So long as the Democratic leadership considers off-limits any investigations into the Trump administration’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the case for holding the president accountable will need to be based largely on what we’ve witnessed the president say and do, and reporting by news organizations. Fortunately for the public, investigative pieces have been coming fast and furious for the past couple weeks. I flagged a pair of essential Washington Post articles last week; this weekend, The New York Times has published its widest-ranging report yet on what went wrong with the president’s response. Among other things, the Times provides further evidence that early on, members of the federal bureaucracy involved with public health issues were aware that the coronavirus was highly contagious, dangerous, and would surely spread to the United States. Moreover, such information quickly filtered to the president. Such evidence is crucial in making the case that the president was derelict in his duties, as it explodes his public contentions over the course of months that the coronavirus threat was a hoax and would not present a danger to the United States, and renders inexcusable the failure to mobilize our government to contain and mitigate the spread of the virus.
But beyond this, the article contains plenty of details about Donald Trump’s unwillingness to act in the face of overwhelming evidence that thousands of Americans lives would be lost if the government did not spring into action with mass testing, stay-at-home orders, and other necessary steps. Time and again, the reporters document how the president made a choice to ignore the experts and basic common sense, and to evade a course of action that could have saved thousands of lives. We know from other reporting that the president has been obsessed above all else during this time with protecting the economy from a slowdown or worse that he believed could undermine his re-election chances. The Times article helps illuminate the basic folly of the president’s mindset, as it demonstrates the degree to which he remained unmoved by the prospect of mass death across the American population, not to mention the obvious economic destruction an uncontrolled epidemic would have inflicted even without shelter-in-place orders and the shuttering of businesses. The portrait that emerges from this article and others like it is that Donald Trump was unable to process the gravity of the danger posed to American lives, was obsessed with the economic downside as a proxy for his political failure or success, and failed to prioritize the fight against this epidemic.
Donald Trump made the wrong call on the coronavirus, and many thousands of Americans have died as a result. The virus and its toll are now, inevitably, the grounds on which the 2020 election will be decided. The president clearly recognizes his own mistakes, which is why he is currently “seek[ing] to rewrite the history of the past several months,” as the Times accurately describes. Having denied a deadly reality until it was inevitable that thousands of Americans would die on account of his ineptitude, the president now tries to embroil us all in his fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient Trump who saw the danger before anyone else, a great leader who “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and who has earned the American people’s everlasting gratitude for his decisive action. These lies amount to an almost unbearable obscenity against our wounded nation, an offense to the dead and an affront to the living. There is no way forward for the United States that doesn’t involve a mass repudiation of this president and his party from all levels of government. There will be no American Resurrection without an American Exorcism first.