A flood of data and reporting continues to reinforce the argument that, by prematurely relaxing social distancing restrictions on citizens and businesses, much of the United States is heading into an ever-greater health calamity of its own making. The single greatest portion of blame goes to the president, who continues to embrace a sociopathic obsession with economic resurgence, even at the cost of countless lives, as key to his re-election. But in an inversion of the saying about success having many fathers, but failure being an orphan, we can see here that failure is a truly multi-headed hydra of a family, the president’s deranged impulses being seconded by a grab-bag of governors, business leaders, and right-wing movements.
In the most benign reading of the facts, many states are easing restrictions to protect millions of their citizens from continued economic pain, rather than in response to presidential pressure or the imprecations of powerful business interests. But it appears that in most states, the public health measures that will prevent such re-opening from leading to a new, even worse wave of infections is simply not in place. Testing is farcically inadequate and often inaccurate; contact tracing efforts are mostly in their preliminary stages; and the message that masks can play a large role in slowing the spread of transmission has been muddled by deranged right-wing pushback against the practice. This New York Times piece has a great rundown of the various gaps in the health infrastructure that make a resurgence not just likely but virtually guranteed; as a former CDC director tells a journalist, “We’re not reopening based on science. We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is cultivating future disaster by consistently low-balling the extent of the virus within U.S. borders. NBC News has obtained a coronavirus task force report that in fact details spiking infection rates across the country, such as Nashville, Des Moines, and Amarillo, TX. Some of the states with these spikes, such as Texas, are actually relaxing restrictions even as the state case load continues to grow, which, as the New York Times article points out, flies in the face of the minimal guidelines promulgated by the Trump administration.
Despite such evidence, the president said earlier this week that “all throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.” This is an outright lie, and is as much an abdication of duty as his previous months’ neglect of adequately mobilizing the U.S. government to contain and mitigate this pandemic. It is a lie meant to encourage the rapid relaxation of restrictions despite the president’s own knowledge that the national situation is very much the opposite of improving. The obvious conclusion is in keeping with what we’ve been seeing all along from Donald Trump: he is willing for Americans to die unnecessarily in his monomaniacal quest for re-election — a re-election that he sees as wholly dependent on Americans’ perceptions that the economy is healthy.
It’s cold comfort to me that other Americans are also watching in horror this collective national nightmare, in which Americans are being lied to by their leaders and encouraged to begin resuming normal life activities with a false sense of their safety, and without the precautions we know will save lives actually being in place. The profundity of our health and economic crisis can be traced directly to Donald Trump’s months of denial and dissimulation about the threat posed by the coronavirus. Now the president, echoed by great swathes of the Republican Party, is insisting that Americans put their lives at risk to compensate for mistakes that were his, and his alone.
The horrific race and class dimensions of Trump’s “solution” to our economic damage are part and parcel of his willingness to send Americans back to work too early, and should be in the forefront of the consciousness of all Americans of good faith. Such workers will disproportionately be working class and minority Americans who will find themselves forced to return to work, either because they can’t afford not to, or because they’ll lose unemployment benefits if they decline out of fear for their health. And as Adam Serwer methodically outlines, the president’s concern for the deaths caused by the coronavirus has diminished as its death toll has fallen most heavily on non-white Americans; he concludes that, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them.”
Though it doesn’t amount to full-scale Democratic resistance to the president’s immoral willingness to send Americans to their deaths, I do see signs of hope in the Biden campaign’s apparent understanding that holding the president accountable for his coronavirus failures needs to be central to the effort to defeat him. It is absurd that there might be debate over this, but we’ve already seen congressional Democrats shy away from a fuller indictment of the president’s murderous leadership. Unconstrained by the House’s need to work with the Trump administration on legislation, the Biden campaign has more latitude to take a slash-and-burn approach; and ads like this one show an understanding that the president can’t be given any quarter over his coronavirus response. I hope to god they keep it up.