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发帖数: 18158 | 1 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/this-is-trumps-plague-now/
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This Is Trump’s Plague Now
The first coronavirus spike, in late April, can be blamed on the president’
s negligence. The second spike, in June, is his own doing.
JUNE 29, 2020
David Frum
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COVID-19 infections peaked on April 24, or so Americans assumed. State
health authorities reported 36,738 new cases that day, a record. By mid-May,
the United States had reduced that rate of infection by nearly half, to 17,
618 on May 11. The accomplishment had come at a tremendous cost: the
lockdown of much of the national economy, Great Depression levels of
unemployment, the shift to online schooling for millions of children,
families denied final visits to dying loved ones. Still, these sacrifices
had delivered the desired result. Had that progress continued, the American
people—and the American economy—could have likely foreseen a further
decline in cases and perhaps a near end to the pandemic, even before a
vaccine.
But that’s not what happened. On June 24, the number of infections
surpassed the April 24 peak. On June 25, the number surpassed that of June
24. On June 26, the country suffered almost 46,000 new infections—nearly 10
,000 more in one day than on the worst day in April. All of the sacrifices
of the past weeks have been thrown away.
The first coronavirus spike, in late April, can be blamed on President
Donald Trump’s negligence. The second spike, in June, is his own doing.
This is Trump’s plague now.
MORE BY THIS WRITER
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DAVID FRUM
Trump’s 3-Point Plan to Win in 2020
DAVID FRUM
Chief Justice John Roberts
Trump Is Losing Credit Where He May Soon Need It Most
DAVID FRUM
A Washington Post report on June 27 captures Trump’s culpability with
horrible aptness. The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has been enforcing social-
distancing rules, and for good reason. From June 1 to June 15, new COVID-19
cases in the state jumped from 67 in a day to 186. In advance of Trump’s
rally in Tulsa on June 20, city employees affixed do not sit here please
stickers to every other seat in the stadium venue. Trump campaign workers
were captured on video removing the stickers so that Trump could cram
attendees closer together. On June 26, Oklahoma reported 396 new infections
in a single day.
Trump’s rally may not directly account for all those new cases. But Trump’
s elevation of the needs of his own ego over the well-being of even his
strongest supporters is profoundly implicated in the virus’s powerful June
comeback.
Read: A devastating new stage of the pandemic
Even before the viral peak on April 24, Trump urged the reopening of the U.S
. economy. On April 16, Trump convened the nation’s governors by conference
call to press them to lift restrictions by May 1. The White House that day
also released a set of highly permissive guidelines to inform the process,
recommending a three-phased plan to begin after states had established a 14-
day “downward trajectory of documented cases.” But how steep a decline?
Many decisions were left to the governors, at least ostensibly.
“You’re going to call your own shots,” Trump told the governors on the
call. “You’re going to be calling the shots. We’ll be standing right
alongside of you, and we’re going to get our country open and get it
working. People want to get working.”
At the time, this show of deference to the governors looked like a political
retreat by the president. Days earlier, Trump had declared that he alone
had “total authority” to reopen the economy—and it would be “the biggest
decision I’ve ever had to make.” But the deference soon proved a sham.
Trump was set on the widest and earliest possible opening, and he exerted
the immense political power of his office to get his wish.
In mid-April, protesters—many of them openly brandishing weapons—assembled
at the capitols of Democratic-governed states to demand immediate reopening
. Trump tweeted his support. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
“LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”
From mid- to late April, the trajectory of infections in states such as
Georgia, Florida, and Texas was relatively flat, not down. Despite that,
Trump cheered for governors to reopen fast and faster. On April 29, Trump
declared that federal social-distancing guidelines would be “fading out.”
“I am very much in favor of what they’re doing,” Trump said in the Oval
Office about the southern and western governors who were racing to reopen by
May 1. The governors were responding to political pressures from local
business owners, yes. But they were also obeying the president’s wishes and
yielding to pressure from right-wing media.
At first, Fox News hosts and guests had dismissed COVID-19 as a Democratic
plot against the Trump economy. Just one example of many: On March 9, Sean
Hannity said, “They’re scaring the living hell out of people. And I see
them again as like, ‘Oh, okay, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.’
” Then, in mid-March, the network abruptly switched its editorial line.
Hosts not only voiced concern, but adamantly denied that they had ever done
otherwise. “This program has always taken the coronavirus seriously, and we
’ve never called the virus a hoax,” Hannity said on March 18.
