As protests against social-distancing measures have popped up around the country over the past week, it’s important to recognize them as manifestations of right-wing extremism rather than a broad-based movement, as a great majority of Americans still back social-distancing measures and a careful process of reversing them. There is an unmistakably misbegotten and tendentious quality to these protests. The assertion that state governments are acting in a tyrannical fashion depends on the notion that the United States isn’t actually experiencing a once-in-a-century pandemic, a deadly virus that spreads extremely easily. It also depends on excluding the fact that catastrophic failures by the Trump administration made such extreme social-distancing measures necessary, and on pretending that governors have just randomly decided to oppress their citizens by arbitrary restrictions.
In other words, the protestors embrace a grossly distorted version of reality, in which the actual reasons for the stay-at-home orders are abstracted of context, and are decried as arbitrary governmental overreach. Any relationship between the necessity of the lockdowns and mistakes by the president are simply whitewashed out of the picture. And underlying the protests is the bizarre assumption that democratically-elected governments aren’t actually able to act in the people’s name, that government is ever and always to be considered an alien intervention in American lives, and that collective action is only legitimate if spontaneously taken by Americans acting to oppose their government. Finally, the fact that many of the protestors haven’t observed social distancing rules at demonstrations confirms an ignorance or denial of basic medical facts, as they turn themselves into potential victims or vectors of the coronavirus.
Frankly, though, even this little bit of explication almost feels like a waste of time. As an NBC report notes, “The protests have been a unifier of anti-government and conspiracy-minded subcultures, bringing anti-vaccination activists, anti-government militia groups, religious fundamentalists and white supremacists together at state capitols.” In Lansing, Michigan, anti-government militants like the Michigan Militia and Proud Boys showed up, as did bearers of the Confederate flag. There is also strong evidence that many protests have a significant astroturf element, funded by rich donors rather than representing an organic upswell of just plain folks’ outrage. The Tea Party comparison that some observers have been making feels particularly apt: just as a fundamentally racist and anti-democratic movement cloaked itself in an obsession with fiscal austerity following the election of our first African-American president, a similar and overlapping coalition now protests restrictions on their freedoms by governors trying to preserve the public health — but the actual objective appears to be simply to use this issue as a cudgel against Democratic governors, and to advance the fortunes of the president, the Republican Party, and its big business supporters. After all, as Susan Demas writes in a report on protests in Michigan, “When Republicans and CEOs tell you they want to open up the economy, it’s because they don’t want the federal government to provide basic income and benefits while people are home so that we actually beat a virus that’s already killed more than 33,000 people in this country. What they derisively call ‘welfare state’ spending gets in the way of massive tax giveaways for the super-rich.”
As Exhibit A for this interpretation of events, we need look no further than the president himself, who on Friday lent his support to such protests when he tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” Many have already pointed out that just the day before, the president had seemed to finally agree that governors should be the ones to make the decisions on when to relax coronavirus restrictions in their states. But now, as Osita Nwanevu writes at The New Republic, “Trump is pivoting to what he does best—inflaming his base, both to build public pressure on governors to open their state economies sooner and to misplace blame for an economic downturn made necessary by the administration’s initial failure to monitor and contain the virus.”
The protest story is a Trump story, and it would be playing into his propaganda to view the protests otherwise. This makes it especially important to acknowledge the vast inappropriateness of Trump’s “LIBERATE” tweets. It’s bad enough that he wants to make governors take the blame for an economic slowdown that he’s responsible for — but enacting a strategy to pressure governors to open up their economies prematurely both threatens to get more Americans killed, and to undo the very economic progress he sees as essential to his re-election. Doing this in a way that gives aid and comfort to right-wing movements that openly speculate about the need for violence to press their demands escalates the political malpractice to a whole other level.
Against this, the response of Democrats and other opponents of Trump needs to be unequivocal. Washington Governor Jay Inslee has the best riposte that I’ve seen; he put out a statement that includes the following:
The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly, and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted.
Just yesterday, the president stood alongside White House officials and public health experts and said science would guide his plan for easing restrictions. [. . .]
Less than 24 hours later, the president is off the rails. He’s not quoting scientists and doctors but spewing dangerous, anti-democratic rhetoric [. . .]
