It's Trump Versus the Trump Administration, as Lead Health Professionals Dare to Speak the Truth

Yesterday I noted a deluge of information hitting us daily that points to a nation very much unprepared to begin easing social distancing rules and widespread business closures, owing to the escalating spread of the coronavirus and the lack of various measures in place — testing, contact tracing, and the like — that can help mitigate and contain its spread.  A few more such sources are worth adding: the testimony of Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield to the Senate on Tuesday, and today’s testimony of Dr. Rick Bright, a former high-ranking health official turned whistleblower.  The New York Times characterizes their cumulative testimony as a “one-two punch for the administration,” an accurate assessment as far as it goes, but which leaves out the urgent moral and health dimensions of why this is so.

Dr. Fauci warned of “needless suffering and death” if states open up too quickly, while Dr. Bright said the U.S. would face “the darkest winter in modern history” if the Trump administration does not move forward with adequate national testing and accompanying mitigation strategies.  Against the urgency these two experts place on saving American lives, and on the need for both progress and plans before restrictions should be eased, is opposed the president’s obsession is with revving up the economy, without regard for the human cost, without consideration of the concrete measures that could make re-opening far safer, and without acknowledgment of the likely spiking of the virus that is likely to result as Americans begin to re-engage in behavior that facilitates its spread.

 While both doctors drew on their experience and expertise, the president’s criticism of their testimony demonstrates his ignorance and basic unfitness for office.  His remarks about Dr. Fauci’s testimony are particularly telling.  Responding to the doctor’s remarks about a too-quick re-opening of both businesses and schools, the president told reporters that, “I was surprised by his answer.  To me it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.”  Trump also commented that, “Now when you have an incident, one out of a million, one out of 500,000, will something happen?  Perhaps.  But you can be driving to school and some bad things can happen, too.”

 The idea that Dr. Fauci’s answer was “unacceptable” begs the question of what makes it so.  He is, after all, an expert on the subject on which he speaks; the president is very much not.  The quality that obviously taints Dr. Fauci’s response in Trump’s eyes is its truth.  The president seizes on the idea that the coronavirus doesn’t harm children, which in the first place is not true (witness the many cases in New York of a coronavirus-related inflammatory syndrome) and in the second, ignores the role that children can play as vectors for the disease even as it generally does not sicken them nearly as much as adults.  That the president would ignore, or be ignorant of, this crucial aspect of re-opening schools is staggering.  He considers himself the person in government who, unlike Dr. Fauci, can provide “acceptable” answers, yet they are based not on science or facts, but the overriding need to protect his power at all costs.  He feigns expertise and a special understanding of scientific reality, but what he demonstrates instead is a profound stupidity and unforgivable callousness towards American lives.  “Unacceptable” is the wrong word to describe Dr. Fauci’s expert opinion, but it’s the right one for the president’s nonsense and its deadly consequences.

And let’s not overlook the very important point that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield aren’t some rogue outsiders bent on destroying Trump’s presidency, but actual members of his administration.

 As I said yesterday, the president’s mind-boggling refusal to acknowledge reality is sustained in great part by the willingness of the GOP to embrace a similar fantasy view of the world, in which the coronavirus is an overhyped threat, and in which Democrats are interested solely in using the coronavirus to destroy the economy (the president tweeted as much on Monday).  And so Republican senators used their time with Dr. Fauci to ask questions that should embarrass any American with a passing knowledge of this pandemic.  Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee proclaimed that the nation has sufficient testing “to begin going back to work” (a lie), while Rand Paul of Kentucky insisted that children should return to school (like the president, ignoring the role that children can play in spreading the disease — a particularly embarrassing argument to make, given that Paul is a doctor, or at least claims to be).

 The president and the GOP are engaging in a strategy that’s breathtakingly cruel and almost certain to subvert their obsessive goal of goosing the economy in time for the November election.  Sure, you can let businesses open while infection rates are rising and testing remains far below necessary levels, but this doesn’t mean Americans will start shopping again.  I suppose the GOP’s next step is to enforce American consumption by means of creative penalties — for example by docking our future Social Security income by whatever amount we selfishly refuse to spend in the present.