But as Trump pressed for reopening, the Fox News line shifted again. Hosts
and guests tumbled over one another to demand more reopenings, faster,
bigger—and to pooh-pooh any continuing danger from coronavirus. “The virus
just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was, all of us, including on
this show. Everybody thought it was, but it turned out not to be,” Tucker
Carlson said on his program April 27.
On April 29, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on the Hannity program
to tout his state’s triumph over the virus. “We know who the vulnerable
populations are. We know, if you look at the statistics for people under 50
who don’t have chronic conditions, I mean, you have an extremely low chance
of death from this virus and those situations. We know how to protect folks
and social distance between those two groups, and so I think there’s a lot
of things we’ve learned over the last six weeks. So I think we can take a
step forward here in May, continue to build on that, and get America back.”
On May 3, Trump staged his notorious town hall in the Lincoln Memorial—a
site usually forbidden to be used for partisan purposes, but accessed by
Trump via a special exemption. Trump used the occasion to exhort governors
to reopen even faster than the guidelines had laid out. “There’s not too
many states that I know of that are going up. Almost everybody is headed in
the right direction,” he said. “We’re on the right side of it, but we
want to keep it that way, but we also want to get back to work.” He praised
states that were moving quickly to reopen their economies—and singled out
Virginia as a state that was moving too slowly.
By this time, Republican-led states had begun letting their stay-at-home
orders lapse, starting with Georgia on April 23. Trump initially praised the
Georgia plan, then criticized it—but ultimately approved it. Texas
followed on May 1. Florida launched the first phase of its reopening on May
4.
Trump promised vaccines by the end of the year, and a surging economy by the
third quarter of 2020. And if anything contradicted all this happy talk,
the president had his answer ready. “The only reason the U.S. has reported
one million cases of CoronaVirus is that our Testing is sooo much better
than any other country in the World,” Trump tweeted on April 29. “Other
countries are way behind us in Testing, and therefore show far fewer cases!”
As Trump had hoped, good news began to arrive in the early part of May.
Cases were trending down, as were deaths. On May 11, he tweeted: “
Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere.
Big progress being made!” Trump ran another victory lap on May 17. “Doing
REALLY well, medically, on solving the CoronaVirus situation (Plague!). It
will happen!” That same day he added: “The number of Coronavirus cases is
strongly trending downward throughout the United States, with few exceptions
. Very good news, indeed!” That was fateful timing. The COVID-19 news from
mid-May on would almost all be bad.
What went wrong? Early reopening could only have worked if stringent safety
measures, including the use of face masks and social distancing, were
incorporated. Yet the president sabotaged the reopening he himself had
forced. Throughout his presidency, Trump has subordinated rational policy in
order to provoke virulent culture wars. And the mask has become a rallying
symbol for his supporters.
Trump never wears a mask in public, and he has mocked Joe Biden for wearing
one. “I see Biden. It’s like his whole face is covered. It’s like he put
a knapsack over his face. He probably likes it that way,” Trump told The
Wall Street Journal on May 21. The Journal’s Michael C. Bender then
followed up. He remarked that Trump often negatively commented on masks,
especially when worn by White House reporters. “Do you view that as a
protest of you? Do you feel like people wear masks to show their disapproval
of you?” Trump allowed that it could be—then attacked the health hazards
of masks—then expressed indifference whether his supporters wore them or
not.
David Graham: Trump can’t bluff his way out of this
Rush Limbaugh mocked the mask as a “symbol of fear” on May 15. The former
Fox anchor Brit Hume joined in. On May 27, a writer at the pro-Trump web
publication The Federalist posted a piece headlined, “Mandatory Masks Aren
’t About Safety, They’re About Social Control.” The author, Molly McCann,
warned: “If everyone is wearing a mask, it telegraphs a society-wide
acceptance that the status quo has changed.” That morning, a pro-Trump
writer named Lee Smith tweeted a link to the article, amplifying McCann’s
paranoia. “Terrific @molmccann piece in @FDRLST — masks aren’t about
public health but social control. Image of Biden in black mask endorses
culture of silence, slavery, and social death.” Smith is a major figure in
the pro-Trump media landscape. Formerly a Middle East correspondent for Bill
Kristol’s Weekly Standard—and still connected to the eminently mainstream
Hudson Institute—he has plunged deep and thick into the pro-Trump cause.
In the early morning of May 28, Smith’s tweet got a retweet from Trump
himself.
You might not imagine that there would be much room to escalate anti-mask
rhetoric from “silence, slavery, and social death.” You would be wrong. An
Arizona city councilman derisively appropriated George Floyd’s dying words
, “I can’t breathe,” to mock mask-wearing. Sebastian Gorka, a former
Trump adviser, found a way to go even further than that on his June 23 radio
program.
