of the white-collar work force are able to rise above the awful dilemma of choosing between work and health.  Such a split has long plagued American society, but the threat of coronavirus has made the terms immediate and unmistakable.  Workers like myself can remain safely at home, able to telecommute to our heart’s content, and with varying degrees of assurance that our employers will not prematurely require us to work in the office.  This is partly due to the nature of jobs that can be done on a computer, but it also speaks to the relative power of white-collar workers vis-à-vis their employers.  I’m quite certain that at many thousands of firms, an order to return to work that white-collar employees felt endangered them would be met with mass resistance, if not outright resignations.  I can only imagine the mix of anger, helplessness, and fear I’d be feeling right now if I were a blue collar worker being asked by, say, the Iowa governor to wrap a bandana around my face, cross my fingers, and return to a meatpacking line.  If returning to work is not a choice that you would freely make, then it’s not a choice that your fellow workers should be asked to make, either.  

In some ways, the frantic maneuvering by government and business to force employees to put themselves at risk is aggravated by the behavior of another grouping of Americans over which they have no such control: the consumers who are supposed to start frequenting all those re-opened businesses.  As many astute observers are pointing out, why on earth should consumers feel safe going to businesses that aren’t able to assure the health of their employees?  

Our collective ability to consider the immorality of the trade-off faced by many Americans who might be able to work only at the cost of risking their lives has been undercut by the president’s desperate efforts to drive the conversation, and to prod states into re-opening businesses as soon as possible.  In a grotesque inversion, we are to believe that it is the economy that is in mortal risk, not actual human lives, and that it can only be saved by sending in Americans to staunch the bleeding.  But this is a false choice.  We are being told that as a nation, we can’t afford for states to maintain lockdown orders for, say, another month to give time for infection rates to go down, and to allow more time to get the testing and contact tracing infrastructure in place, not to mention to manufacture the many millions of masks workers will need in order to safeguard their health.

This is clearly a lie.  The United States could easily afford to pay every American unable to work remotely to stay home for another month, and support the businesses that are impacted; but this is not happening because the Republican Party has indicated this is a non-starter, and because not enough Democrats are refusing to dig in and fight for it.  It was heartening to at least see one of our Oregon senators, Ron Wyden, taking a stand on this issue.  Wyden told the Post that the issue of workers getting their unemployment cut off was due to GOP governors “casting public health aside and forcing their states to reopen” and that “pretending the crisis is over when it’s not over will make it much harder to contain the virus and for workers to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.”

Indeed, attempting to push around working-class and minority Americans isn’t only reprehensible in and of itself, but pretty much guaranteed to prolong our health and financial crisis.  If workers are not protected, then they’ll simply vector the coronavirus into their customer base.  It’s hard not to conclude that the president’s re-election panic has combined with the GOP’s latent white supremacism to result in a deeply flawed, premature vision of re-opening America, with the most vulnerable, disproportionately minority workers as sacrificial pawns.  This is brutal, appalling stuff, and every American will need to choose between solidarity or tacit endorsement of this self-defeating and murderous strategy.

Deadly Treatment of Meatpacking Workers Betrays American Values

Adding to the toll of the coronavirus pandemic, we are beginning to see reports of impending meat shortages in the coming months.  Politico notes that meat plants are overall operating at 60% of their capacity, and that stockpiles are starting to decline slightly.   The reason for this is that many meatpacking facilities have been the site of coronavirus outbreaks, due not only to the close quarters in which workers operate but, more fundamentally, to a catastrophic failure of both meat processors and the U.S. government to prevent worker illness.

The Washington Post has the most in-depth story I’ve seen to date on the scope of this issue, covering failures by three major companies: Tyson Foods, JBS USA, and Smithfield Foods.  Across the industry, these corporations have lied to their workers about the risks from the coronavirus, and have failed to take adequate measures to protect worker health.  Many facilities simply refused to allow sick workers to go home without losing their jobs.  Workers for one company were told that everyone has already had the virus, so there was no need to worry; others were told that the cold temperatures of their facility meant the virus could not survive there.  Another posted a communication to employees suggesting that the U.S. government deemed it necessary that they keep working in unsafe conditions. 