 And if that fails, they can always resort to the more coercive arts of their armed allies, the gunmen who’ve threatened Wisconsin legislators and vowed to defend Texas businesses that defy shutdown orders; only now, instead of just arguing for a premature relaxation of coronavirus restrictions, these bearded buckos will go direct-to-consumer, forcing us at gunpoint to shop the local Walmart, to dare the inside of a nearby Starbucks, to stop at the CVS down the street for a solitary, gratuitous tube of toothpaste.  Though I doubt they will be content even then.  As we hesitate too long in choosing between Crest and Colgate, distracted not for the first time by the legendary rivalry of those iconic brands, I see these militia of capitalism offering barbed opinions about our slow decision-making, urging us to make a choice and be done with all the shilly-shallying, sliding off the safety of their AR-15’s in frustration as our continued indecisiveness enrages them further. . . honestly, it’s really hard to make those guys happy.

Sleepwalking Into An American Nightmare

A flood of data and reporting continues to reinforce the argument that, by prematurely relaxing social distancing restrictions on citizens and businesses, much of the United States is heading into an ever-greater health calamity of its own making.  The single greatest portion of blame goes to the president, who continues to embrace a sociopathic obsession with economic resurgence, even at the cost of countless lives, as key to his re-election.  But in an inversion of the saying about success having many fathers, but failure being an orphan, we can see here that failure is a truly multi-headed hydra of a family, the president’s deranged impulses being seconded by a grab-bag of governors, business leaders, and right-wing movements.  

In the most benign reading of the facts, many states are easing restrictions to protect millions of their citizens from continued economic pain, rather than in response to presidential pressure or the imprecations of powerful business interests.  But it appears that in most states, the public health measures that will prevent such re-opening from leading to a new, even worse wave of infections is simply not in place.  Testing is farcically inadequate and often inaccurate; contact tracing efforts are mostly in their preliminary stages; and the message that masks can play a large role in slowing the spread of transmission has been muddled by deranged right-wing pushback against the practice.  This New York Times piece has a great rundown of the various gaps in the health infrastructure that make a resurgence not just likely but virtually guranteed; as a former CDC director tells a journalist, “We’re not reopening based on science.  We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is cultivating future disaster by consistently low-balling the extent of the virus within U.S. borders.  NBC News has obtained a coronavirus task force report that in fact details spiking infection rates across the country, such as Nashville, Des Moines, and Amarillo, TX.  Some of the states with these spikes, such as Texas, are actually relaxing restrictions even as the state case load continues to grow, which, as the New York Times article points out, flies in the face of the minimal guidelines promulgated by the Trump administration.

Despite such evidence, the president said earlier this week that “all throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”  This is an outright lie, and is as much an abdication of duty as his previous months’ neglect of adequately mobilizing the U.S. government to contain and mitigate this pandemic.  It is a lie meant to encourage the rapid relaxation of restrictions despite the president’s own knowledge that the national situation is very much the opposite of improving.  The obvious conclusion is in keeping with what we’ve been seeing all along from Donald Trump: he is willing for Americans to die unnecessarily in his monomaniacal quest for re-election — a re-election that he sees as wholly dependent on Americans’ perceptions that the economy is healthy.

It’s cold comfort to me that other Americans are also watching in horror this collective national nightmare, in which Americans are being lied to by their leaders and encouraged to begin resuming normal life activities with a false sense of their safety, and without the precautions we know will save lives actually being in place.  The profundity of our health and economic crisis can be traced directly to Donald Trump’s months of denial and dissimulation about the threat posed by the coronavirus.  Now the president, echoed by great swathes of the Republican Party, is insisting that Americans put their lives at risk to compensate for mistakes that were his, and his alone.

The horrific race and class dimensions of Trump’s “solution” to our economic damage are part and parcel of his willingness to send Americans back to work too early, and should be in the forefront of the consciousness of all Americans of good faith.  Such workers will disproportionately be working class and minority Americans who will find themselves forced to return to work, either because they can’t afford not to, or because they’ll lose unemployment benefits if they decline out of fear for their health.  And as Adam Serwer methodically outlines, the president’s concern for the deaths caused by the coronavirus has diminished as its death toll has fallen most heavily on non-white Americans; he concludes that, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them.”

