President Trump’s monomaniacal focus on beginning to “open up” the country as of May 1 is indistinguishable from his obsession with getting re-elected, as he sees the health of the economy as the key to winning in November. But since opening up the country means relaxing the restrictions that have helped flatten the curve of the coronavirus spread, and as the broad consensus of public health officials is that we generally won’t be ready to do so in mere weeks, we are witnessing the president’s willingness to risk American lives on a vast scale for the sake of his political fortunes.
The mass testing, surveillance, and contact tracing necessary to roll back the virus and allow Americans to begin returning to normalcy are much more than two weeks away. Shortages of basic materials plague the testing of infected individuals, while antibody tests to assess who has already had the virus and thus may have immunity are at the very beginning of deployment. Likewise, the personnel and networks needed for contact tracing are still far from being fully in place.
Ominously, while Trump and his team seem quite aware that the country is not fully prepared to move forward, and that a measured process is necessary, they are simultaneously working to ensure that if they have miscalculated, Trump will be sheltered from blame. How? By making sure that opening up the country on a recklessly early schedule isn’t actually seen as Trump’s idea. The Washington Post reports that:
Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that f it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts.
At the same time, conservative groups like FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council are lobbying to relax coronavirus-related restrictions, while a US Chamber of Commerce return-to-work plan has apparently gained favor with decision-makers in the White House. Businesses, like Trump, are eager to evade blame for possibly deadly decisions, and so are pushing “a liability shield for businesses that would insulate them from lawsuits if their employees get the coronavirus at work.”
This administration’s strategy of ensuring the president doesn’t get blamed if his own plan ends up killing people is horrifying and morally bankrupt. Trump’s failures up to now, including his refusal to admit his culpability for the scale of this crisis, means it would be madness for Americans to view his goal of relaxed social restrictions with anything but the most extreme skepticism. The notion of U.S. business leaders huddling with Trump advisers to ensure that millions of us keep making them a profit while boosting the president’s re-election prospects, even if the downside is that tens of thousands more American die, is as dystopian a vision of American politics and capitalism as you could imagine. This isn’t leadership or democratic governance, it’s a predatory vision of the world in which the rich and powerful use ordinary Americans as pawns to drive profits and preserve political power.
Particularly maddening about these plans is that we are in such a dire economic situation because of this administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus for months now. We are in this shitty place, with millions upon millions of Americans left jobless, because of the president’s horrific decision to dismiss the virus as a non-threat and to waste precious time doing nothing to prepare the U.S. to combat this disease. Governors and mayors around the country had no choice but to implement strict lockdown orders to combat a virus that had been allowed to spread for weeks upon weeks without a nearly-adequate government regime of testing, contact tracing, and surveillance. Despite the tens of thousands of Americans dead, the president now seeks to make us all pay a still higher price, to risk sacrificing more lives to get the economy going again.
Governors and mayors around the country need to resist administration pressure to relax social distancing measures prematurely, or to re-open businesses before adequate testing and other measures are in place to address the continued spread of the coronavirus (this Talking Points Memo piece has a good rundown of how in some ways we’re just returning to the point we were at several months ago, with a new outbreak of the coronavirus the obvious outcome if we repeat the same mistakes as before). It’s also conceivable that American workers will need to engage in a massive campaign of civil disobedience if we are expected to return to work without such conditions being met. Matt Yglesias has raised a compelling point about the class dimensions of the situation, in which white collar workers are allowed to continue telecommuting while retail and blue collar workers are expected to return to work, with all the dangers that entails. This wouldn’t be fair, and it would justly provoke outrage and resistance, as well as hopefully solidarity from those lucky enough to do their jobs remotely. No one wants the economic pain to continue, but the consensus position of health and medical professionals needs to be our guiding principle, not the selfish requirements of deranged politicians and amoral CEOs.