Caller: I wanted to discuss what I call the Democrat Islamo-Maoist masks
that their dictators demand.
Sebastian Gorka: You mean the COVID burqas, the COVID masks. … You know,
there’s something inhuman about it, isn’t there? The idea that you cover
the face. Not only does it dehumanize the individual in that interaction
with another human being, but also it is, you’re right, an act of
submission.
Millions of citizens obeyed the cues from Trump, the right-wing media, and
the medical crackpots who predominate Facebook. While the great majority of
Americans approve of mask wearing in public, only 40 percent of Republicans
do. On June 20, a short video showed up on Twitter of a middle-aged man in
shorts trying to enter a Florida Walmart unmasked. When a masked store
employee politely reminded the customer of store rules, the man shoved the
employee so hard that the shover actually fell over from his own momentum.
The customer got up and pushed the same employee again to force his way in.
Perhaps the customer was carrying one of the fake “anti-mask exemption
cards” now circulating on the internet and social media for printing at
home.
As the United States nears the Fourth of July, the disease is reviving. Some
Trump supporters want to blame the Black Lives Matter protests for the
spike. But the states that mounted the largest protests have seen caseloads
decline since George Floyd’s death. Minnesota reported 645 new cases on May
26, then 493 on June 26. New York recorded 1,044, then 804 on the same
dates. Washington, D.C.’s 109 cases on May 26 fell to 26 by June 26.
Granted, not everybody who protested in those places lived in those places,
so perhaps some demonstrators carried the virus to other states. But there’
s certainly no obvious link yet. Meanwhile, JPMorgan has found powerful
connections between rising restaurant spending and, three weeks later,
increasing COVID-19 infections.
The disease is spiking in places precisely where state governments hastened
to reopen bars, casinos, restaurants, shopping malls, and other indoor
places of entertainment. Phoenix, Houston, and other southern cities are
suddenly reporting caseloads that look like New York City at its worst.
Florida reported nearly 9,000 new infections on June 26, nearly equaling
some of New York’s worst days. Texas recorded almost 6,000 new cases that
day. Arizona reported nearly 3,400 new cases on June 26 and now suffers more
cases per capita than Brazil or any country in Europe.
Read: America is giving up on the pandemic
In the face of this worsening crisis, Trump is not taking action; he’s
instead shifting the goalposts: Don’t pay attention to the case rate, he
now argues. Look at the death rate. Last week, he tweeted: “Coronavirus
deaths are way down. Mortality rate is one of the lowest in the World. Our
Economy is roaring back and will NOT be shut down. ‘Embers’ or flare ups
will be put out, as necessary!” But deaths lag behind infections, and a
rise in cases in late June warns of more deaths to come in late July. We’re
already well past the death toll of 100,000 that Trump predicted at his
Lincoln Memorial town hall only eight weeks ago.
Trump’s hopes for a third-quarter economic recovery are also blighted.
Spending data suggest that the upward trajectory of May and early June has
halted and reversed in the states that have opened. The slight uptick in
employment in May now may prove abortive. For millions of American families,
the hardest reckoning arrives on July 31, when the federal government stops
supplementing state unemployment insurance benefits. Those who have kept
their jobs face other hardships. Will schools reopen in September? It looks
more and more doubtful.
At the onset, the pandemic was aggravated by Trump’s negligence and
indifference. He had dismantled the country’s pandemic preparedness. He
denied the disease for two months. He made one crucial mistake after another.
Even so, Trump could plausibly shift at least some blame for the arrival of
the disease. The pandemic did originate outside of the U.S., China did cover
up the disease, and the World Health Organization did enable China. Trump
could also argue that even those countries with the best responses were hit
hard for many weeks.
But what has happened in the U.S. in June, and what will happen in July, is
entirely Trump’s fault. The president’s approach to the virus has been
guided by his lifelong beliefs: It’s just as real to say you have done a
good job as to do a good job. Denying you failed is just as real as actually
succeeding. This time, though, reality will not be blustered away. Tens of
thousands are dead, and millions are out of work, all because Trump could
not and would not do the job of disease control—a job that includes setting
a positive example to those Americans who trust and follow his leadership.
Across the rest of the developed world, COVID-19 has been ebbing. As a
result, borders are reopening and economies are reviving. Here in the U.S.,
however, Americans are suffering a new disease peak worse than the worst of
April. How lethal will this new peak be? We will learn that the way we seem
to learn everything in this era of Trump: the hard way. |
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