Again and again, the meatpacking industry put profit over human lives, in a self-destructive strategy that has both led to plant closures and endangered the food supply of the United States.  The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is complicit in this clusterfuck; while it released guidance around protective gear for workers, it also indicated it would not enforce such regulations in order not to burden companies, which amounts to doing nothing at all.  OSHA has clearly failed these workers, which is not surprising given the president who oversees this agency; House investigations of its refusal to do its job are now necessary.

One clear theme of the Post article is that it came down to county health officials to clamp down on plants that suffered Covid-19 outbreaks, with the local authorities clearly aware of their responsibility for trying to prevent outbreaks that would overwhelm their health care resources.  Yet prudent action by local health agencies has been insufficient in the absence of strong federal action, as 3,300 workers have fallen ill and 17 have died at more than 30 plants across the country.  Many workers have in turn transmitted the virus to their families.

Not only did these companies fail to protect their workers, they are now lying about their efforts, as evidenced by the testimony of multiple workers and documentation that contradicts claims that they acted adequately in the face of the virus.  Whether through incompetence, indifference to human life, or some combination of the two, these companies treated their workers not much differently than the animals they slaughter, replaceable cogs in a multi-billion dollar machine.

It was entirely predictable that the meatpacking industry would be impacted by the coronavirus, yet clearly the Trump administration did nothing to get ahead of the threat.  This is a betrayal of the workers, but also for the country that relies on their labor.  It is difficult to believe that the high numbers of undocumented workers in the industry has no relationship to this indifference — it is estimated that a third of them are non-citizens, a situation which has long enabled the meat industry to subject its workforce to conditions that, even before the coronavirus, were the stuff of nightmares, from unsanitary environments to hideous injuries from dangerous equipment.  Both the industry and government regulators have long viewed these workers as expendable, and the coronavirus crisis has not changed this view.

The coronavirus is making many of us reconsider the essential nature of jobs many of us didn’t adequately appreciate before, from grocery clerks and Amazon fulfillment center workers to UPS delivery people and city bus drivers.  The threat of mass death and the prospect of economic collapse has spurred a renewed realization of our interdependence.  With the meatpacking industry in crisis, we’re learning a fresh lesson in how refusing to defend necessary workers in good times threatens us all in bad times.

Premature Relaxation of Social Distancing Rules Is A Triumph of Magical Thinking

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last week, it’s that there’s a strong consensus among medical professional that the United States lacks the coronavirus testing capability that we’ll need to contain and eventually eliminate this pandemic.  The conservative figure I’ve seen is that we need 3 times as much testing as at present; others urge something many multiples of that, on the order of 22 million tests a day (this Vox article provides a comprehensive overview of the various testing strategies).

And yet, several states — including Tennessee, Missouri, Idaho, Georgia, and Florida — are now beginning to relax their social distancing restrictions, despite lacking the capacity to conduct anything near to the recommended testing.  Though all these states insist they are taking proper precautions, you don’t have to be a medical expert to see that this is a potential catastrophe in the making, a squandering of the precious time we’ve bought through the sacrifices of the severe lockdowns to date.  Without sufficient testing, not to mention mass availability of no-brainer measures like effective masks, premature relaxing of quarantine measures means needless deaths, and a possibility that the virus will come back as strong as ever.

The re-opening of barber shops and bowling allies in a state like Georgia makes a mockery of the necessity of these moves.  Haircuts and bowling a strike are both profound pleasures of life, but they are hardly necessities, and at any rate not worth risking lives over.  Far better for the government to bail out these businesses while they remain closed for the sake of public safety.