Though it doesn’t amount to full-scale Democratic resistance to the president’s immoral willingness to send Americans to their deaths, I do see signs of hope in the Biden campaign’s apparent understanding that holding the president accountable for his coronavirus failures needs to be central to the effort to defeat him.  It is absurd that there might be debate over this, but we’ve already seen congressional Democrats shy away from a fuller indictment of the president’s murderous leadership.  Unconstrained by the House’s need to work with the Trump administration on legislation, the Biden campaign has more latitude to take a slash-and-burn approach; and ads like this one show an understanding that the president can’t be given any quarter over his coronavirus response.  I hope to god they keep it up.

In Absence of Adequate Coronavirus Testing, Trump's Strategy Is Simply "Let Them Eat Death"

This post from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line blog hit me with the shock of revelation.  With the president insisting that Americans act like “warriors” by risking death by returning to work (even as he and his inner circle stay safe via daily coronavirus testing), Donald Trump has seemed to throw himself headlong against an unyielding reality: the economy won’t begin to prosper so long as Americans fear going about their daily lives, which won’t happen until the virus is far more contained than right now.  Isn’t he just setting himself up for failure?

But Sargent zeroes in on a special ingredient that helps Trump’s approach make more sense, even if it makes it no less sociopathic: rather than trying to move the country to a state of normalcy, Trump is instead concentrating on creating the illusion of normalcy — even if, logically, actually taking the steps to save the country’s health will also help save its economy.  And so Trump attempts to convince the American people that the worst of the virus is past, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

It’s impossible to say exactly why Trump would choose a tenuous unreality that may well backfire over actual action that could realistically help preserve the economy, not to mention save lives, but the creation of appearance over reality has undeniably been the hallmark of Trump’s long and catastrophic career through the past several decades.  Sargent suggests something along these lines, referencing Trump’s faith in his “magical reality-bending powers.”  But Sargent also points to a way in which reality itself (apart from the glaring disaster of the pandemic and economic meltdown) is shaping Trump’s fantasy response: there’s a relatively short timeline until the election, which the president could well see as not nearly sufficient to reverse the current crisis enough to assure re-election.  A corollary of this that Sargent doesn’t mention outright is also true — this finite time frame also means the illusion need only work until November, after which, from Trump’s perspective, who cares?  All that matters to Trump is re-election, not governance or the actual lives and livelihoods of the American people.

In a Twitter thread that references Sargent’s column, Salon writer Amanda Marcotte singles out a powerful through-line of Trump’s effort to convince voters of an alternate coronavirus reality: the president’s resistance to adequate testing in the United States.  Just as a few months ago the president opposed allowing a cruise ship to dock in the United States because it would raise the number of cases in the U.S., the president now openly admits that he wants to keep the numbers artificially low (in a separate column, Marcotte documents his previous efforts to slow down the testing effort).  In a similar vein, we’ve also seen reports in recent days that the president and his allies intend to start disputing the coronavirus death tolls, which is both not surprising and completely abhorrent. The clear objective is to keep the virus from appearing as bad as it actually is. This attitude is reflected in policy, as the Trump administration continues to deny its responsibility for taking the lead on testing nationwide.

Marcotte’s prescription for battling the president’s effort to re-open the economy at the cost of tens of thousands or more American life has the power of simplicity and moral clarity, and aims dead center at his efforts to corrupt the coronavirus statistics in his favor; it also seems like an excellent start to rolling back the president’s wish to create the illusion of premature victory over the coronavirus.  Stop getting sucked into the open-versus-closed debate, Marcotte advises, and just start asking “Where are the tests?” at every opportunity.  I think this is exactly right.  Against Trump’s denialism and appeals for American workers to die for his re-election, holding fast to the importance of basic facts, such as the extent of the pandemic and measurable points at which re-opening measures might be more safely undertaken, is a supremely simple way to wield verifiable reality against presidential propaganda.

