Trump and the GOP give COVID an invitation to run wild
Some time ago, as the evidence piled up—Nixon’s criminal Watergate actions and secret racism and anti-Semitism, Reagan’s tax cut for the rich and coded racism, George W. Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that got us into a bloody, endless war—I came to the conclusion that the Republican Party as a whole has become an incorrigibly nefarious organization.
The level of maximum GOP virulence has been reached with the presidency of Donald Trump—with a lot of help from his obedient minions. The GOP’s poisonous policies and inhuman ideology are responsible for the difference between the awful COVID-19 death toll in this country and the much smaller death total in countries like South Korea.
What accounts for this other than the lunacy of Donald Trump? South Korea is not infected by the GOP minimal government ideology. The country has a universal health care system. Its government responded to COVID-19 in a unified and effective way.
In contrast, this country has responded to the Coronavirus more like the dis-United States of America than the United States of America. Each state makes its own rules. Each economic interest, like the meatpacking industry, looks out for its own profit over safeguarding the life of its workers. Not to mention that Donald Trump personally had a direct hand in the carnage of the meatpacking workers by issuing an executive order requiring meatpackers to stay open no matter what.
These are some of the main reasons that the United States, with a population of 328 million, 6.4 times that of South Korea’s 51 million, has as of today recorded 82,799 deaths compared to South Korea with a total of 258 deaths. That is 320 times more deaths per capita in the United States compared to South Korea. So much for Trump’s boast that this country leads the world in the fight against COVID-19. It is the opposite, a scandal, an outrage. It ought to be crime.
To this day, the Trump administration has failed to develop a comprehensive strategic national plan to address what Trump himself has called a war. Eisenhower did not carry out the D-Day invasion based on instinct, whim, and whimsy. If he had, U.S. forces would have been massacred on the beaches of Normandy. But that is how Donald Trump has faced this supreme threat to the people of the nation with a predictable result.
At this point, Trump’s plan is to open the economy as wide as possible so he has a chance at reelection and hope for a miracle that will make the virus go away. As experts like Doctor Anthony S. Fauci have testified, that’s not going to happen.
This is a highly infectious, lethal disease that will only claim more victims as we drop common sense precautions. Indeed, it has already happened in places like Georgia that are trying that approach. Florida, with Ron DeSantis, Trump’s toady as governor, will not be far behind.
Trump’s absolute electoral priority and the GOP’s free market uber alles ideology has made what was bound to be an unfortunate situation escalate into an absolute tragedy. While Donald Trump boasts and focuses on convenient scapegoats like the World Health Organization and China, Americans, especially Latinos and African Americans, are dropping like flies.
Such people are not part of Trump’s base. Does he care? Maybe he does, but he does not mention their special tragedy. Who knows what goes on in Trump’s sick mind? I do not exclude the possibility that he may even see an upside. Death, after all, is more permanent than deportation or disenfranchisement.
As the death toll mounts, the extreme-right-wing is trying out a huge lie to defend Donald Trump. An obscure physician and Republican state legislator from Minnesota is spinning a conspiracy theory—one amplified by Fox and the other usual suspects—according to which “federal guidelines are coaching doctors to mark COVID -19 as the cause of death even when it is not, inflating the pandemic death toll.” In the real world, experts say COVID deaths have been substantially undercounted.
This administration has brought us the equivalent of Watergate with its attempted extortion of Ukraine leading to the shame of impeachment. It is having its Bay of Pigs moment as a result of its make-it-up-as-we-go-along response to COVID-19, only with many more casualties and a president who, unlike Kennedy, assumes zero responsibility for failure. After claiming falsely that he had created the greatest economy in the history of the world, Donald Trump is living through what for him is a worse disaster than a pandemic: an economic meltdown.
The economic free fall is not of Trump’s doing but it has put in stark relief the flimsy nature of a supposed prosperity founded on gigantic levels of inequality and an almost non-existent safety net thanks to Republican rule. Were we living in a normal country we would not be facing such a deep economic crisis.
Increased and extended unemployment benefits, much greater allotments of food stamps, and similar measures radioactive to Republicans would have bolstered demand, putting a floor under the economy and preventing the spectacle of Americans lining up in their cars in droves to ensure their next meal by resorting to food banks.
Instead of rebuilding the safety net to prevent hunger and destitution, we are running headlong into an economic opening when not even the safest workplace in the country, the White House, is safe from infection. Trump’s Marie Antoinette answer to the intrusion of COVID-19 into his own workplace: Let them wear masks. As always, Trump leads by counterexample.
No state has met the benchmark set by the administration’s own Coronavirus Task Force required for a safe economic reopening, yet governors all over the country are hellbent on restoring a false and perilous sense of normalcy. You might as well give the coronavirus and embossed invitation to romp unimpeded among the American people.
Amid this catastrophe, there are a couple of slivers of hope: The fact that it won’t be long before we can crush Donald Trump’s hope for a second term, and the valor and integrity of not just a few good men like Anthony Fauci but of hundreds of thousands of good women and men risking their lives every day in hospitals and grocery stores so that the rest of us may live.
