Trump’s failure and lack of leadership are not the real reasons for the Covid-19 disaster

Momentous events bring forth big misunderstandings, fantastical myths, fanciful explanations, conspiracy theories, paranoias of every description, malicious lies.  Covid-19, caused by a deadly, previously unknown type of coronavirus, is an ideal object for bold, ignorant assertions, scapegoating, wild rumors, and transparent rationalizations to suit a political preference or a need for psychological consistency.

Historically, misinformation has been a field of play for bigots and those we used to call the lunatic fringe. Today, the line between the lunatic fringe and the realm of reason has blurred. QAnon, perhaps the leading purveyor of paranoid, outlandish ideas affirms a vast cabal of Democratic politicians and celebrities is carrying out a vast, clandestine child sex and physical abuse fueled by trafficking and sometimes culminating in cannibalism. The charge, lacking a shred of evidence, would be laughable except for the fact that there is a small but not insignificant number of people who believe it, some fervently enough to commit violence.

Lunacy used to start at the fringe. Today, lunacy begins at the top, which makes it that more dangerous. This weekend Donald Trump spouted perhaps the biggest and most obscene of his thousands of lies. He said that Covid-19 “has affected almost no one.” There are already more than 200,000 “nobodies” dead, and there will be probably 400,000 by the end of the year. That is a lot of nobodies, far too many people who died in agony and alone.

The dead are no longer suffering, but their families and friends, many times 200,000, still are and will be for a long time. A legion of healthcare workers has been emotionally traumatized and physically depleted. They, too, often suffered family separation as they tried to prevent carrying the scourge from the hospital into the home.

The healthcare workers and President Trump, a tale of heroism versus heartlessness

In this article, I pay attention to the main myth asserted and repeated in prestigious mainstream media more than to those of the nuts like QAnon and the professional misleaders, like Trump, Fox News, and the Republican Party.

The biggest mainstream media myth about the Coronavirus comes from the attempt to answer an unavoidable question: Why? “Why have we as a country failed to stop or even curtail the spread and deadly toll of the virus while other countries like ours have?”

The answer usually devolves into a description of individual failures centered on the Trump administration’s gross incompetence and lack of leadership. This explanation is fundamentally misleading, simplistic, wrong. Trump is incompetent and he practices the opposite of leadership. Had he been the one trying to lead the children trapped in a maze of caves in the Philippines, he would have shepherded them in the opposite direction of the way out.

Failure is the wrong concept with which to understand the role of the president in this fiasco. You can only judge success or failure in relation to a common goal. People like you and me assume that life is the supreme goal.

But there are those for whom life is not the highest value and preserving it is not the top priority. Who are those people? The error at root in the mainstream media is in assuming that the goal of the Trump administration has been to crush the virus and save lives. But that is not the goal of Trump or the Republicans; it has never been, and is not, even now, when 205,000 Americans have died from Covid-19.

For more than a generation, the goal of the GOP has been to remake American society from one of widely shared prosperity, albeit unequally distributed, into a hypercapitalist Utopia in which the gains of technological advance, increased efficiency, and economic growth accrue almost exclusively to the richest. The pandemic has not changed this at all. In fact, it has increased inequality.

The Republican tax counter-reforms have provided gains that rise as you move from the top ten percent of the distribution of wealth and income to very top 0.001 percent, who have gotten the biggest piece. As you go down the privilege escalator, gains are minimal or non-existent. Those in the bottom 80 percent—the vast majority—are a prime example of Trump’s losers. Those in the middle tread water while those nearer the bottom try not to drown and often fail.

The pandemic has only magnified and thrown into stark relief the consequences for human lives of the longstanding and growing socioeconomic chasm in the United States and the political priorities of the GOP-Trump juggernaut that fight fiercely to maintain it.

Preserving and expanding this accelerating counterrevolution against the project of social, racial, economic gender, and sexual justice launched in the 1960s is by far more important for Republicans than saving lives. This is a counterrevolution with a vengeance, a hard turn to the right in response to decades of gradual, moderate reforms. Taken together, these mild reforms were eventually seen by many in the dominant majority, white Americans, as a radical revolution that threatens the ideological hegemony of laissez-faire capitalism and the supremacy of native-born Euro-Americans.

For them, Trump is the only politician willing to confront, head on, the slow drift toward diversity and equality. He shows no failure or lack of leadership here. For those who had been waiting for a national leader willing to call a spade a spade a spic a spic and a spaz a spaz, Trump is their man. That’s why he can do no wrong. He channels their resentment over the possible loss of a privileged status based on the only things they have—a white skin and a European heritage. Trump channels and normalizes their hate of those like Barack Obama who succeeded despite lacking a Euro-American pedigree by dint of intelligence, education, hard work, and empathy.

For Trump and the GOP, maintaining the political power to continue and expand hypercapitalism and the counterrevolution against diversity and justice is the most important thing—more important than beating back a lethal pandemic.

For the Trump-era GOP, Russian electoral interference, Trump’s authoritarian rule, even a deadly pandemic are superficial problems compared to liberalism or social democracy The threat of what they mischaracterize as socialism is not Marxist rule but that it would enable blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and the whole catalogue of “others,” to achieve status and opportunity on a par with the chosen people of this nation, the Euro-Americans.

That is what Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick meant, in relation to public health measures that curtail economic activities to prevent contagion: “there are more important things than living.” That is the principle implicit in the Trump administration handling of the pandemic. The economy is more important than saving lives, but only one part of it really matters. The success of the stock market, which represents the gains of the rich, is more important than the economy as a whole or saving lives. Reelecting Donald Trump is more important than saving lives.

It is a mistake to attribute the latter focus solely to Donald Trump’s giant, malevolent ego, although it is an important part of the equation. Republicans are subservient to Donald Trump not only because they fear him politically, although that is a major part of it. The biggest reason for their sycophancy is that a Donald Trump presidency is a guarantee for the continuation of counterrevolution and hypercapitalism.

Republican leaders, and the conservative business elite—the real base of the party—directly and indirectly form Republican minimalist governance. GOP minimalism is not an art form. It is an ideology in which less is always better when it comes to government and the functions it performs, except when it comes to repression of crime and dissent at home and the violent exercise of power abroad. Republican minimalism applies to taxes, corporate regulation, environmental protection, progressive income redistribution, provision of medical care, gun control, in fact anything that would advance a fairer and kinder society.

The minimal governance credo is the Republican Bible, the Koran, and the Torah rolled into one. It conveniently provides the GOP access to the vast corporate and personal resources of the rich and selfish, an informal club that encompasses most of the wealthy—the generous rich are touted for PR purposes but they are the exception. For the selfish rich giving money to Republicans is an investment with a high rate of return.

But there is more to the support of this sector for Republicans than the annual bottom line or their annual tax bill. More important is maintaining long term ideological hegemony and the political power to keep the gravy train going permanently for this minuscule class of millionaires and billionaires. The ultimate goal is to make the counterrevolution of economic inequality and white supremacy irreversible.

Donald Trump did not invent this mindset, but it is natural to him. When it comes to miserliness, cruelty toward the “losers,” Trump is an overachiever even among Republicans. He inspires them toward ever greater achievements in the crusade toward a society ever closer to a two-caste society: the have-much-more than they ever could need caste and the have-almost-nothing caste.

This is the GOP Utopia and, like all Utopias, not fully achievable. A have-nothing caste would not survive to provide profit and comfort for the have-everything. But such a twisted ideal provides a horizon toward which the GOP can aspire and march. And march the GOP has, getting ever closer. This election may be the last chance to bend the arc of history, which for decades has been bending toward injustice, in the right direction.