Help me out here. I can’t seem to decide who’s more at fault for the new spread of the pandemic. Is it Trump, or the oblivious fools to whom he gives aid and comfort?
Three months into this true-life sci-fi epic, with no treatments or cures in sight, America is inexplicably “reopening” – and, sure enough (who could’ve ever foreseen this) 25 states are already seeing spikes in new cases. Millions of Americans, having simply decided that they’re bored with quarantine, are ready to party, bro. And these Covidiots are being goaded to do so by a purported president who can’t bring himself to wear a mask, and who’s stoked to disgorge his sewage on Saturday at an indoor arena that’s a veritable Petri dish for further infection.
What a country.
Trump doesn’t even bother to tweet about the virus anymore; he has given up and moved on. The Covidiots, heavily concentrated in the red states of the south and west, and goaded to misbehave by the Republican death cult party, have given up and moved on. But here’s some breaking news: the virus has not moved on. If millions of Americans want to test positive for stupidity, the virus is fine with that.
Andy Savitt, a former health care CEO and high-ranking Obama health administrator, says it best: “With 1000 people silently dying every day, we have no COVID national leadership. Even the shell game we had is gone…Whatever the situation, we seem bound to make it worse.”
Joseph Fair, a prominent virologist who has survived his own bout with the virus, said yesterday on Meet the Press: “We could’ve truly mitigated (the spread of the virus). And we missed that opportunity…We’re not only not putting down the stricter measures, we’re loosening the measures we had in place. So those cases are going to continue to rise…Once it gets so ingrained in the population, that just means we’re going to have it in the country until a vaccine is here.”
Texas and Florida, two big states that have loosened their measures, are now seeing record virus spikes. So is Arizona, where the bars are open again and the number of virus patients on ventilators has reportedly quadrupled since mid-May. But Arizona’s Republican governor is fine with that, because, in his words, “This virus is something we need to learn to live with.”
But the tone is set at the top. Trump plans to pack a 19,000-seat Tulsa, Oklahoma arena with MAGA saps who will not be required to wear masks. This is the same arena that has canceled all other events through the end of July. This Trump rally is the ultimate metaphor for our American dystopia.
And what timing! Last Friday, Oklahoma’s cases spiked, setting a one-day state record, and Bruce Dart, executive director of the Tulsa Health Department, said he sure wishes the rally wasn’t happening: “I have concerns about large groups of people gathering indoors for prolonged periods of time.” But he’s powerless to do anything about it.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, tells the Associated Press that Trump’s Tulsa rally is “an extraordinarily dangerous move for the people participating, and the people who may know them and love them and see them afterward” – referring to the fact that the MAGA-ites will return to their communities and potentially infect innocent people who had no interest in spending a few hours indoors with America’s Mortician. But hey, Dr. Jha is an elitist from Harvard, so what does he know?
And besides, the stable geniuses working for Trump are saying there’s no threat of further COVID spread. Larry Kudlow, who directs Trump’s economic council, surfaced the other day on Fox News and said, “There is no second spike. Let me repeat that. There is no second spike…There is no second wave.”
Of course, this is the same guy who declared – roughly 115,000 deaths ago – “We have contained this. It’s pretty close to airtight.” But hey, if you’re a Covidiot who mocks masks, and who has already normalized 1000 deaths a day, you’re gonna take your cues from the Trump regime.
So I’ve circled back to my opening query: Who deserves the brunt of the blame for our ongoing woes?
My first instinct is to pin it on Trump; after all, the buck stops at the top. In 2018 he fired the pandemic response team created by President Obama, he wasted months minimizing the threat, his daily press briefings were a disastrous font of disinformation, and he has since sidelined his own coronavirus task force. (Where is Dr. Fauci, whose disapproval rating in the latest national poll is 11 percent?)
Jonathan Bernstein, a political commentator at Bloomberg Opinion, writes: “I’m not blaming ordinary citizens for how they’ve handled this…by far the heaviest responsibility lies with Donald Trump, who as president has both a particular duty to accurately inform people and by far the largest microphone. Trump should’ve been making sure from the start that the government was pushing a clear message, putting experts out front and backing up what they said with action…Trump briefly tried saying that the country was at war with the coronavirus. Whatever the merits of that framing, he never acted like it was true.”
All true. But since most citizens (even some of his supporters) already know that Trump is unfit to lead a health crisis, don’t they share some responsibility for the virus spikes? Taking cues from a death cult regime doesn’t seem wise. Being bored with sacrifice – and expecting magical results – seems very American, all to our detriment.
Historian Kevin Kruse tweeted yesterday: “We were asked to do virtually nothing, and even that proved too much for us…In World War II, Americans endured a range of sacrifices for nearly four years. These days, we couldn’t handle Netflix and face masks for more than three months.”
My verdict: There’s synchronicity between the Covidiots and the high-office idiots. They feed on each other.
For instance: It’d be nice if a Republican senator who’s planning to attend Trump’s Tulsa rally would wear a mask – to show some common sense, to set a good example. But on CNN yesterday, when Oklahoma’s Jim Lankford was asked whether he’ll wear a mask and encourage attendees to wear masks, he stammered:
“I haven’t decided on that. (I’m) trying to figure out the best way to be able to do this. You see actually very few masks in Oklahoma now…”
That says it all.