It’s the triumph of magical thinking over rationality: the mentality is that since we have already suffered, our suffering has redeemed us, and we will suffer no longer.  The magical thinking pretends to root itself in data, but this only makes it more insidious.  States are relaxing restrictions as they believe they are past the peak of new infections.  But as a Columbia University epidemiologist tells the Washington Post, “those declines have come only because of sweeping social distancing rules, and [. . .] as the rules are relaxed, controlling transmission will become more difficult.”  To the degree this loosening is driven by the president’s deranged quest to save his re-election, and by right-wing protests driven by stilted notions of personal freedom, fantasy is fueling these moves.  We have already seen how in the early days of the pandemic, single or small groups of people ended up facilitating massive spread of the disease.  As the mayor of Tulsa, OK remarks to the Post, his city “does not exist in a bubble [. . .] we should expect the illness to spread.”

Every state is affected when one makes the wrong decision, which brings us back to the over-arching truth of this crisis: as a country, we are in danger so long as imaginary thinking and incompetence prevail in the White House, and prevent the orchestration of a national strategy to navigate us through this crisis.  Unfortunately, going by the president’s latest speculation that bright light and mainlining bleach might save us, what was already a tenuous grip on reality at the top has shifted further into the realm of make-believe and denialism.

It could not be any clearer that we are undergoing a political and societal crisis as much as a health and economic crisis.  Politicians who balance public health and economic stability wrong will get people killed while causing the economy to backslide.  It is not inspiring that a preponderance of the states relaxing the rules have Republican governors, who are more likely to embrace the fantasy thinking and political priorities of our disinfectant-addled president.  Right now, it seems like citizens of states like Georgia and Oklahoma are unwitting subjects of a wild scientific experiment.  I also suspect that those who can work from home in those states will continue to do so, which will skew the lab subjects to a disproportionately working class demographic.

Freedumb and Dumber

I’ve already made clear what I think of the “re-open America” protests that have taken in place in various states around the country.  As we learn more about their astroturf origins and right-wing proponents, we can see that they’re less about protecting Americans’ freedom and more about trying to cudgel democratically-elected and largely Democratic governors, as well as constituting an ill-conceived and deadly effort to advance the president’s re-election chances by prematurely allowing businesses to re-open.

But it’s not morally adequate or politically smart to point to their motivations and call it a day.  Whether or not we can maintain necessary social distancing is a life and death matter, and requires massive societal consensus. There are very few Americans who don’t long to resume life as usual, and who strain at the current restrictions.  The ideas of personal freedom that the anti-quarantine forces point to have broad appeal across the U.S.; who among us is against freedom, for goodness’ sake?

It may at first seem counter-intuitive, but I actually think we need to recognize the ways in which the anti-restriction protestors may be right about our freedom currently being restricted, beyond the crude assertion that we should be free to do whatever we want whenever we want.  In particular, restrictions on freedom of movement mean that a host of other liberties guarantied to Americans are truncated or non-existent, including freedom of association, freedom to worship, and freedom to assemble.  This last point gets to what I think is an under-rated cost of the current situation — the way that it hampers our ability to organize and act politically.

But recognizing this massive curtailment of American liberty in a variety of areas — which, collectively, help to give our lives purpose and meaning — isn’t the same as arguing that social distancing and other such orders are illegitimate.  Rather, it means that there’d better be a damned good reason for these restrictions.

Of course, there is such a reason: a deadly and easily communicable virus that swept much of the globe before gaining a foothold in the United States.  Because we’re dealing with such a mortal, even existential threat, you can see how arguments about freedom actually include aspects we might not have thought about before — the freedom to be alive, for example, or the freedom not to be sickened by irresponsible neighbors who don’t take adequate precautions.  A wider perspective begins to emerge: government can be seen as restricting our freedoms now to protect them for the future — a trade-off that should always be viewed with deep skepticism, but which really does pass the reality test in our present circumstances.

