It has been hard to miss the news over the last several days that many states around the country have had record-breaking numbers of new coronavirus cases, leading some major hot spots like Texas and Florida to freeze further relaxation of social distancing measures. Reports abound of overwhelmed testing facilities and ICUs nearing capacity; the United States is now staring into the abyss of escalating mass illness and death. And just the other day, the head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said that more than 10 times as many Americans have been infected with the virus as have been reported, meaning there have been not 2.3 million but a staggering 23 million cases around the nation. As this New York Times analysis observes, many states that opened before meeting basic benchmarks are now seeing hard evidence that they indeed opened up too early, with deadly effects on public health and body blows to the economy.
A Washington Post report out this weekend is blunt and correct in its assessment that President Donald Trump is at the center of this historic American failure, reminding us of how he “has repeatedly downplayed the virus, sidelined experts and misled Americans about its dangers and potential cures,” and “now finds his presidency wracked by an inability to shepherd the country through its worst public health calamity in a century.”
But state-level decisions echoing the president’s demands that the country prioritize opening the economy above all else, in some cases even as their case counts were going up, have given broader substance to the president’s incompetent leadership. Such decisions looked reckless at the time, and now reality is bearing out all prior criticism of the moves, and more. In some states led by Republican governors, such choices weren’t just based on unethical and illogical decisions to prioritize business interests over public health, even when it should have been obvious that business would suffer so long as people were afraid to go out and about in the world. They were also following the lead of our coronavirus-denier-in-chief, who even as late as last week was continuing to assert that the the coronavirus is going away and will soon disappear.
Their coronavirus response demonstrates that the president and his loyal governors share two broad traits: a belief in business interests over public health, and a belief that the coronavirus will really go away on its own. The belief in business is fundamental to their politics — in the case of the president, because of how he sees economic health as the route to re-election, and in the case of governors, because of an ideological commitment to economic interests above human interests. The belief in the coronavirus going away on its own is something else, a variety of magical thinking that, among other things, contrasts starkly with the hard-headed talk of getting Americans back to work and making the economy great again. I understand how the president has this belief — he’s a sick and damaged man unable to separate objective reality from his own rampant needs, desires, and delusions. But there’s not such a clear excuse for governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.
What I keep coming back to is this: the explosion of coronavirus cases across the United States is an entirely predictable event. We had already seen around the world, and in fact around the United States, that covid-19 is a highly contagious disease that will spread exponentially once it gains a foothold in an area. And yet, multiple governors — mostly Republican — acted as if this reality were somehow behind us and no longer operative. For so many to act similarly, in contravention of a known reality, is not just an incidence of magical thinking, but a display of political mass delusion on a scale with little parallel in our history. For our purposes, the particular explanation for this delusion doesn’t matter; what matters is that it is a catastrophe for many millions of Americans, and a display of political incompetence that’s at a minimum disqualifying, and at a maximum a display of criminal negligence in performing their duties as elected officials. Just as I recently wrote that no Trump supporter deserves to die because of the president’s incompetence and malignity, no one in a Republican-governed state deserves to die because their governor has succumbed to delusion and rejected basic scientific evidence and medical advice. In the same way that we wouldn’t want as governor someone who didn’t believe in gravity, we also don’t want governors who don’t believe in the basics of epidemiology.