If you aren’t filled with rage at Trump,
you aren’t paying attention
Opinion by
Columnist
July 14, 2020 at 2:08 p.m. CDT
Let me
take you for a moment to a fantasy land. In this place, the coronavirus pandemic
was bad for a couple of months but now it is largely under control. If you
lived there you’d still be a little uncertain about going to a concert or a movie,
but your life would have largely returned to normal.
You
wouldn’t have lost your job; the government would have had a comprehensive
support program that kept unemployment low. You’d be able to see your family
and friends without fear. Your children would be returning to school in
September. There would be some precautions to take for a while longer, but
there would be no doubt that the pandemic was on its way to being defeated.
To us
here in the United States, this picture seems magical, like a dispatch from the
far future. But it isn’t. It’s the situation that exists right now in many of
our peer countries around the world. And the fact that our situation is so
different? That shouldn’t just make you feel disappointed, or anxious, or
upset.
It
should make you enraged. That is the proper response to where we
find ourselves today.
Let’s
begin with the situation in other countries. Here are new case totals from Monday for a few of
our peer countries:
·
France: 580
·
UK: 564
·
Spain: 546
·
Germany: 365
·
Canada: 299
·
Japan: 259
·
Italy: 200
·
Australia: 158
·
South Korea: 52
And the United States? 55,300.
Some of
these countries were in extremely bad shape for a time, but with sane
leadership and a population willing to work together, they’re in the process of
defeating the pandemic. But not us.
There
are many reasons we have experienced this catastrophe (and it quickly became
two catastrophes, an economic crisis added to the public health crisis), but
one stands above all others: President Trump.
Is
there a single aspect of his response to this pandemic that has not been a
miserable failure? For weeks he ignored warnings and denied that the pandemic
would be a problem. He didn’t prepare the equipment and systems we’d need to respond.
AD
We have
no national testing strategy — still! There is no national contact tracing
program. Trump turned over the effort to coordinate the distribution of
supplies to his incompetent dolt of a son-in-law. He responded to efforts by
governors to impose strong lockdowns by berating them and calling for their
states to be “liberated.” For months he not only refused to wear a mask but
also belittled those who did, successfully turning a vital public health tool
into a polarized political issue.
And he
demanded that everyone around him echo his insane claims that everything is
under control and the pandemic is being vanquished. It was a month ago that
Vice President Pence pathetically proclaimed that “we are
winning the fight against the invisible enemy,” and the administration’s great
success was “cause for celebration.”
And
now, rather than working harder to contain the pandemic, the White House has
begun a furious campaign to discredit the
federal government’s chief infectious-disease specialist, Anthony S. Fauci, who
has had the temerity to admit that things aren’t going well.
Trump himself has
clearly decided that he’s bored of worrying about the pandemic, so he’ll stop
trying to do anything about it. With over 135,000 Americans dead and counting.
How can
you look at what has happened to us and not be enraged?
Just
consider the economy: the tens of millions of people unemployed, the millions
who have lost health coverage, the tens of
thousands of businesses going under, the tens of millions of people
who could soon be evicted. None of it had to happen. In other
countries it hasn’t. But it happened to us.
Or
think of the millions of children who will wind up losing a year or maybe more
of their lives, without the opportunity to be educated, to build and sustain
friendships, to just be kids.
Even if
you’re lucky enough not to have gotten sick or lost a loved one, you’re the
victim of a robbery. Trump stole so much from all of us — our time with friends
and family, our mental health, even our faith that our country could meet a
challenge.
Don’t
let him get away with saying that it would have been worse were it not for him,
or that we only have so many cases only because we’re doing more testing. Those
are lies.
Anger
is often toxic in our political lives. But there are times when our leaders —
or in this case, one leader in particular — ought to be the target of every bit
of anger we can muster. To give him anything less is an affront to the truth.
To let our anger dissipate into a miserable resignation is to give him a kind
of forgiveness he doesn’t deserve.
Before
the pandemic, Trump was one of the worst presidents in our history. But now he
has laid waste to our country, with his unique combination of incompetence and
malevolence — and he’s not done yet. Once we finally rid ourselves of him, it
will take years to recover. But as we do, we should never for a moment forget
what he was and what he did to us. And we should never stop being angry about
it.
