A slew of reporting out this past weekend further illuminates the president’s unforgivable and catastrophic handling of the coronavirus crisis. The Washington Post has a pair of essential articles, including one titled “Commander of Confusion” that details Donald Trump’s self-contradictions and attempts to evade blame for the U.S. response. But “Commander of Confusion” turned out to be the mere amuse bouche for a investigatory piece out Saturday that tracks in vivid detail how the president’s incompetence has interacted with and fed a larger bureaucratic failure to deal with this crisis. I don’t see how a fair-minded person can walk away from these stories, which capture both the United States’ vast potential to have dramatically minimized the impact of Covid-19, and the way this president frittered away our chance to deploy the full force of American medical power against this outbreak, and not be filled with rage, sorrow, and frustration.
However, this bitter knowledge and a grappling with profound betrayal and heartbreak are absolutely necessary if we are to have a chance of keeping this epidemic from being mismanaged still further. There are many layers to the dysfunctional governmental response, but at its most basic, it’s a story of a president who wasted precious time spreading lies about the harmlessness of the coronavirus instead of mobilizing American government and society to fight it:
[It] took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.
Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.
Recognizing Donald Trump’s failures to date is crucial not only for basic issues of accountability, but because the same mistakes and parody of leadership continue through the present, with all the danger they create for the public. As just one example among many, the Centers for Disease Control recommended this weekend that Americans wear masks when out in public. The president communicated this information at a news conference, but followed it up by stressing that this recommendation is only voluntary, and that he himself will probably not wear a mask. The grotesquerie was two-fold: on the one hand, he seemed to object to the mask on some sort of bizarre aesthetic/too-cool-to-wear-it grounds, declaring, “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know. Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.” (This bizarre concern is all the stranger given that he is not meeting such visitors in the White House, due to the very epidemic that makes wearing a mask advisable in the first place). But the greater dereliction of duty is in communicating to the public that the mask recommendation can safely be ignored. Rather than help advance the public fight against coronavirus by advocating for the wearing of masks, he undermines it, endangering countless lives in the process.
And this is just one of dozens of examples, which are sure to increase in the coming days.
But the story of how the president has betrayed the American people by downplaying the coronavirus contains an equally disturbing, and potentially more politically consequential, story of how the president has effectively betrayed his own supporters. And this story implicates not only the president, but members of his party who have remained silent in the face of his serial lies, distortion, and inaction in the face of the coronavirus threat. The Washington Post reports that:
Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.
The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.
It would be terrible, and remarkable enough by itself, for a president to exploit the credulity of his supporters in a way that literally got many of them killed. But Trump’s lies about the coronavirus threat have been seconded both by congressional Republicans, who have at best stood silent while he propagated all manner of disinformation, and by state leaders, including GOP governors, some of whom up to this very moment refuse to institute strict stay-at-home orders. For both groups, loyalty to the president seems to have played a role in refusing to challenge his mangling of basic scientific reality. In states like Florida, you can also see the GOP placing the interests of the business community over public health in resisting closure orders. And some of the resistance has been aided by the epidemiology of this disease, which hit Democratic-leaning states like California and New York first, allowing GOP leaders to paint it as an urban problem distant from their rural constituents, and as a problem to blame Democrats for.
It’s really impossible to overstate how profoundly the GOP has betrayed its own supporters. To act in ways that guaranty that more people will die from the coronavirus than otherwise isn’t just a bad political call, it’s a disqualifying one. And while no one denies that we face a difficult choice between stopping the spread of the virus and shutting down large parts of our economy, the debate over what balance to find has already been resolved by the medical community and much of the political establishment: stopping the virus is a prerequisite to returning to anything resembling economic normalcy.
Yet, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, but that seem rooted in a reluctance to be accused of politicizing this crisis and undermining the president, as well as in a belief that Americans can see for themselves the culpability of the GOP, the Democratic Party as a whole has collectively pulled its punches against both the president and the Republican Party — including in making the specific case to Republican voters that their party has let them down. Such reluctance is a political catastrophe in the making for Democrats. The president has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to control the news cycle and to pump disinformation into the public sphere. Having assured by his unfit leadership that the dangerous challenge posed by the coronavirus metastasized into a pandemic projected to cost at least 100,000 American lives, he now seeks to avoid accountability while continuing the same inept leadership. He is doing a profoundly shitty job, and the refusal to fully confront him on this fact shades into enabling his incompetence and excusing his errors.
Nonetheless, on Sunday, the Democratic house leadership doubled down on an attitude of minimal confrontation with the Trump administration, as Majority Whip Jim Clyburn indicated that a panel for overseeing relief funds will not examine the president’s initial response to the coronavirus. Rather, that effort is to be conducted by another panel — but one whose work is to begin at some unspecified future point. Maybe, if Trump and the Republicans were willing to have an open discussion of their errors in handling the virus, the Democratic approach might be reasonable. But even as I type this, the president and his party are engaged in an effort to deny and re-write the history of the past few months. Donald Trump claims he has conducted a flawless response, denies he ever said that the virus would go away on its own after maybe infecting 15 people, max, and now presents the deaths of upwards of 100,000 Americans as the best case outcome of his heroic efforts, for which we should all be eternally grateful. And the GOP backs this revisionism every step of the way.
This is not the behavior of a normal democratic party, but one that has rejected basic notions of competent governance and accountability. It is behavior that, in fact, demonstrates that the GOP is no longer a party that subscribes to the basics of American democracy, which at its heart demands that our government be held accountable for its actions, and that citizens have access to the information required for such accountability. Against this, the Democrats’ decision to play by some sort of unwritten rulebook in which you refuse to critique the president and his party in a crisis, is politically insane. If the GOP is not to be held accountable for needless American deaths, and if the Democrats are unwilling to make the argument that they would have done a far better job than this president, then why on earth should Americans vote for the Democratic Party? If the Democratic Party cannot be roused to outrage and action by mass death inflicted by the incompetence and ideological blindness of its political opponents, what is the point of the Democratic Party? More to the point, who are these Democratic leaders to think they should be entrusted to guide the party through this moment, which is not just a medical emergency but a true political crisis?
The situation is all the more unbelievable in that the coronavirus discredits the GOP not simply due to its failed response over the past few months, but because America’s vulnerability to the virus has been exacerbated by the anti-government principles that have been bedrock Republican values for literally generations. At the macro level, our lack of universal healthcare is due in large part to the GOP’s basic belief that healthcare is neither the government’s responsibility to provide, nor something that every American deserves. The same goes for other related issues, such our lack of guaranteed paid sick leave. Now, Americans are dying because such policies were deemed by the GOP to be beyond the scope of American politics. And at the level of economic relief, Americans are paying the price for GOP policies — such as newly-unemployed residents of Florida who are unable to apply for unemployment insurance because of a state system explicitly designed to deter claims, all in order to save billions for businesses (the Florida GOP is in a panic about being held accountable for this malpractice, which hardly sounds like the time for the Democrats to stand down from criticism).
With reality providing the ultimate judgment on the limits and failures of Republican politics and politicians, now is the time to make them pay a price for their lack of relevance to the needs of Americans — not months from now, after they’ve they deploy the vast propaganda networks at their disposal to lie and confuse Americans about what we’ve actually experienced. Now, when their support for an unfit president is causing mass death on a daily basis. Now, when their culpability can be hammered home for all voters to see. Now, when it can make a difference between life and death for thousands of Americans.