There is a long, long list of good reasons to vote against Trump in November. After all, the man was impeached for extorting a foreign government to sabotage his political rival’s presidential campaign and was only acquitted because his party has become a soulless death cult devoted to protecting him. Most Americans already know that re-electing him would likely spell the end of us.
But they cheat. And the the chances of having a fair election have dwindled significantly since the pandemic struck. Trump and his henchmen will do everything in their power to ensure that the vote among Democrats is suppressed.
That means the Democrats must be ruthlessly focused an on message to try to cut through the cacophony of other news to make sure that people understand the stakes.
Jonathan Alter suggests that they focus on “the lost months”
In his Feb. 5 State of the Union address, Trump said of the spreading coronavirus, “My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.” This did not happen.
“Necessary steps” were not taken, “safeguards” were neglected. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans will die unnecessarily as a direct result of the president’s negligence. ..
Trump understands that he might have blown it, which is why—like a sweaty salesman—he has repeated “We’re doing a good job” more than a dozen times at his bogus and petulant news conferences. And now, even as he crassly brags about his ratings amid the “carnage” (his word, from his inaugural address), he’s getting set to use the mounting death toll to exploit a gruesome expectations game.
Here’s his only real plan: pivot from the fantasy of jammed churches on Easter Sunday to support for Anthony Fauci’s “best case” projections of 100,000 to 240,000 dead. If, through the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses on the battlefront, the numbers fall in the lower range—still possible, as Fauci notes—you can bet Trump will spend the general election campaign declaring a kind of sick victory over sickness.
This will be an obscene distortion of what he actually did—and, worse, didn’t do—in early 2020. But making logical arguments this summer and fall about Trump’s failures won’t be easy. Joe Biden and other Democrats charging that “Trump sent mixed signals” or saying “Look at South Korea now” will not be enough. By all means, let’s establish the accountability commission Rep. Adam Schiff wants, but it won’t change many minds.
What might affect the outcome is a short, tight, resonant meme, a dramatic phrase that crystallizes and immortalizes the historic moment—the way John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World did after the Russian Revolution. The phrase must somehow capture all the squandered time and missed opportunities without frontally attacking Trump in ways that just push people back into their partisan corners. The headline on a superb Boston Globe editorial—“Trump Has Blood on His Hands”—is plenty true, but too blunt an instrument to win an election.
Instead we must tar Trump with his lack of preparedness the way “the emails” were stuck to Hillary Clinton in 2016, “the hostages” to Jimmy Carter in 1980, “the pardon” to Gerald Ford in 1976, and “Hoovervilles” to Herbert Hoover in 1932.
So what should the frame be? I’m partial to a headline in the March 28 New York Times: “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19.” The article detailed how testing screw-ups (by a still-unnamed pharmaceutical company) and bureaucratic bumbling led the government to lose the critical weeks it needed to get on top of testing the way China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany and other nations have.
Of course, we now can see that Trump’s incompetence runs much deeper and ran much longer than one month of snafus on testing (which he lied about almost daily). “The Lost Month” was actually “The Lost Months.” In fact, we lost three full years—years when the Trump administration let its contempt for science and “deep state” civil servants cripple the ability of the federal government to respond to a crisis. Trump didn’t fill 700 vacancies at the CDC, didn’t replenish stockpiles of medical supplies (while lying about Obama’s response to pandemics), and didn’t stop John Bolton from closing the pandemic preparedness office at the National Security Council (later lying that he knew nothing of it).
Trump has said repeatedly that no one could have seen this coming—just another lie. Bill Gates warned of it in a famous 2015 speech and Trump’s own NSC predicted it in a 69-page report. A Feb. 3 report from the U.S. Army estimated that “between 80,000 and 150,000 [Americans] could die” from coronavirus.
Even if the true period of negligence is longer, “The Lost Months” is resonant shorthand for what led the United States to have the most coronavirus cases of any country in the world. Repeated enough—with GOP-style message discipline—it could work as code for: He messed up big-time.
I don’t know if that’s exactly the right phrase. It seems a little abstract to me. But whatever it is, it should come out of every Democrat’s mouth every time they speak. No one should be able to think of Trump over the next six months without hearing it.