During one of his freewheeling media briefings in April, Donald Trump fielded a question from Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She told of a family that contracted COVID-19 after attending a funeral in mid-March, not taking the danger seriously because the President was not.
So Alcindor asked, “Are you concerned that downplaying the virus maybe got some people sick?”
The party that chided Barack Obama over made-up nonsense about “death panels” is now prepared to accept catastrophic levels of mortality to get the economy back on track.
This was how the President responded: “And a lot of people love Trump, right? A lot of people love me. You see them all the time, right? I guess I’m here for a reason, you know? To the best of my knowledge, I won [the 2016 election]. And I think we’re gonna win again. I think we’re going to win in a landslide.”
The United States is in the midst of a full-blown health care crisis, headed by a man who is not just monumentally unfit to lead, but actually deranged. Tens of thousands of U.S. deaths could have been prevented had he not wasted critical weeks minimizing the threat and ignoring pleas to act.
From the start, Trump has seen the pandemic strictly in terms of how it affects him. He has used the most powerful position on Earth to boast about how well his briefings did in the TV ratings. An analysis by The New York Times found that Trump, in talking about the pandemic over a six-week period, congratulated himself 600 times, compared to just 160 “attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity.”
The President has lied constantly about the nation’s level of preparedness. (His pronouncement on March 6 that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” is still not anywhere close to being true, three months later.) He habitually blames others for problems caused by his own incompetence. And he continues to spread dangerous misinformation. Yes, some people really have tried ingesting disinfectants as a way to fight COVID-19, per Trump’s suggestion.
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"Presidential cocktail"
Containing the virus that is Donald Trump has become a national imperative. Responsible news outlets must do more to point out that nothing he says should be believed, much less acted on. Experts including the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci and coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx need to stop sitting passively by, trying to contain their shocked reactions, and physically impose some distance between the President and his microphone.
The governors and mayors who have helped fill Trump’s leadership void must keep pushing back against his mishandling of the crisis. The courts have a duty to protect incarcerated people and immigration detainees from the President’s deadly disregard. And there should be a massive public backlash against Trump’s use of emergency powers to order meatpacking plants to stay open without requiring that they become safer, despite overwhelming evidence that these hotbeds of infection threaten entire communities.
But sadly, none of these steps, though necessary, will be enough to contain the damage. Trump’s ignorance has proven contagious, to where it now infects an entire political party and millions of Americans. The cure will not come anytime soon.
Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. Senator, Ron Johnson, speaks for many members of his party when he laments the harm being done to the nation’s economy, just to reduce the death toll from COVID-19.
The court, lame duck Justice Kelly included, has struck down Evers’s stay-at-home order and is now poised to purge more than 200,000 voters from the rolls, as part of Republican efforts to help Trump win in the fall.
“Death is an unavoidable part of life,” mused Johnson in an op-ed for USA Today in late March, noting that some 48,000 Americans die by suicide and 67,000 die of drug overdoses each year. “That level of individual despair has occurred in a strong economy with near-record low levels of unemployment in virtually every demographic. Imagine the potential psychological and human toll if this shutdown continues indefinitely, unemployment reaches 20 percent or higher, as some now predict, and we sink into a deep recession or depression.”
Johnson even put a number on an acceptable level of loss, saying “getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population.” That would mean eleven million U.S. deaths.
The party that chided Barack Obama over made-up nonsense about “death panels” is now prepared to accept catastrophic levels of mortality to get the economy back on track. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, said he would be personally willing to die “in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves,” adding, “There are more important things than living.”
Trump’s supporters, at his urging, are rebelling against stay-at-home rules supported by his own administration. Having drunk the Kool-Aid—or, rather, the Clorox—that Trump is dispensing, they are holding ill-advised rallies, carrying signs that say things like, “My Rights Are Greater than Your Fear” and “Resist Tyranny.” Most do not wear masks or heed distancing guidelines. Some brandish assault rifles and other firearms.
The President and Fox News are spreading the message that people’s livelihoods are being senselessly destroyed, so they need to fight back. It’s the exact opposite of the caution and cooperation that the situation demands. It ensures that more people will die, while offering no guarantee of economic revival.
A virulent strain of ignorance has infected the body politic.
Here’s how one letter-to-the-editor writer sized up the situation: “I am fed up with being treated like a lab rat in an interminable experiment conducted by scientists who have no incentive to look beyond the narrow confines of their expertise.”
Heaven forbid that scientists should be allowed to keep fixating on what they know best.
Or consider this response posted to the Facebook page of Costco, after it announced that its patrons must now wear facial protection: “Time to discontinue my membership. I will NOT wear a mask!! I am sick and tired of being told what to do and when to do it. No store is worth my personal freedoms being taken away.”
Sick and tired. It’s an ironic complaint, coming from someone who can’t muster an iota of empathy for the hospital workers risking their lives to tend to tides of critically ill patients. But it is fully congruent with the casual flouting of social-distancing guidelines by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
And then there’s Alex Jones, the star of the Internet portal InfoWars, who recently declared his intention, if things get tough, to kill and eat his neighbors. “My children aren’t going hungry,” he’s decided. “I’m literally looking at my neighbors now going, ‘Am I ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up?’ and you know what, I’m ready.”
That’s good to know, especially if you live next door.
For a moment, early in the pandemic, it looked as though the nation and even the world were uniting against a common threat, finding power in collective action predicated on concern for others. In many cases and places, that is still happening. But now something ugly and discordant has been injected into the process, as the President and his allies stir division in the pursuit of political ends.
In Wisconsin, the Republicans who control the state legislature got the conservative-dominated state Supreme Court, which they also control, to block Democratic Governor Tony Evers’s effort to postpone the state’s presidential primary on April 7. They were hoping a low-turnout election would help them elect Dan Kelly, a state Supreme Court justice appointed by Republican former Governor Scott Walker.
Kelly, who has repeatedly conveyed his contempt for the very notion that the government should ever come to the aid of people in need, lost anyway, because large numbers of people in urban areas defied health warnings to come to the polls, often waiting in line for hours. The court, lame duck Justice Kelly included, has struck down Evers’s stay-at-home order and is now poised to purge more than 200,000 voters from the rolls, as part of Republican efforts to help Trump win in the fall.
We can expect more moments of opportunism and ugliness as this pandemic plays out. Trump’s supporters will continue to engage in risky and irresponsible behaviors, though most will likely stop short of cannibalism.
Let’s all breathe a collective sigh at their foolishness, then offer our understanding and forgiveness. It ought not be an act of folly for Americans to believe their President. We are all victims of the plague of ignorance that he has unleashed.
Meanwhile, there are countless examples of people pulling together and making sacrifices and being there for each other and trying to do what’s right. It is this energy and not our worst instincts that we need to tap into. There is so much to do.
The pandemic has powerfully exposed the failings of our health care system, including the racism baked into it. We can see the savage inequalities at the heart of our economy, in which some of our most essential workers are the lowest paid.
We cannot go back, ever, to the way things were before the pandemic. That is a good thing. In the necessity to rebuild comes the opportunity to build something better. The present crisis changes everything. The only question is how.
We are all in this together—whether we like it or not.