This post from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line blog hit me with the shock of revelation. With the president insisting that Americans act like “warriors” by risking death by returning to work (even as he and his inner circle stay safe via daily coronavirus testing), Donald Trump has seemed to throw himself headlong against an unyielding reality: the economy won’t begin to prosper so long as Americans fear going about their daily lives, which won’t happen until the virus is far more contained than right now. Isn’t he just setting himself up for failure?
But Sargent zeroes in on a special ingredient that helps Trump’s approach make more sense, even if it makes it no less sociopathic: rather than trying to move the country to a state of normalcy, Trump is instead concentrating on creating the illusion of normalcy — even if, logically, actually taking the steps to save the country’s health will also help save its economy. And so Trump attempts to convince the American people that the worst of the virus is past, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
It’s impossible to say exactly why Trump would choose a tenuous unreality that may well backfire over actual action that could realistically help preserve the economy, not to mention save lives, but the creation of appearance over reality has undeniably been the hallmark of Trump’s long and catastrophic career through the past several decades. Sargent suggests something along these lines, referencing Trump’s faith in his “magical reality-bending powers.” But Sargent also points to a way in which reality itself (apart from the glaring disaster of the pandemic and economic meltdown) is shaping Trump’s fantasy response: there’s a relatively short timeline until the election, which the president could well see as not nearly sufficient to reverse the current crisis enough to assure re-election. A corollary of this that Sargent doesn’t mention outright is also true — this finite time frame also means the illusion need only work until November, after which, from Trump’s perspective, who cares? All that matters to Trump is re-election, not governance or the actual lives and livelihoods of the American people.
In a Twitter thread that references Sargent’s column, Salon writer Amanda Marcotte singles out a powerful through-line of Trump’s effort to convince voters of an alternate coronavirus reality: the president’s resistance to adequate testing in the United States. Just as a few months ago the president opposed allowing a cruise ship to dock in the United States because it would raise the number of cases in the U.S., the president now openly admits that he wants to keep the numbers artificially low (in a separate column, Marcotte documents his previous efforts to slow down the testing effort). In a similar vein, we’ve also seen reports in recent days that the president and his allies intend to start disputing the coronavirus death tolls, which is both not surprising and completely abhorrent. The clear objective is to keep the virus from appearing as bad as it actually is. This attitude is reflected in policy, as the Trump administration continues to deny its responsibility for taking the lead on testing nationwide.
Marcotte’s prescription for battling the president’s effort to re-open the economy at the cost of tens of thousands or more American life has the power of simplicity and moral clarity, and aims dead center at his efforts to corrupt the coronavirus statistics in his favor; it also seems like an excellent start to rolling back the president’s wish to create the illusion of premature victory over the coronavirus. Stop getting sucked into the open-versus-closed debate, Marcotte advises, and just start asking “Where are the tests?” at every opportunity. I think this is exactly right. Against Trump’s denialism and appeals for American workers to die for his re-election, holding fast to the importance of basic facts, such as the extent of the pandemic and measurable points at which re-opening measures might be more safely undertaken, is a supremely simple way to wield verifiable reality against presidential propaganda.
Taken together, Sargent’s and Marcotte’s arguments lend yet more urgency to fighting back against Trump’s ongoing dereliction of duty as the coronavirus continues to sicken and kill Americans. A president who has given up on saving American lives, and prefers instead to try to convince Americans that things are better than they are by suppressing the evidence and deploying the full propaganda power of the White House, clearly deserves political annihilation. But Sargent and Marcotte also implicitly make the case that the president’s strategy is weak, even fatally flawed, and can be taken apart by the steady application of facts and logic, not to mention moral suasion.
At this point, the lack of a coordinated and relentless Democratic assault on the president’s insane and immoral strategy to essentially let the coronavirus run its course, while demanding that Americans die for the economy, amounts to an unbelievable failure of leadership from the opposition party. It seems to me that if you are an elected Democrat, and are not consumed with a righteous fury to save the country and the American people from the mass death inflicted by this mad president and the discredited GOP, then you should resign and make way for new blood that actually gives a damn about American lives and American democracy. One of my darkest fears is that the Democratic leadership is satisfied to stand back and let Trump destroy himself in the coming months, even at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives, rather than internalizing the need to expose and roll back his monstrosity with every of ounce of energy and creativity they have, starting yesterday.
As Heather Havrilesky writes in a recent cathartic Twitter post, “You wake up some mornings and you just need to see one single Democrat in office visibly losing their shit over this murderous fucking clown. That’s all you want: One human being in power, reflecting our shared reality by spontaneously combusting over the nightmare world this hapless homicidal buffoon ushered in.” Exactly so: and it makes me wonder if the Democrats are also holding back, not because they might fail in their opposition, but because the righteous fury building up around the country will also hold accountable even those Democratic politicians who have failed to rise to this dreadful, apparently endless moment in our history.