On a day of relentless bad news, the most chilling thing I’ve read is that President Trump has apparently grown impatient with the nation-wide lockdown orders aimed at checking the spread of coronavirus. Viewing them primarily through the parlous effect they’re having on the economy, he has indicated that he will review the lockdown guidelines after they’ve been in place for 15 days — a countdown clock that began ticking last week. According to Reuters, he told reporters that states with lower rates of infection might allow people to resume going to work. In this, he disregards the reality of his administration’s failure to allow adequate testing for the virus; we can really have no idea how many people in such states are actually ill from or currently incubating COVID-19.
If it were simply the president alone floating such a deranged relaxation of measures, it would be bad enough. But there’s strong evidence that this is a strengthening position among right-wing commentators, political allies of the president, and some corporations. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, tweeted that, “I think it is soon becoming time to have old and/or sick people take every precaution and healthy people go back to work forever changed w(ith) new habits in a grimmer reality.” In a similar vein, former Goldman Sachs CEO tweeted, “Extreme measures to flatten the virus curve is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”
Both Schlapp’s and Blankfein’s comments are irresponsible in the way they submerge the serious risks posed by community spread and ignore the impossibility of assessing who is sick and who is healthy, given the lack of sufficient testing capability. Who are the “healthy people” Schalpp is talking about? Even young people can die from this virus. But even darker is the way they, like the president has begun doing, insinuate that there are health risks from the economy being so severely slowed down — it’s a venture into medical territory about which they are supremely unqualified to opine.
Yet most terrible of all is the sinister elevation of the economy above all other concerns, even above life itself. At The Nation, Jeet Heer captures this perfectly, writing, “What they are arguing for goes beyond Social Darwinism and is, in fact, a kind of cult capitalism. The existing system is viewed as so sacred that it is worth sacrificing innumerable human lives to keep it going.” Indeed, Jeer’s entire column about this frightening new strategy of calling off the lockdown prematurely is necessary reading. Among other things, he cites how opposition to government intervention in the economy by conservatives and corporations is leading them to oppose the very measures that would help the economy now, in place of the doomed plan of sending workers back to the office too soon: “a combination of universal basic income, mortgage, and rent forgiveness, bailouts for small business and a Keynesian booster shot at the end of the pandemic.”
The president’s mad desire to declare victory over the coronavirus before we’ve really even begun to fight it is all the more nightmarish in light of his culpability in allowing things to get this bad, this fast. If his administration had taken the coronavirus threat seriously, we would have had sufficient tests prepared to have a real chance at containing the virus. Instead, as the threat grew, the president did everything he should not have: he told people it was a hoax, that it would go away, that we did not need to be concerned. Always of paramount importance was his re-election and his obsession with the stock market and its imperfect relationship to the health of the economy.
Having helped bring this catastrophe upon us, he now considers asking us to ignore its horror in support of his re-election campaign, with a false return to normalcy that, under current circumstances, would supercharge the spread of the virus. His obsession with re-election over actually being president will get millions of us killed.