Trump and his cronies: Too little, too late, and the carnage of Covid 19

On July 8, Progreso published a “breaking news” note in which I stated that Florida had become the new epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic. At the time, the number of new cases was spiking all over the country, especially in the Sunbelt, and there was no consensus that Florida was the new epicenter. But that fact is now clear.

Things here have only gotten worse since early July. The record of 11,458 new cases set on July 4 has been eclipsed several times, with the new single-day record now close to 16,000. Several South Florida hospitals are reporting ICU capacity of more than 130 percent!

There is palpable alarm among local public officials in Miami-Dade, who are tightening the rules they recently relaxed on bars, restaurants, and other businesses. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez has even suggested people wear masks inside their own homes.

It’s well they should start to panic. Right now, Texas and California are in various depths of shit, and Florida is about as deep as you can get. Florida has 6 percent of the U.S. population and 20 percent of the Covid-19 cases. Texas, with 6.8 percent of the U.S. population has 13 percent of the Covid-19 cases in the United States. California, with 12 percent of the U.S. Population, has 10.8 percent of cases.

Panicking now is locking the barn gate after the horse is out. Too little, too late; the infection has been spreading wildly since Gov. DeSantis began reopening. Miami-Dade County is the epicenter of the epicenter, despite the fact that officials here were more cautious than in other parts of the state. Yet, they still reopened too soon and too widely under pressure from above (DeSantis, Trump) and below (local business owners). The predictable spike came, and they were forced to partially reclose again. The back-and-forth produced whiplash and even more anger among business owners who had become economically and emotionally invested in a progressive reopening.

Amid this disastrous scenario, Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided to open schools following the dictates of his master, Donald Trump. He says teachers are “champing at the bit” to get back into the classroom. The truth value of the statement of this minor league Trump-type liar can be judged by just two facts. The largest teacher’s union in Florida is signaling its opposition by suing the governor. Miami-Dade School Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has been clear he won’t open schools for in-classroom teaching unless he can assure safety, which is hard to imagine given the runaway Covid-19 situation in Miami-Dade.

DeSantis won’t be able to satisfy Trump’s demands. Schools are under local, not state or federal control.  That means the schools won’t reopen against Carvalho’s will. Also, you can’t have school if teachers don’t show up.

Two final indicators of how dire the situation is in Florida. One, even pig-headed Donald Trump decided a mass gathering was a bad idea and cancelled the Republican convention in Jacksonville. The probable reason? According to the most recent poll, more than 60 percent of the people of Florida don’t want it in the state. Then, too, if the GOP show turned out to be a super-spreader event, the convention would be the mother of all PR disasters.

Things are bad when Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who is terrified to annoy the president, has been having secret talks with governors of states that are hot spots, telling them they should impose tougher measures. In a rare break from White House spin, she said last week that with cases in Texas, California, and Florida spiking, we now have the equivalent of three New Yorks.

That means that, as a nation, we are not just back to square one. We are on square minus two. The worst-case scenario from the oft-cited University of Washington model now projects as many as 670,000 deaths are possible.

There is another aspect of the current crisis that is almost as horrific as the worsening death toll and that is the increasing corruption of institutions and the ramping up of authoritarian rule.

Corruption and authoritarianism have been part of the Trump playbook since day minus one. The invitation of Russia to interfere in the U.S. election—an invitation that Russian President Vladimir immediately took up and carried out via the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers by the GRU, Russian military intelligence—preceded the 2016 election. So did Trump’s infamous thrashing of Mexican immigrants on the night he announced his campaign, a green light for every xenophobic bigot to perpetrate hate crimes against the scapegoated group.

Trump’s catastrophic response to the Covid-19 pandemic has only magnified his worst tendencies. Now he is corrupting even the country’s scientific institutions like the CDC. Corruption and authoritarianism come together in Trump’s overriding the CDC guidelines on the safe reopening of the schools, watering them down so he can force schools to reopen and still pretend his administration is not endangering the lives of children, teachers and other school employees, not to mention parents.

Unwilling to do what was known to be necessary to save hundreds of thousands of lives, he postures as the strong man who can save Americans from very bad people. These awful people are protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, who he lumps together with a tiny sub-sector of the most violent to justify deploying federal shock troops in military garb who use teargas and batons on unarmed civilians.

Violence provokes violence. In Portland, the site of these events, the real violent element were the Homeland Security goons who honed their skills on the border, abusing Trump’s favorite scapegoats, Latin American immigrants, and refugees from everywhere, and especially Muslims.

The question to be answered by the next election is stark. Which side are you on? Fascism and death or democracy and life.