Taken together, Sargent’s and Marcotte’s arguments lend yet more urgency to fighting back against Trump’s ongoing dereliction of duty as the coronavirus continues to sicken and kill Americans.  A president who has given up on saving American lives, and prefers instead to try to convince Americans that things are better than they are by suppressing the evidence and deploying the full propaganda power of the White House, clearly deserves political annihilation.  But Sargent and Marcotte also implicitly make the case that the president’s strategy is weak, even fatally flawed, and can be taken apart by the steady application of facts and logic, not to mention moral suasion.

At this point, the lack of a coordinated and relentless Democratic assault on the president’s insane and immoral strategy to essentially let the coronavirus run its course, while demanding that Americans die for the economy, amounts to an unbelievable failure of leadership from the opposition party.  It seems to me that if you are an elected Democrat, and are not consumed with a righteous fury to save the country and the American people from the mass death inflicted by this mad president and the discredited GOP, then you should resign and make way for new blood that actually gives a damn about American lives and American democracy.  One of my darkest fears is that the Democratic leadership is satisfied to stand back and let Trump destroy himself in the coming months, even at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives, rather than internalizing the need to expose and roll back his monstrosity with every of ounce of energy and creativity they have, starting yesterday.

As Heather Havrilesky writes in a  recent cathartic Twitter post, “You wake up some mornings and you just need to see one single Democrat in office visibly losing their shit over this murderous fucking clown.  That’s all you want: One human being in power, reflecting our shared reality by spontaneously combusting over the nightmare world this hapless homicidal buffoon ushered in.”  Exactly so: and it makes me wonder if the Democrats are also holding back, not because they might fail in their opposition, but because the righteous fury building up around the country will also hold accountable even those Democratic politicians who have failed to rise to this dreadful, apparently endless moment in our history.

Trouble in Smallbusiness-ville

The coronavirus epidemic is a crisis for our country on multiple fronts: medical, political, economic, and beyond.  At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey zeroes in on the devastating losses among small businesses across America as both an immediate and long-term problem for the country.  She notes that prior to the pandemic, only half of small businesses had sufficient cash reserves to last more than two weeks in the event of a closure like so many are now undergoing.  Although relief programs designed to benefit small businesses made it through Congress, those were insufficiently funded and funneled money disproportionately to larger businesses. Lowrey notes that “researchers found no evidence that money went to the places and industries hit hardest, as measured by business closures and declines in hours worked.”

But as bad as the current situation is for small businesses, Lowrey looks to the future — and the outlook is grim, both for these companies and for the health of the U.S. economy going forward.  The dispensing of funds is leaving minority-owned firms out in the cold — one study found that an estimated 95% of African America-owned businesses, 91% of Latino-owned businesses, and 75% of Asian-owned businesses had almost no possibility of receiving emergency loans from a “mainstream financial institution.”  The consequence would be a perpetuation and growth of inequalities that already punish minority groups in America and hobble our collective economy.  Beyond this, a future in which millions of small businesses are forced to close is a future with slower job growth and thus collective wealth for average Americans.  Lowrey notes that small businesses are responsible for net job growth in the U.S., and that the alternative — a country where industries consolidate — will both keep wages lower and increase prices for goods and services.

It's a depressing picture, but it’s hard to see how it won’t more or less come to pass without public awareness and decisive action to turn this trajectory around.  I have to hold onto the hope that millions of Americans will find this projected culling of the most vital sector of the American economy both unacceptable and in urgent need of remedy.  The small business emergency cross-cuts with the disproportionate impact the pandemic is already having on the finances and health of minority and lower-income Americans; without adequate government intervention, the likely consequence is that both established businesses and the better-off are more likely to be spared, and will even prosper in the aftermath of the pandemic, while those less fortunate are harder hit, with a diminished future to look forward to.  It seems likely that the Republican Party will try to pin these injustices on the pandemic, if it chooses to acknowledge them at all, but political choices created these inequalities to begin with, and only political choices can get us out.  In this way, as in so many others, the coronavirus points inescapably to the conclusion that only massive, ground-up reform will keep our country from an unending future path of immiseration for the majority.

