JV Last writes about one of the most profoundly depressing aspects of this election — half the country’s willingness to reward Trump with another term despite his performance as the worst leader in a national crisis in memory.
There’s a Churchill quote that goes something like this: The after effect from the extreme prostrations of war—even a successful war—is ennui.
He was explaining that in democratic societies, wars begin with drums and parades, but ends with public disaffection.3
There might be a corollary to this rule concerning pandemics because it is pretty clear that COVID broke something deep in the American psyche.
It’s why people went crazy for two years, screaming at strangers in the grocery store about masks.
It’s why we have a mass economic delusion in which people aren’t able to accurately perceive the state of the economy.
It’s why we got the meme-stock phenomenon.
It’s why our popular culture has largely chosen to ignore COVID and pretend that the pandemic never happened.4
And it’s why Americans have made themselves so willfully blind about what happened in 2020 that they are seriously considering reelecting the man who managed the greatest failure of the federal government in a century.
There’s something about a pandemic that’s different from an economic collapse. Herbert Hoover could never have gotten reelected after the economy collapsed on his watch. People fixated on the cost of his mistakes and were determined never to go back again.
But a pandemic is different. No one wants to think too deeply about 2020. They want to look away. They want to not remember it.
And this willed amnesia has made the unthinkable possible.
He’ right and it’s terrifying, especially since the world is in a major state of transition and putting someone as incompetent as Trump in charge should be unthinkable.
Last linked and excerpted a great article by Stephen Robinson who put all of Trump’s COVID atrocities in one place. It’s hard for me to understand how people can forget all this but apparently they have.
Remember that Trump dismantled most of the government’s pandemic preparedness prior to COVID:
The first recorded case of covid in the US was in January 2020. A few weeks later Judd Legum at Popular Information posted on Twitter, “I feel like more people should be talking about the fact that Trump fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
Indeed, the Trump administration gutted the infectious disease defense infrastructure through shortsighted cost-cutting measures starting in 2018 — a year after passing a trillion-dollar tax giveaway for his billionaire buddies. The administration specifically canned the executive branch team that would’ve coordinated a response.
Trump then spent most of February 2020 minimizing covid’s threat. He called the coronavirus Democrats’ “new hoax” at a campaign rally in South Carolina. By April, when everything was going to hell, he lamented that the pandemic was “something that nobody expected.” However, former President George W. Bush had warned in 2005 that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Bush compared a pandemic to a forest fire: “If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
Bush paved the way for pandemic planning, which the Obama administration continued. Only Trump was simultaneously arrogant and stupid enough to demolish what his predecessors had built.
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden warned on October 25, 2019, that “we are not prepared for a pandemic.
Last archly observes:
Honestly, this is like a president dismantling a system that would have dealt with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, then having a rival say, “This is dangerous! Pearl Harbor could be attacked and it would be catastrophic!” And then Pearl Harbor gets blown to hell and . . . people think about electing the first guy again.
Trump and the masks. He gestured limply at the guidance and then did everything he could to persuade people not to wear them:
By the summer of 2020, even such Republicans as Sen. Rick Scott from Florida, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey publicly encouraged wearing masks and social distancing. Trump not only refused to promote masks but told the Wall Street Journal that they were possibly more trouble than they were worth.
“People touch them,” he said. “And they grab them and I see it all the time. They come in, they take the mask. Now they’re holding it now in their fingers. And they drop it on the desk and then they touch their eye and they touch their nose. No, I think a mask is a — it’s a double-edged sword.”
Trump consistently undermined any mask-wearing guidance from his staff.
“We have urged Americans to wear masks, and I emphasized this is a patriotic thing to do,” he said in August 2020 but added, “Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”
This was the worst:
One of the important functions of the federal government during a pandemic is to control and centralize the procurement and distribution of critical equipment so that individual states don’t end up competing against one another and creating suboptimal allocations. Trump failed in this task.
And as he was failing he tried to blame not just Democratic governors for the shortages that arose, but frontline medical personnel.
[T]here was an ongoing shortage of vital personal protection equipment in hospitals, and Trump openly accused doctors and nurses of “hoarding” masks and ventilators. He expected governors, especially Democrats, to sing his praises publicly in exchange for him doing his job, and states were pitted against each other for the equipment, which only drove up costs.
“It’s a source of frustration that there’s not more of a national strategy on procurement of these critical pieces of equipment that everyone across our country is going to need,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told NBC News in April 2020. “And when we’re bidding against one another and the price keeps going up, then we can’t count on the national stockpile to meet our needs, it creates a very dangerous situation.”
Trump responded by denigrating Whitmer, and it took him a week to approve a disaster declaration for Michigan.
For Trump it was all about his re-election
By September 2020, Trump openly blamed “blue states” for the escalating covid death toll. He obviously didn’t back this up with data. He just suggested that if you excluded the dead from “blue states,” then the US numbers overall would’ve been more in line with other nations. . . .
This is especially sickening because Vanity Fair reported that the Trump administration had dismissed a national pandemic plan as bad politics. It was deemed preferable to let the virus rage through blue states — where it was disproportionately killing people of color — and blame the Democratic governors. Trump’s advisers had to tell him directly that the virus was hurting “our people” — white MAGA voters in Republican-run states.
How about trump’s first Big Lie. You know, the one that resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths?
Bob Woodward revealed in his book “Rage” that Trump was fully aware that the coronavirus was more than just a bad flu. As early as January 28, his national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned Trump that covid would become “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency. This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on February 7. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Trump’s public statements often contradicted his public health advisers and created confusion. He repeatedly claimed the US had the virus “under control,” when this simply wasn’t true.
Trump administration officials insisted he was simply being “optimistic” when he’d claim the virus would “disappear” miraculously. His interview with Woodward, however, made it clear that he understood how dire the situation was. . . .
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” . . .
Yet he admitted to Woodward that the virus was a growing threat to the nation.
“Now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older … young people, too, plenty of young people.”
“Slow the testing down, please”:
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please,” Trump told his mostly mask-less supporters at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the very same one where Herman Cain likely contracted covid and later died.
Trump’s careless disregard for public health precautions led to him contracting the virus in late September. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump tested positive on the same day as the White House’s gloating superspreader event in honor of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump was already experiencing symptoms and should’ve quarantined for 10 days, but visibly unwell, he still attended the first screaming match debate with Biden. At least 11 covid cases were linked to that event, including Trump’s debate prepper Chris Christie, who was hospitalized. Fortunately, Trump failed to spread the virus to his political opponent, but he kept his condition secret for days. When close aide Hope Hicks tested positive, he announced he and First Lady Melania Trump were entering quarantine, implying that Hicks had exposed them to the virus. He even attempted to scapegoat military personnel and law enforcement for infecting Hicks and other members of White House staff.
Read it all and then ask yourself how it’s even possible that we are having to fight like we’ve never fought before to ensure that this man is not ever allowed near the White House again. Nothing makes me feel as disoriented as this does.