What makes this freedom-based argument much more persuasive is a point that, not by coincidence, the anti-quarantine protestors totally reject: the concept that governments in the United States are democratically-elected, and are empowered to act in the public name and for the public good.  The conflict between the protestors’ stated arguments and those who contend that the restrictions are legitimate comes down to whether the government has the ability and legitimacy to navigate broader questions of freedom, including protecting the long-term liberty of the many — even if it calls for short-term restrictions that nearly all of us would find unacceptable otherwise.

A complicated but very real relationship exists between democratic government and the rights that a vast majority of Americans believe in: for a variety of reasons, the far-right denies this relationship, and the idea that collective action might not just restrict freedom but amplify it (think: universal health care that allows Americans to live healthier and longer lives (more freedom!), public education that allows you to pursue your dreams plus make more money (more freedom!), or environmental protections that allow the freedom not to die from mercury poisoning (more freedom!).  A whole cacophony of dumb conclusions follow from the right’s opposition to “collectivist” action, including disbelief that the government might act in the public interest in ways that temporarily restrict important liberties.  

Fortunately, most Americans do understand this relationship between their freedom and the governments they elect, though it’s as much an intuitive understanding as anything else, and one somewhat frayed by years of assault by the countervailing conservative perspective.  We can tell this is the case by the massive public support for the current restrictions.  We may not like them, but we understand they are necessary — and legitimate.  In fact, it’s possible that motivating some of this current right-wing resistance is their awareness that this crisis is re-awakening Americans‘ understanding of the collective good, as journalist and historian David M. Perry suggests in a recent opinion piece.

Perry goes on to describe Americans’ mass willingness to restrict their activities as a “patriotic urge toward the common good” and “an act of love,” which gets at how our society thrives not simply on abstract ideas of freedom and responsibility, but on connectedness and compassion that aren’t spelled out anywhere in the Constitution — but that unite us nonetheless.

Yet the current necessity for restrictions on our daily lives shouldn’t for one moment blind us to their severity, their cost, or the culpability of the president whose catastrophic handling of this crisis has made them unavoidable.  As has been thoroughly documented, Donald Trump failed to take the actions that might have reduced the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. to a fraction of its current size.  Instead of mobilizing the government to fight it, from ensuring we had adequate testing to procuring sufficient protective equipment for medical professionals, he chose instead to engage in a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the American people that the virus was a hoax, a mere flu, something that would sicken only a handful of people.  Donald Trump immersed himself in a world of fantasy, and this denialism resulted in a deadly reality for the rest of us.

So if the right wing wants to talk about freedom, then let’s not shy away from the debate.  Let’s talk about the freedom Donald Trump has cost us all, starting with the jobs lost, the religious services curtailed, and the ability of millions of students to continue their education, and moving on to the mortal blows to our liberty — the tens of thousands of Americans dead, whose freedom is lost forever, and whose deaths diminish all of us.  As writer John Stoehr argues, Donald Trump is the one who has come for our freedoms, not state governments. In his encouragement of premature openings and hoax cures, he allows the coronavirus to continue to pin us down in fear and uncertainty. Only when he has been driven from office will we be able to fully regain our full sense of possibility, as a country and as individuals.

In Rhetoric and Action, Trump and the GOP Have Given Up on the United States

I noted a few days ago how the right-wing protestors against social-distancing orders carry an implicit message that democratically-elected governments are, strangely enough, to be considered anti-democratic dictatorships imposing their will on the populace.  Greg Sargent makes a point that’s less theoretical and closer to the mark: what many of the protestors oppose isn’t just democratic governance but Democratic governance.  He reminds us that the president has been making a similar argument for years now, for instance when he has suggested that the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives doesn’t actually speak for the American people.  The president and the protestors share a belief that government is always to be treated as illegitimate when controlled by Democrats.

