No question can remain that Donald Trump is the primary author of the United States’ catastrophic handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His policy of indifference and denial has hobbled the federal response from the start, and today we’ve witnessed what may be the most astounding and callous example yet of his unfitness to lead the country through this crisis. The president has decided that his re-election depends on getting children in school so that their parents can work and pump up the economy, so today he declared his intention to force American schools to re-open in the fall, and to use the cudgel of withheld federal funds to punish any that don’t. Alongside this, he has criticized the re-opening guidelines of the Centers of Disease Control regarding schools, almost immediately causing CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield to aver that his “recommendations should not be used as an excuse for not returning children to classrooms.” This of course raises the question of why the CDC even had guidelines to begin with, if they are not meant to get in the way of sending children back to school. More importantly, it raises the question of whether the CDC is openly manipulating its health advice to soothe and support an out-of-control president panicked by his declining poll numbers.
There have been many events that I thought Trump could not survive, and was proven wrong many times, but what has been true is that his parade of horrors has accumulated to the point that Americans are turning firmly against him, with the pandemic and his openly white supremacist attitude to the George Floyd/social justice protests as the final two likely knockout blows. But this idea of requiring that all children — and teachers — return to school, regardless of the state of the epidemic, regardless of the protection that can be afforded them, is tantamount to asking Americans to sacrifice their kids for the sake of the president’s election.
In a tweet earlier today, writing about this “kids are junior warriors for the economy” gambit, Jamelle Bouie wrote that forcing schools to re-open prematurely is of a piece with Trump and the broader GOP’s push to re-open businesses, their wish to cut off further unemployment benefits, and their lack of response to the mounting eviction crisis: the intent is “to use the pandemic to force work, discipline labor, and maintain capital’s share of national income.” What is increasingly remarkable, and abhorrent, is their willingness to move forward with this sadistic and self-serving approach as the pandemic appears to be spinning out of control in many parts of the U.S., in no small part due to the Republican Party’s premature relaxation of social distancing and other preventative measures. The class war and racist aspects could not be more apparent; as white-collar employees work from the safety of home offices, disproportionately-minority essential workers are forced to choose between reporting for work or losing their jobs, learning that despite the seeming paradox, “essential” and “expendable” can refer to the same employee.
Whereas a few months ago this approach merely seemed murderous on the basis of logic, now it has been proved to be clearly murderous on the basis of implacable evidence. It’s not just the escalating case count and tragic rise in the number of deaths that have happened over the last few weeks. We’re also seeing our testing system getting clogged up and slowed down by the huge recent increase in cases, health professionals warning of PPE shortages, and states like Texas indicating that their ICU’s are nearing capacity. Things are getting worse, and mass suffering is on the way. Yet, instead of forming a real plan to deal with our crisis, Trump and the GOP give us a fake plan for pretending that none of this is a big deal, that we should all treat it as normal.
Of course everyone wants kids to go back to school. Of course everyone wants to avoid long-term damage to their education and their socialization. But as folks like Josh Marshall and others have been hammering on, the way you get kids back to school is by containing the virus, not by simply mandating that children must go back to classes no matter what. The lack of seriousness about fighting the virus shows the GOP’s basic lack of care about actually making schools safe. And really, when did we ever before hear of Donald Trump showing the slightest concern for education until today? Only when it became a tool in his deranged plan to create the appearance of normalcy did it catch his attention.
It doesn’t matter if, in the coming days, the president tries to backtrack on his authoritarian pronouncements about forcing schools to re-open. This is clearly his intent, and we can be sure that even if the administration makes a tactical retreat from trumpeting a plan sure to increase America’s loathing of this insane president, his loyal servants at the White House and allied GOP governors will continue to push the company line.
The Democrats need to crucify these motherfuckers for this one. Trump failed, and now our children are supposed to pay the price? Not in our America.