A recent Plum Line post by Greg Sargent makes an argument that complements the case I tried to make yesterday about the perfidy of Republican governors who have stood down from their coronavirus responsibilities. Sargent writes that even as GOP politicos panic over the president’s desultory re-election trajectory, they still can’t bring themselves to actually talk about the coronavirus pandemic, or to urge the president to change course for the sake of saving his presidency:
For these Republicans, the very existence of Trump’s authorship of this catastrophe cannot be acknowledged. So public revulsion over this sick and dying elephant in the room — and the role that’s playing in Trump’s travails — also cannot be conceded.
The clincher is that both President Trump and the GOP are ignoring public sentiment:
Majorities don’t believe the virus is under control now and want more government action to rein it in even if that slows the recovery, rejecting Trump’s central story of the moment. Voters think Biden will better handle the virus by large margins. Approval of Trump’s handling of it is at a near-low, rivaling where it stood amid the last coronavirus peak.
Trump’s failure is echoed by the failure of GOP governors to do their duty and respond to the public’s desire for more action. Yet, across the GOP, we find a conspiracy of denialism and downplaying, all out of tacit recognition of what a disaster the pandemic is and that the president’s handling of it, being indefensible, must simply be ignored.
Sargent rightly points to the president’s ongoing in-person rallies as attaining an emblematic significance in the light of all this denial of reality:
Trump’s own rallies — the most visible manifestations of his case for a second term right now — unfold largely without masks and social distancing, themselves dramatizing this pathology as vividly as one could imagine.
Indeed, these late-stage campaign rallies in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century, which effectively act as potential super-spreader events among Trump supporters, are the supercharged Trumpian analogue to those GOP governors who tell citizens they are responsible on their own for dealing with the coronavirus. The particular responsibility of his supporters is to enact in rally-size miniature the covid-free world he claims is imminent, to bask in a sort of immunity-by-mass-denial. Yet just as average citizens have become victims in a GOP war to discredit a meaningful role for government in their lives, so Trump’s strongest fans — those who show up — are willing victims in his quest for power and approval. But even more than victims, they are modern-day sacrifices to the orange demon god, giving up their lives so that his campaign might live another day.
We joke, but only to cope with the terror of a national spectacle whose substance may still consume us — politicians willing to not only tolerate but actively abet the spread of a deadly virus in the name of proving that they have not failed us, that if we get sick it is our own fault for not having the proper attitude or genes or medical care. And the willingness of so many of our fellow citizens to go along, or to join in the ritual of Trump rallies, orgies of hatred, racism, misogyny, and fascistic appeals, is dizzying and disheartening.