McConnell's Bankruptcy Comments Reveal His Own Moral Bankruptcy

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floated the idea that the federal government should allow states to declare bankruptcy, rather than Congress send funds to those states facing massive holes in their finances due to the fallout of the coronavirus epidemic.  McConnell left no doubt that this was a nakedly partisan move, referring to the potential of such relief as “blue state bailouts” and specifically identifying state pension programs (and their benefits to union members) as something he has no interest in helping out.  Savage and spot-on critiques followed from many corners, from politicians such as New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo to Hot Screen favs like The Plum Line and Jamelle Bouie.  Among other things, critics remarked on how blue states pay more into the US Treasury than red states, and get less in return; and that allowing states to descend into fiscal chaos will deepen the economic downturn we’ve already entered. 

While McConnell’s opposition to the government providing public goods is long-standing, some have raised the reasonable question of why he’d pursue what would seem to be a strategy with decently high risks of backfiring against his party in this time of crisis.  Philadelphia Inquirer Columnist Will Bunch laid out some explanations, including the possibility of McConnell using an eventual relief bill as leverage to gain political advantage over states; that the resulting pain may somehow be pinned on Democratic state leaders; or simply blind ideological belief that this is the right thing to do, no matter the circumstances.

My sense is that all three possibilities are probably at play, reinforcing each other in malignant ways.  But the third is closest to the core reason why not just McConnell, but so many others Republicans as well, are on board with using this crisis to advance a broad anti-government agenda.  A central identity of the Republican Party is a long term-opposition to government intervention in the economy for the benefit of the majority, twinned with support for as deep a privatization of American life as possible. McConnell, Trump, and other Republicans aren’t now urgently pressing for ideologically-pure measures simply out of inertia or a willingness to put a crisis to good use in service of long-term goals (more on which shortly), but because of a recognition, conscious for some and only intuited by others, that the coronavirus and attendant economic crash constitute an existential challenge to the meaning and continued viability of the Republican Party.

On the economic front, the GOP has for years essentially argued that the goal was, as Grover Norquist appallingly and unforgettably put it (and as Bunch reminds us), to shrink government down in size sufficiently to be able to drown it in a bathtub. Now, along comes an event that not just reminds us why a competent and well-resourced federal government is essential, but that demonstrates on a daily and escalating basis why the anti-government ideology of the GOP has always been bankrupt.  The once-in-a-generation threat of the coronavirus is something that ideally called for long-term, methodical, and non-partisan preparation — a federal effort that in fact existed, but which was undercut by the GOP anti-government mindset over many years and then eviscerated under the Trump presidency.  Likewise, the economic damage that has ensued — damage that deep economic inequalities have amplified — requires massive government intervention to counteract.

While Republican willingness to allocate trillions of dollars in economic relief superficially suggests an abandonment of principle when the chips are down, it in fact more specifically represents a doubling down on their general aim of protecting giant corporations and advancing privatization over public goods in this country.  The vast $500 billion slush fund that the Treasury Department aims to dole out with no requirement that corporations retain workers or not use the money to do stock buy-backs; the small business relief that’s been gobbled up by decidedly not-small businesses; the undersize relief checks that have been delayed due to the obscene need to mark them with the president’s name: these efforts as a whole aim to enhance the status of the largest players in the economy while tossing peanuts to the little guys.  The logical outcome will be a U.S. economy even more tilted to oligopolies and monopolies, and enervated by the destruction of small businesses.

As I noted above, we presently see the GOP applying the principle of never allowing a crisis to go to waste, and using it to advance long-held objectives.  But this should not be surprising, or be seen as particularly out of bounds in and of itself.  By their nature, massive crises that shake the pillars of our society and economy steer us in the direction of first principles: How do we best protect ourselves?  Do we want to return to the status quo that made the crisis possible or forge a new, better future?  The problem is not that the Republican Party is trying to implement big changes, but that the big changes they are trying to implement are destructive, anti-democratic, and bound to exacerbate the very problems that have made our current crisis so horrific.