As Sargent also reminds us, though, this isn’t an idea that originated with Trump, but one that’s central to the Republicans’ decades-long effort to combat their increasing inability to win majority support by essentially arguing that the only people who really count in our country are GOP voters.  This manifests in a variety of familiar ways, such as when Republicans distinguish between “makers” (white, virtuous, heartland Americans) and “takers” (minority, parasitic city dwellers).  And as Sargent notes, this mindset has already been part of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, as seen in the president’s speculation about imposing quarantines on blue northeastern states to, in Sargent’s words, “protect virtuous Red America [. . .] from getting infected by a disease exported by depraved Blue America.”

But under the pressure of the coronavirus crisis, I think that the deserving us-versus-undeserving-them division that underlies the president’s and the GOP’s primary political stance has revealed a facet that’s been hiding in plain view all along, nestled among the racism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism: namely, that neither the Republican Party nor Donald Trump really believe in the existence of the United States.  Sure, they know there are millions of people living in a particular geographic region called the United States — but a single united country populated by citizens with equal rights?  Such a reality is no longer comprehensible to them, but how could it be?  Once you’ve decided that the majority of Americans don’t actually deserve full citizenship — and how else can we describe an attitude that believes in voter suppression and other restrictions for Democrats trying to cast ballots – what’s left of the nation?  It’s hollowed-out, a shadow of its former self, an artificial entity rather than a living, breathing organic whole.

Donald Trump certainly has never acted like someone who believed in the United States, but only in the citizens and states that voted for him.  This has been demonstrated since his first days in office, as he’s made it clear his only constituency is his base.  And as coronavirus has ravaged blue states and urban areas, he’s shown a fundamental indifference to the loss of life and to the prospect of alienating the voters of states he never expected to win in 2020.  Beyond the sociopathic attitude to mass death among non-supporters, he has indicated time and again that states are on their own in the fight against coronavirus.  Has there ever been a modern president so unwilling to remind us that we are all in a crisis together, that state borders matter little at a time like this?  It’s not just a logical result of his habit of breaking the country up between supporters and opponents — it’s also been his way of evading responsibility for his catastrophic lack of leadership.  If it’s necessary to deny the existence of a unified country in order to deny his responsibilities as president of that unified country, then so be it.

But the same attitude is prevalent in the congressional GOP.  As just one example: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been speculating about the desirability of allowing states to declare bankruptcy due to the pandemic, rather than the federal government sending them money to prevent governmental insolvency.  It’s notable that McConnell brought up state pension obligations as something he doesn’t want to help fund; after all, many of those public pensioners are union members, and the modern GOP is defined partly by its hatred of organized labor.  But the larger message is unmistakable: states and their citizens are considered not to be part of the United States, and there is no logical relationship between the U.S. Congress and the needs of individual states governments.  This is ideological abstraction raised to an art form, in the name of denying a reality evident to the average American: we’re all U.S. citizens first and state citizens second, and if states need a bailout so that the basic functions of government can continue, then we goddamn better get it from the federal government.

A president and an opposition that don’t actually believe in the United States: this would seem to leave a hole large enough in the political firmament for an opposition party to drive a No Malarkey-sized tour bus through. 

"Invisible Enemy" Moniker for Coronavirus Merits a Closer Look

You’ve probably heard President Trump use the phrase “invisible enemy” to describe the coronavirus at some point, but it may surprise you to learn he’s actually deployed it nearly every single day for a month now, in what Politico columnist Jack Schafer argues is a deliberate “branding campaign, one fashioned to shape our attitudes toward the microbe to his liking.”  Schafer continues, “By calling the virus ‘invisible,’ Trump implies that he can’t be responsible for its wreckage because who can be expected to see an invisible thing coming? And once the unseeable thing has arrived, there are limits to what one can be expected to do about it!”  He goes on to point out the self-serving lie this advances, as it helps cover up the president’s reckless decision to ignore and downplay the coronavirus threat despite repeated urgent warnings.  And calling the virus an “enemy” lets the president pretend he’s a wartime commander-in-chief, with the political bump that might bring and the patriotic loyalty it engenders.  Again, though, as Shafer points out, the “enemy” moniker is misleading when we’re talking about a mindless disease.

