The “American carnage” Donald Trump described in his 2017 inaugural address was going to stop. Right here. Right now. He would stop it.
“Nobody knows the system better than me,” he told delegates to the Republican National Convention the summer before, “which is why I alone can fix it.”
The bleak images Trump conjured of Americans in poverty amid “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” were not entirely fanciful, but overall seemed to exist mainly in his own dark imagination. When he’d finished, President George W. Bush muttered, “that was some weird shit.”
Three long years later, workers in New York City are filling mass graves on Hart Island in the Bronx. Drone footage Thursday showed workers in hazmat gear stacking and burying coffins filled with victims of the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump didn’t cause the outbreak, but his lack of anything resembling competence at running “the system” means those deaths occurred on his watch. His autocratic tendencies mean his administration is staffed with loyalists whose main qualification for their positions is “unquestioning loyalty” to him, writes Gary Kasparov, chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
Trump gives daily press briefings now, misinforming the public, promoting unproven remedies, and trying to shift responsibility for the chaotic and mismanaged federal response that has resulted in literal carnage. He alone could not fix it and has declared publicly his intention not to accept responsibility for it.
Dahlia Lithwick depicts that inaugural speech as prophetic:
In that speech, Trump promised that above all things, at the center of his presidency lay a “crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” And yet, as the United States has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world, its citizens wait for tests, for hospital beds, and for relief. Jared Kushner insists that stockpiled emergency equipment that should go to front-line workers in fact belongs to the federal government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been hollowed out by Kushner’s disaster hobbyist cronies, and the federal government is backing out of its testing support by week’s end. States unwilling to bow and scrape for supplies don’t get them, while craven politicians use access to Trump to game the distribution channels. This nation is not serving its citizens. It is offering mealy-mouthed promises that private interests will magic up cures, and supplies, and websites, and vaccines while its citizens die and unemployment soars. Federal officials who are supposed to serve citizens have clocked out, even as they gut federal laws that would keep the air clean, and emissions lowered, and environmental degradation at bay. Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is muzzling health officials and distorting public information, such that the American people are left in the dark in the middle of the most devastating public health disaster we’ve seen in a century. The invisible people are no longer merely invisible. Now they are invisible and dying.
Facing a chaotic non-response from the federal government, states with Democratic governors find they must fend for themselves. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is leveraging his state’s bulk purchasing power “as a nation-state” to meet his state’s medical supply needs. He might even “export some of those supplies to states in need,” explains Bloomberg News opinion writer Francis Wilkinson:
Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.
Second, Newsom is kicking sand in the face of President Donald Trump after Newsom’s previous flattery — the coin of the White House realm — failed to produce results. If Trump can’t manage to deliver supplies, there’s no point in Newsom continuing the charade.
Third, and this may be the most enduring effect, Newsom is sending a powerful message to both political parties. So far, the Republican Party’s war on democratic values, institutions and laws has been a largely one-sided affair, with the GOP assaulting and the Democratic Party defending. The lethal ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican bloc, which required Wisconsin residents to vote in person during a pandemic that shut down polling stations, is a preview of the fall campaign. The GOP intends to restrict vote-by-mail and other legitimate enfranchisement to suppress turnout amid fear, uncertainty and disease.
Republicans mean to subvert majority rule and sabotage the rescue plan by any means necessary. Democrats must provide a visible model of competence and public service that serves the public. They must make sure Trump’s daily, blame-shifting floor show does not dominate the national conversation. That is a tall order in normal times, but Newsom is providing one example of how to lead on that.
This also means Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, must raise his voice not just in opposition to Trump but in support of Americans Trump supports only in rhetoric. With Sen. Bernie Sanders effectively out of the nomination hunt, Biden is rushing to court Sanders voters with proposals to expand Medicare to Americans 60 and older, and to forgive some student debt as Sanders advocated. He’s not likely to go full-Sanders, but he’s moving left.
Democrats everywhere need to make some noise about it. Americans groaning under the weight of pandemic-driven economic collapse need someone to give them hope of relief that actually helps them.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.