The Trump-made calamity is getting worse
Opinion by
Columnist
July 8, 2020 at 2:19 p.m. CDT
The
news on the coronavirus front is so appallingly bad that it’s hard to know
where to start. We now have recorded more than 3 million cases. “More than a
fifth of the country’s population now lives in a county where the high was
reached on Monday,” my colleague Philip Bump writes.
“If it’s a tide threatening the body politic, it’s at our knees.”
Millions
in bailouts already dispensed went to “small government”
conservative groups and billionaires while
the Republican-controlled Senate drags its feet on new funds for testing, state
and local government, and continued direct assistance to unemployed workers (of
which there will be many more as states are compelled to shut down again).
Much of
the blame rests with President Trump, who has downplayed the virus, eschewed
mask wearing, held mass gatherings, misrepresented the facts and egged on
governors to open up their states too soon. What else could be worse? Oh, threatening to cut
off funding unless schools open without regard to Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention guidelines. This might be one of the rare instances in which an
ad claiming the incumbent might kill your children would not be an
exaggeration. If you think women hate Trump now, wait until mothers and K-12
schoolteachers — more than three-fourths of whom are
women — learn that Trump voices no qualms putting children in
obvious danger.)
Former
vice president Joe Biden was remarkably restrained in responding to the latest
news on Wednesday. (I suspect ad makers from the Lincoln Project will not be.)
In a written statement, Biden
denounced Trump’s nonexistent leadership. “Today’s awful — and avoidable — news
that America surpassed three million COVID-19 cases is yet another sad reminder
of the cost our country is paying for President Trump’s failure to lead us
through this crisis,” Biden wrote. He continued:
While
other countries safely re-open their economies and their citizens get back to
work, businesses in America are being forced to shut down — again — as Donald
Trump’s failures make countless workers and families face an uncertain future.
President Trump claimed
to the American people that he was a wartime leader, but instead of taking
responsibility, Trump has waved a white flag, revealing that he ordered the
slowing of testing and having his administration tell Americans that they
simply need to “live with it.”
Biden
essentially declared Trump AWOL and pleaded with him to “ramp up testing, get
protective equipment to first responders, health care workers, and other
essential workers, and ... finally provide science-based leadership on
re-opening safely.” Biden rightly called Trump out for spending so much time on
racist rhetoric (“devoting what energy he has left to dividing our nation, the
opposite of a commander in chief’s duty at all times, let alone a moment of
historic crisis”).
We have
gone far beyond the Katrina disaster, for example, in terms of lives lost,
economic ruin and a leadership void. Unlike President George W. Bush, Trump
disregards expert advice in favor of his own ignorant hunches and refuses to
accept the federal responsibility of responding to the crisis (e.g., purchasing
needed material, setting up a testing and tracing program). Where the Katrina
debacle failed to break a presidency, a raging and containable pandemic might
succeed. Even some Republicans, especially those in states where cases are
spiking, will be horrified by an economy screeching to a halt (again) and the
thought of sending children back to school without meticulous planning and
adherence to rigorous protocols.
There
is no sly political tactic at work here. There is no campaign playbook that
says: “Override experts on children’s health.” Perhaps Trump is in full
denial about the extent of the problem. Perhaps he does not have a clue how to
address it. Perhaps he thinks people will not hold him accountable for
preventable deaths.
In any
event, his unfitness was never so evident, nor has the refusal among
Republicans to dump him been more irresponsible.