Shafer notes that other Republican politicians have adopted this phrase, which is hardly surprising as it allows them to tie themselves to the president while also benefiting from it in the same way Trump does.  But the larger lesson here is one that’s been playing out throughout the Trump administration — the president’s use of language to manipulate reality and gain political advantage.  All politicians do this, of course, but Trump and his cronies have used language to incite and divide Americans in an especially destructive fashion.  This linguistic strategy has been abetted by insufficient attention and pushback against it, both by the press and by the opposition.  His more inflammatory language rightly gets attention, but lesser concoctions like “invisible enemy” too often slip under the radar.

Inciting Anti-Government Protests, Trump Yields Last Shreds of Legitimacy

As protests against social-distancing measures have popped up around the country over the past week, it’s important to recognize them as manifestations of right-wing extremism rather than a broad-based movement, as a great majority of Americans still back social-distancing measures and a careful process of reversing them.  There is an unmistakably misbegotten and tendentious quality to these protests.  The assertion that state governments are acting in a tyrannical fashion depends on the notion that the United States isn’t actually experiencing a once-in-a-century pandemic, a deadly virus that spreads extremely easily.  It also depends on excluding the fact that catastrophic failures by the Trump administration made such extreme social-distancing measures necessary, and on pretending that governors have just randomly decided to oppress their citizens by arbitrary restrictions.

In other words, the protestors embrace a grossly distorted version of reality, in which the actual reasons for the stay-at-home orders are abstracted of context, and are decried as arbitrary governmental overreach.  Any relationship between the necessity of the lockdowns and mistakes by the president are simply whitewashed out of the picture.  And underlying the protests is the bizarre assumption that democratically-elected governments aren’t actually able to act in the people’s name, that government is ever and always to be considered an alien intervention in American lives, and that collective action is only legitimate if spontaneously taken by Americans acting to oppose their government.  Finally, the fact that many of the protestors haven’t observed social distancing rules at demonstrations confirms an ignorance or denial of basic medical facts, as they turn themselves into potential victims or vectors of the coronavirus.

Frankly, though, even this little bit of explication almost feels like a waste of time.  As an NBC report notes, “The protests have been a unifier of anti-government and conspiracy-minded subcultures, bringing anti-vaccination activists, anti-government militia groups, religious fundamentalists and white supremacists together at state capitols.”  In Lansing, Michigan, anti-government militants like the Michigan Militia and Proud Boys showed up, as did bearers of the Confederate flag. There is also strong evidence that many protests have a significant astroturf element, funded by rich donors rather than representing an organic upswell of just plain folks’ outrage.  The Tea Party comparison that some observers have been making feels particularly apt: just as a fundamentally racist and anti-democratic movement cloaked itself in an obsession with fiscal austerity following the election of our first African-American president, a similar and overlapping coalition now protests restrictions on their freedoms by governors trying to preserve the public health — but the actual objective appears to be simply to use this issue as a cudgel against Democratic governors, and to advance the fortunes of the president, the Republican Party, and its big business supporters. After all, as Susan Demas writes in a report on protests in Michigan, “When Republicans and CEOs tell you they want to open up the economy, it’s because they don’t want the federal government to provide basic income and benefits while people are home so that we actually beat a virus that’s already killed more than 33,000 people in this country.  What they derisively call ‘welfare state’ spending gets in the way of massive tax giveaways for the super-rich.”

As Exhibit A for this interpretation of events, we need look no further than the president himself, who on Friday lent his support to such protests when he tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”  Many have already pointed out that just the day before, the president had seemed to finally agree that governors should be the ones to make the decisions on when to relax coronavirus restrictions in their states.  But now, as Osita Nwanevu writes at The New Republic, “Trump is pivoting to what he does best—inflaming his base, both to build public pressure on governors to open their state economies sooner and to misplace blame for an economic downturn made necessary by the administration’s initial failure to monitor and contain the virus.”

