Is Anyone Buying the Trump Administration's Back-to-School Blather At This Point?

Jennifer Rubin has a solid beatdown of the Trump administration’s desperate plan to force school re-openings in the fall as a way to stimulate the economy and rescue the president’s diminishing re-election prospects.  Apparently, freaky billionaire/Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was on weekend talk shows promoting the idea; things did not go well, and the public was at least able to confirm that there is no actual plan for getting schools ready to re-open beyond a mandate to do so.  Rubin also notes the very important points that a) the president really has no leverage to actually deny funding to schools that aren’t unconstitutional b) such denial of funding would hurt the most vulnerable students and c) this chaotic strategy runs completely against decades of Republican insistence that local communities, not the federal government, should make decisions about schooling.  Rubin also makes the salient point that DeVos herself clearly sees the effort to deny funding to uncooperative public schools as a front in her war to replace public schools with private ones.  In the appearances Rubin cites, it was also illuminating to read of DeVos making the tacit argument that there is a battle going on between those who want kids to be educated and those who don’t, when the real struggle is between those who don’t want their kids and teachers to get sick and spread disease, and those who don’t care as long as it helps the president get re-elected.

Donald Trump’s effort to strong-arm America’s teacher and kids into returning to class, no matter the state of the pandemic or their ability to stay healthy, is an act not only of political insanity but borderline evil.  As I wrote a few days ago, it would be one thing to declare that the nation will spend whatever it takes to return kids to school safely; it’s another thing entirely to say that schools must re-open or actually lose money.  Every day that the administration presses this absurd point is another day that they deliberately feed themselves into a political wood chipper, and broadcast to the world the fundamental indecency and incompetence of Trump and his Republican allies.