Heather Cox Richardson’s overnight summary of the Trump Administration’s apparent management goal of Covid-19 has been stuck in my brain:
Looming over Trump’s portrayal of his version of America, though, was the coronavirus. While other advanced countries have gotten the virus under control and are cautiously beginning to reopen, we are moving the opposite direction. As of today, we have almost 3 million confirmed cases and more than 130,000 deaths. In a number of states, especially in the South, cases are hitting new highs. Europe has banned American visitors, and Mexico and Canada have both closed their border with the U.S. Rather than trying to stop the crisis, the White House is launching new messaging about the coronavirus: “Learn to live with it.”
Trump is doubling down on the idea that the United States must simply reopen, and take the resulting deaths as a cost of doing business. Three people who have been privy to administration thinking about the issue told reporters for the Washington Post that officials are hoping “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.” Advisors have urged Trump to try to avoid responsibility for the administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic by simply blaming China for it. Their goal is to try to repair the economy before the election, recognizing that economic recovery is the only way to make up the gap between Trump’s poll numbers and those of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
I finally found a suitable analogy: a mechanic on a Formula 1 race car, upon discovering his car’s engine has a broken piston, insists he can carve a new one out of wood and it’ll be better than ever.
And if that doesn’t work, well, the remaining pistons will cover it fine and, ya know, last place isn’t that bad if we don’t acknowledge there was anyone else in the race and … add your favorite strident self-delusion here.
Look. All it takes is comparisons, honestly done, to show how poorly this Administration has performed. That’s it. We can always talk about how much we hate our grandparents, our friends with health conditions, and all the folks who have heart attacks and can’t be treated at the local ICU because the Covid-19 patients are using all the beds, all with great sarcasm.
But we may, tragically, end up having all this magical thinking terminated by the great head slap of reality. Hospitals overflowing with patients, friends and family dying when they could have been saved.
If the GOP falls in line behind this rationale, they will have truly become the Party of Death. Historians will point out that this never had to happen.