The protest story is a Trump story, and it would be playing into his propaganda to view the protests otherwise.  This makes it especially important to acknowledge the vast inappropriateness of Trump’s “LIBERATE” tweets.  It’s bad enough that he wants to make governors take the blame for an economic slowdown that he’s responsible for — but enacting a strategy to pressure governors to open up their economies prematurely both threatens to get more Americans killed, and to undo the very economic progress he sees as essential to his re-election.  Doing this in a way that gives aid and comfort to right-wing movements that openly speculate about the need for violence to press their demands escalates the political malpractice to a whole other level.

Against this, the response of Democrats and other opponents of Trump needs to be unequivocal.  Washington Governor Jay Inslee has the best riposte that I’ve seen; he put out a statement that includes the following:

The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly, and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted.

Just yesterday, the president stood alongside White House officials and public health experts and said science would guide his plan for easing restrictions.  [. . .]

 Less than 24 hours later, the president is off the rails. He’s not quoting scientists and doctors but spewing dangerous, anti-democratic rhetoric [. . .]  

The president’s call to action today threatens to undermine his own goal of recovery by further delaying the ability of states to amend current interventions in a safe, evidence-based way. His words are likely to cause COVID-19 infections to spike in places where social distancing is working — and if infections are increasing in those places, that will further postpone the 14 days of decline that his own guidance says is necessary before modifying any interventions.  

I hope political leaders of all sorts will speak out firmly against the president’s calls for rebellion.

Inslee’s statement is notable for a couple reasons.  He asserts that the president has engaged in unacceptable behavior, in part by making it more likely that the coronavirus will spread even more.  And by focusing on the president’s incitement of “domestic rebellion,” Inslee articulates what is arguably the central crime of Donald Trump’s tenure in office: his willingness to divide Americans against each other, even to the point of courting violence by his supporters, while failing to advance and protect the national interest.

What Inslee also suggests, without fully articulating it, is that the president has shown himself unfit for office.  After all, when a wide array of the president’s actions result in worsening a deadly pandemic, and his solution is to incite mass resistance against the state governments as a way of evading accountability, we have reached a point where it is folly to act if he still retains any moral or political legitimacy.  We also need to acknowledge the relationship between the president’s willingness to continually engage in unfit acts and the Democrats’ unwillingness to make his unfitness for office part of their daily discourse.  Such reticence is part of our crisis; as Josh Marshall writes, we should be “consistently demanding Donald Trump’s resignation” — if the president is largely responsible for our crisis, then the proper punishment for his catastrophic leadership is a necessary element of setting the terms of debate for resolving it.

Of course the president will never resign, but making calls for his resignation a central part of our political discourse, as a way of spotlighting his abdication of duty and the importance of forging a path forward that minimizes his ability to do further harm, is well within the reach of the Democratic Party.  It is a position merited not only by Trump’s recent encouragement of rebellion against democratically-elected state governments — though that alone would be sufficient — but by the many months of his catastrophically-bungled response to the crisis.  It’s not enough for Democrats to assume that since a large majority of Americans support the caution exhibited by most governors, they will judge the president harshly on his obvious preference for putting the economy and his re-election interests ahead of public health.  That might be an adequate argument if all Democrats had to care about was winning in November, but Democrats’ responsibility is more immediate and urgent than that.  Elected Democrats at all levels have a responsibility to protect the lives of all Americans right now — lives endangered by a president who continues to subordinate the spread of the coronavirus to his perceived re-election needs, and who threatens to undo any economic recovery by creating the conditions for a renewed wave of illness.

It would be one thing if Donald Trump were acknowledging his previous mistakes and honestly trying to find a proper balance between protecting American lives and saving our economy.  Instead, the opposite is happening.  Determined to deny any culpability for the mass, preventable deaths sweeping the United States, and to salvage his re-election chances, he downplays the deaths to date while seeking to open up economy activity prematurely and scheming to place the responsibility for any resultant mass casualties on governors and mayors.  Even as we have only a third of the testing capacity necessary to safely ease social-distancing rules — due in part to the president’s efforts to downplay the virus during January and February — Trump urges right-wing protestors in hard-hit states like Michigan to force governors to undo policies meant to defend their states against mass casualties.  Donald Trump’s removal from office isn’t just a logical demand because of what he did in the past, but because of continued mistakes that amplify the terrible errors he has already made.