The coronavirus crisis is an existential threat to the GOP not only because the pandemic discredits its bedrock attitudes towards government and the economy, but also because it simultaneously highlights the immorality of the party’s white supremacist core.  Fighting the coronavirus has required mass public adherence to social distancing measures, hammering home the idea of our fundamental equality and interconnectedness; we can only get through this by all Americans pulling their weight, which reinforces the argument that being American isn’t about your race or skin color, but about your commitment to the greater good.  Against this, racial tribalism appears as plainly insane.  At the same time, the relatively high proportion of minorities in lower-wage occupations that are belatedly being recognized as essential has exposed an inexcusable prior denigration of such jobs and workers; this will rightly continue to send shockwaves through U.S. society in the coming months and years, a truth that cannot easily be repressed. In the face of the coronavirus, our overarching need for solidarity — a humanistic, democratic principle — is a dagger that reality has stuck in the heart of Republican racism and hyper-capitalism.

Capitol Offensiveness

The wave of right-wing protests against measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic came to Oregon this weekend, with a few hundred people gathering around the State Capitol building in Salem on Saturday.  While their right to protest should be supported by all Oregonians, the lack of social distancing at the event, combined with the absence of mask-wearing by nearly all participants, demonstrates that their beef is not only with the state government’s measures, but with science and reason as well.  How else to explain the lack of fear at spreading and being infected by this dangerous disease?

Rejecting basic anti-coronavirus measures while protesting state quarantines and shuttering of businesses, they turned a political rally into a potential super-spreader event. Not only does this threaten the lives of their fellow Oregonians, but it could well prolong the necessity of the very measures they came to protest.  In this, their demonstration is not just against the explicit target of state government, but against the idea of solidarity with their fellow Oregonians.  It is a statement of contempt for the rest of us.  Attempting to portray themselves as heroes of a make-believe resistance against a fictional governmental tyranny, they are in reality the dupes and villains of the story, dismissive of both germ theory and democratic governance in one dumb, fell swoop.

“You can’t just place citizens under house arrest and enforce those orders,” said Adam Ellifritt, an event organizer.  But of course “house arrest” is an intentionally incendiary and misleading term that decontextualizes the actual stay-at-home orders from their purpose.  Like other such protestors, Ellfritt would have us believe that state governors arbitrarily issued such mandates because they hate liberty and freedom and America.  Denying the reality of the coronavirus is essential, because otherwise they’d have to concede that the governors are indeed trying to protect our freedom — our freedom to live, and to prosper in a future in which this pandemic has been contained and defeated.  Opening that door would also raise intriguing questions, such as why they choose to direct their ire at governors, rather than at the inept president who failed to act decisively against the spread of the virus, who called it a hoax and a Democratic plot as it spread through Washington state and New York City and beyond?

As these right-wingers attempt to raise a ruckus and claim that they’re the true patriots, and as frustration and fear begin to climb about the economic effects of social distancing measures, it’s essential to remember that the great majority of Americans have risen to this awful occasion.  In what political writer John Stoehr describes as “the biggest political story of the year,” we are witness to “tens of millions of  Americans sheltering in place for the sake of their own well-being and safety, and for the sake of all Americans.”  Stoehr urges us to realize that our collective willingness to do so is a political act, one that should hearten us all about this country’s willingness to behave with democratic intent and a liberal spirit.  In this, Americans are repudiating the (white) nationalist smallness of President Trump, and the scattered right-wing protests, with what constitutes a mass demonstration of patriotic sacrifice.

This is not to say that Americans shouldn’t be pressing our government to take actions that will allow the relaxation of extreme social distancing measures as quickly as possible — but not by ranting about governmental tyranny and overreach, but by ensuring that the government acts democratically, responsive to our collective interests in both protecting our health and our livelihoods.  To demand that measures be ended without meeting necessary public health thresholds is simply to supercharge the virus’ reign of death and economic destruction.  To make the point that should by now be a cornerstone of all such discussions: allowing businesses to re-open when the general public is too scared to patronize those businesses, and in a way that allows those businesses to act as vectors of disease for those customers who do venture out, only means that we will be seeing a second wave of the virus in the coming months.  This is a horrific situation, but it is also our reality: a reality ensured by a sub-par federal response that continues to be crippled by a president who engages in denialism, magical thinking, and a sociopathic prioritization of his re-election effort above all else.  Just as Americans have demonstrated great democratic spirit in adhering to social distancing guidelines, we now collectively need to take a more active role in demanding that state and federal governments have realistic, measurable plans for rolling back the virus.

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.