With his statement this weekend that the United States is “not going to control the pandemic,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows further clarified the harrowing stakes of the upcoming election and made a case for Joe Biden likely worth tens of millions in equivalent advertising dollars. Alongside his accompanying declaration that “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas,” the message is clear: the Trump administration takes no responsibility for advocating or coordinating measures like social distancing, strategic closures, and mask-wearing that might mitigate and even control the spread of the coronavirus, and has effectively embraced a “let them eat covid” strategy of allowing the virus to run its course while blaming Americans for their inclination to fall ill and die.
This dovetails with something people like Paul Krugman and John Stoehr have been writing about — the Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic has been “strongly influenced by the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto on behalf of herd immunity that grew out of a meeting at the American Institute for Economic Research.” The AIER has connections to the Charles Koch Institute, famous for promoting libertarian (i.e., anti-worker and anti-government regulations) approaches to the economy, which means that the White House’s public health policy appears driven not by public health concerns, but by powerful business interests who fear above all the loss of a single cent of profits. Among other things, this further validates the motivations I suggested were propelling the various GOP governors who have thrown up their hands about being able to do anything about the spread of the virus; the notion that workers simply need to hurl themselves into the breach of an ailing economy, and take one for the team (even if “taking it” means getting seriously ill or dying), while checking their expectations about whether the government can or should play a role in protecting public health, is of a piece with the libertarian claptrap coming out of an organization like the AIER.
(In a gratifyingly direct connection, Krugman notes how the AIER “published an article lauding Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose refusal to take action against the coronavirus has turned her state into what the article called “a fortress of liberty and hope protected from the grasps of overbearing politicians.”” Noem, you may recall, was possibly the most odious of the GOP governors I wrote about; among other things, as the Washingon Post described, “She is one of the few governors who refused to issue a stay-at-home order in the spring, has repeatedly questioned the validity of using masks to reduce viral spread and hosted the president for a massive, tightly packed Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore.”)
I think when we look back at the disaster of the coronavirus response, this malign confluence between conservative business interests that literally do not care if workers live or die, and a president who feared above all else the appearance of a crashing economy in an election year, were key culprits. But the fact that a cruel, profits-first mindset appears to provide the intellectual grounds (such as they are) for conservatives’ backing of the president’s approach needs to be kept front and center in the public mind, now that it looks increasingly likely Donald Trump will be defeated in the upcoming election. Without Trump’s personal incompetence and mental illness clouding the picture, it will be more important than ever to zero in on the deadly policies and immoral thinking of his current abettors and future successors — those fellow Republican elected officials who will doubtless take up the baton of fighting against reasonable measures to protect the public health, arguing that it is government tyranny to tell people to wear masks and social distance and close non-essential businesses if that’s what’s necessary to save lives. Mark Meadows this weekend wasn’t just enunciating Trump’s view, but the view of businesses and conservatives who horrifically believe that no number of lives is too many to lose if there is a chance that profits may be made without interruption.
If they want to maximize the chances of a Biden administration successfully implementing a science-based coronavirus response, Democrats will need to remain on the attack against those in the GOP who holds such twisted values and want them to guide the government’s pandemic response. The attacks around incompetence and selfish self-preservation that worked against Trump will need to be replaced with a more direct attack on such murderous, pro-business ideology. Democrats can’t rest if Trump is defeated; they will also need to discredit and drive from office all those who serve up in more sophisticated form arguments that elected officials have no role to play in protecting the health of the citizenry.