The president’s call to action today threatens to undermine his own goal of recovery by further delaying the ability of states to amend current interventions in a safe, evidence-based way. His words are likely to cause COVID-19 infections to spike in places where social distancing is working — and if infections are increasing in those places, that will further postpone the 14 days of decline that his own guidance says is necessary before modifying any interventions.
I hope political leaders of all sorts will speak out firmly against the president’s calls for rebellion.
Inslee’s statement is notable for a couple reasons. He asserts that the president has engaged in unacceptable behavior, in part by making it more likely that the coronavirus will spread even more. And by focusing on the president’s incitement of “domestic rebellion,” Inslee articulates what is arguably the central crime of Donald Trump’s tenure in office: his willingness to divide Americans against each other, even to the point of courting violence by his supporters, while failing to advance and protect the national interest.
What Inslee also suggests, without fully articulating it, is that the president has shown himself unfit for office. After all, when a wide array of the president’s actions result in worsening a deadly pandemic, and his solution is to incite mass resistance against the state governments as a way of evading accountability, we have reached a point where it is folly to act if he still retains any moral or political legitimacy. We also need to acknowledge the relationship between the president’s willingness to continually engage in unfit acts and the Democrats’ unwillingness to make his unfitness for office part of their daily discourse. Such reticence is part of our crisis; as Josh Marshall writes, we should be “consistently demanding Donald Trump’s resignation” — if the president is largely responsible for our crisis, then the proper punishment for his catastrophic leadership is a necessary element of setting the terms of debate for resolving it.
Of course the president will never resign, but making calls for his resignation a central part of our political discourse, as a way of spotlighting his abdication of duty and the importance of forging a path forward that minimizes his ability to do further harm, is well within the reach of the Democratic Party. It is a position merited not only by Trump’s recent encouragement of rebellion against democratically-elected state governments — though that alone would be sufficient — but by the many months of his catastrophically-bungled response to the crisis. It’s not enough for Democrats to assume that since a large majority of Americans support the caution exhibited by most governors, they will judge the president harshly on his obvious preference for putting the economy and his re-election interests ahead of public health. That might be an adequate argument if all Democrats had to care about was winning in November, but Democrats’ responsibility is more immediate and urgent than that. Elected Democrats at all levels have a responsibility to protect the lives of all Americans right now — lives endangered by a president who continues to subordinate the spread of the coronavirus to his perceived re-election needs, and who threatens to undo any economic recovery by creating the conditions for a renewed wave of illness.
It would be one thing if Donald Trump were acknowledging his previous mistakes and honestly trying to find a proper balance between protecting American lives and saving our economy. Instead, the opposite is happening. Determined to deny any culpability for the mass, preventable deaths sweeping the United States, and to salvage his re-election chances, he downplays the deaths to date while seeking to open up economy activity prematurely and scheming to place the responsibility for any resultant mass casualties on governors and mayors. Even as we have only a third of the testing capacity necessary to safely ease social-distancing rules — due in part to the president’s efforts to downplay the virus during January and February — Trump urges right-wing protestors in hard-hit states like Michigan to force governors to undo policies meant to defend their states against mass casualties. Donald Trump’s removal from office isn’t just a logical demand because of what he did in the past, but because of continued mistakes that amplify the terrible errors he has already made.
Alongside coordinated and sustained arguments for the president’s resignation, Democrats need to hold daily briefings as counter-programming to Trump’s deranged and propagandistic coronavirus briefings. If they believe that the president’s actions are endangering Americans, then they have a moral and political responsibility to broadcast this fact, and to highlight what the United States needs to do instead. Such briefings should also include plain descriptions of what the president is doing wrong. His attempt to shift blame for all that has gone wrong, and might still go wrong, is fair game for discussion. Not only would this help to hold the president accountable for his errors and evasions, but would also provide useful context for Americans to understand whatever fresh propaganda and hare-brained schemes the president tries to put forward.
But beyond this, the meta-message needs to be that Donald Trump has lost his moral authority to lead the nation, and should no longer be treated with the deference accorded an ordinary president. Legitimate American presidents don’t twiddle their thumbs for months and call a deadly pandemic a Democratic hoax that will magically disappear on its own. Legitimate American presidents don’t threaten to withhold supplies to states unless their governors offer proper praise and obeisance. Legitimate American presidents don’t support right-wing protests that undermine necessary safety measures taken by governors of the opposite party. Legitimate American presidents don’t roll the dice with the lives of tens of thousands of Americans for the sake of re-election.