“The virus is with us, but we need to live with it.”
After months of communicating mixed messages about the coronavirus, of making promises that weren’t kept and pronouncements that were plainly false, the Trump White House has belatedly recognized that “the virus is not going away any time soon — and will be around through the November election.”
NBC’s Carol Lee, Kristen Welker, and Monica Alba report that the administration and Trump’s reelection campaign has landed on a new message: Learn to live with it.
Predictions dating back nearly six months include: “the problem goes away in April”; on Easter Sunday there will be “packed churches all over our country”; “by Memorial Day weekend we will have this coronavirus behind us”; and by July the country will be “really rocking again.”
Trump has never made a genuine effort to squelch the virus (though he briefly posed as “a wartime president,” nothing came of that). The evidence suggests that Donald Trump is not much interested in governing. He has certainly been disinclined to craft a plan, marshal resources, and coordinate a national effort to defeat the coronavirus.
Trump has no plan to defeat the coronavirus and declines to make a plan. It is no wonder that none of the rosy predictions about the epidemic resolving itself have come to pass.
Throughout the first half of 2020, Trump has evaded accountability, while insisting that the nation’s governors are responsible for combating the coronavirus. And wishful thinking is still the order of the day. On Wednesday the President said:
But now — White House advisers tell NBC — they are ready to turn a corner, as they watch the economy reopen: “the White House is now pushing acceptance.”
As of July 4, 2020 (3 a.m.), the United States has had 2,794,153 cases of coronavirus and 129,434 deaths.
This graph from Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center shows what that looks like (in comparison with other hotspots in the world):
As Donald Trump made the case in Tulsa for pushing aside concern with the coronavirus: “We have to get back to business. We have to get back to living our lives. Can’t do this any longer.”
These infections, at this level, were not inevitable. The number of people who have died from coronavirus did not have to total more than one hundred twenty-nine thousand. Yet the spread of coronavirus and the number of deaths continue to increase — because Donald Trump has proved incapable and uninterested in leading a national effort to end this catastrophe.
Instead, the immediate future we will see more of the same. More infections. More pain and suffering. More deaths. And, at this stage, we can lay responsibility for virtually everything yet to come at the feet of Donald Trump.
A consistent theme of this blog is that the leadership of the Republican Party is complicit in whatever Donald Trump says and does. They made a Faustian bargain to lock arms with Trump and they’re not disentangling themselves. The devastation being wrought on our country now — and for the forseeable future — from coronavirus is also at the feet of the GOP. So I’m on board with Josh Marshall’s sentiments:
I seldom think anything good about Donald Trump. I hate what he has done to the country. I hold his enablers even more responsible for what has happened on his watch.
Marshall concludes:
None of this had to happen. It is a failure of cataclysmic proportions. It has many roots. It has revealed many insufficiencies and failures in our society and institutions. But the scale of it, the unifying force of it is a man who never should have been president, who has abandoned his responsibility to lead and protect the country, making it every state for itself, a chaos only organized by a shiftless and shambling effort to help himself at all costs at every point.
The worst is yet to come.
(Image: NBC News report on mass graves of coronavirus victims at New York’s Hart Island in April.)