Alongside coordinated and sustained arguments for the president’s resignation, Democrats need to hold daily briefings as counter-programming to Trump’s deranged and propagandistic coronavirus briefings.  If they believe that the president’s actions are endangering Americans, then they have a moral and political responsibility to broadcast this fact, and to highlight what the United States needs to do instead.  Such briefings should also include plain descriptions of what the president is doing wrong.  His attempt to shift blame for all that has gone wrong, and might still go wrong, is fair game for discussion.  Not only would this help to hold the president accountable for his errors and evasions, but would also provide useful context for Americans to understand whatever fresh propaganda and hare-brained schemes the president tries to put forward.

But beyond this, the meta-message needs to be that Donald Trump has lost his moral authority to lead the nation, and should no longer be treated with the deference accorded an ordinary president.  Legitimate American presidents don’t twiddle their thumbs for months and call a deadly pandemic a Democratic hoax that will magically disappear on its own.  Legitimate American presidents don’t threaten to withhold supplies to states unless their governors offer proper praise and obeisance.  Legitimate American presidents don’t support right-wing protests that undermine necessary safety measures taken by governors of the opposite party.  Legitimate American presidents don’t roll the dice with the lives of tens of thousands of Americans for the sake of re-election.

New Details on the Saga of the USS Roosevelt

A recent New York Times article provides additional details and context about the spread of the coronavirus aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and the firing of its captain after he tried to raise the alarm with his superiors.  The piece does a good job of relating this story to how the military has fared under Trump; in the reporters’ words, the tale of the Roosevelt touches on “how the military, the most structured and hierarchical part of the government, has tried to adjust to an erratic president, and how in a hollowed-out leadership, acting secretaries have replaced those confirmed by the Senate.”  It also provides a lot of details I hadn’t seen before about the port visit to Vietnam where crew members were infected with the coronavirus and the early steps to stop its spread onboard (one historical footnote picked up by the Times – the Roosevelt’s visit to Da Nang was only the second time a U.S. aircraft carrier had visited Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War).  The piece also provides more evidence that acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly’s harsh intervention in the matter – specifically, his decision to step over the chain of command and fire the captain – was driven by his interest in pleasing President Trump.  And though it’s been reported elsewhere, the fact that Modly’s subsequent flight to Guam to berate the crew and insult the captain cost taxpayers $243,000 is a reminder that there are many other layers of obscene waste by this administration which have yet to see the light of day.

What’s still unclear after reading this article is why Captain Brett Crozier’s superiors opposed his request to evacuate most of the crew off the ship, and believed that the coronavirus could be contained without such a move.  The fact that hundreds of crew members have subsequently tested positive, with one fatality, would seem to settle that argument in Crozier’s favor, but that doesn’t mean officers up the chain of command didn’t have good reasons for opposing the request – at this point, the public needs access to the considerations involved in that refusal.  There are also points of inconsistency that need resolution.  For instance, Modly had an aide get in touch with Crozier, with the aide reporting back to Moldy that the captain was satisfied with the Navy’s response – yet the captain was already composing his plea for help at that point.

The prime questions that remain are whether the Navy acted reasonably in refusing Crozier’s pleas to evacuate the Roosevelt, and if not, to what degree the Navy was influenced by the Trump administration’s general desire to downplay the threat posed by the coronavirus.

LATE UPDATE: And now the Washington Post has published a story with more new details about the Roosevelt saga – including a copy of the communication Crozier sent up the chain of command.  Among other things, we now know that Modly lied to the media about the email having 20 or 30 recipients – there were three main addressees, plus another seven captains cc’d. 

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.