For anyone interested in holding the president and the GOP to account for their murderous incompetence in the escalating coronavirus epidemic — say, a Democratic party that finally comes to grips with its mandate to protect the American people — this weekend has supplied more powerful evidence in the case against this administration. The New York Times has perhaps the most comprehensive story to date about what went wrong with the U.S.’s ability to test for the coronavirus. The article identifies inept leadership at multiple agencies involved, including Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Robert Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. It’s also clear that individual mistakes compounded each other, adding up to a systemic failure. But even this systemic failure might have been headed off by adequate prioritization and leadership from the White House; instead, neither was forthcoming.
Publicizing such facts should be a top priority for Democrats because, as in the case of inadequate testing capacity, the problem is still happening, and is overseen by the same people who fucked up in the first place. We cannot expect better results if the same players are allowed to stay in charge. And in terms of holding the Trump administration accountable for its unforgivable errors, establishing the truth of its deadly incompetence is a necessity. As much as this crisis cements the illegitimacy of the Trump administration, it is also an existential challenge for the Democratic Party. We are beyond even the most fundamental debates about what values should guide our country, to the basic fact of a president whose policies and lack of action have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans, with the death toll certain to rise far more. This administration is responsible for an overwhelming loss of life, and the Democrats need to start act liking it if they want to avoid becoming accomplices to mass death.
Will Stancil has been tweeting about the asymmetry between the Democrats and the Republicans in their approach to disseminating information to the public. He makes the extremely important point that while Republicans have a vast right-wing media apparatus to spread coordinated disinformation campaigns, the Democratic Party consistently shies away from countering this by mounting its own coordinated efforts simply on the party level. Rather than hitting the president consistently and relentlessly, elected Democrats rely on the media to pick up the slack. But of course this isn’t the job of the media, or at least mainstream media. It is a strangely passive approach, and one that, in our current moment, seems almost like self-sabotage. When the president is directly responsible for mass deaths across America, there is both a moral responsibility and a political imperative to trumpet that responsibility across the land.
That imperative is all the more acute as the president, his party, and his right-wing defenders are already engaged in a disinformation campaign to allow the president to shirk responsibility for even his most murderous decisions. It has been going on for weeks now, ever since the president proclaimed the coronavirus threat to be a hoax and a Democratic plot to take him down — propaganda echoed by both the Republican Party and outlets like Fox News. And as Josh Marshall writes today, the GOP’s broader strategy for evading blame for the pandemic even while failing to adequately fight it is coming into view. He points to the example of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who refused lockdowns of Florida while the coronavirus spread throughout the state, but who has now ordered a 14-day quarantine on anyone arriving in the state from the New York area. Marshall sees a larger narrative emerging, in which the president and his allies will scapegoat blue states like New York and California for sickening the nation with the virus — a strategy that will become necessary as it begins to also spread widely in majority-Republican states.
Against this, the Democrats need to provide a coordinated and savage narrative that highlights the damning facts of the president’s culpability in this crisis. This effort will necessarily encompass holding the GOP to account for its refusal to critique or check this malevolent president. They should not shy away from tying the failed impeachment effort to the present danger we face; after all, the GOP looked at irrefutable evidence that the president placed personal interest over the nation’s safety, and declared it all good. To their credit, after all, the Democrats tried to remove this unfit president from office, while the GOP did everything it could to ensure he’d be around to preside over what may yet be the most catastrophic health and economic disaster in American history. What might have seemed abstract about the president’s malfeasance in the context of national security questions a few months ago is now grounded in the frightening everyday of our collective lived experience.