After months of mixed messages on the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump Republicans are busy worrying about re-election. They are putting on rallies endangering thousands of naïve supporters in Tulsa, Phoenix, and Mount Rushmore, instead of working on a national plan to defeat this virus, even as the numbers continue to rise.
One day last week, the United States reported more than 55,000 new cases of COVID-19, and infection rates were hitting new records in Republican states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona.
But in the face of the surging virus across the nation, the “Deny – Delay – Deceive” Trump-McConnell administration is functionally giving up on controlling this virus, very much like Woodrow Wilson’s reaction to the pandemic of 1917 which cost the U.S. 675,000 lives.
The new 2020 Republican campaign slogan has become “Learn to live with it.” In fact, White House insiders tell media outlets that they hope Americans will “grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.”
But wait – it gets worse.
The failure of the Trump-McConnell administration
The Trump/McConnell administration has utterly failed us. It has told the states to find their own personal protection equipment (PPE), their own ventilators, and their own testing and tracing process.
States and municipalities are hemorrhaging money because much of their income depends on sales tax receipts.
The death toll in the United States is 132,000 and climbing. Infection rates are spiking at record levels. The U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, has 25% of the cases of the disease.
Dr. Howard Koh, Harvard School of Public Health , notes that “the patchwork effort from state to state has failed, and a uniform, national response is needed. We look like 50 + small countries doing our own thing badly.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could care less.
The politics of the failure
Now that his major campaign donors have gotten their “pound of flesh,” he thinks any states and municipalities that are in financial trouble should cut, cut, cut — even though that endangers the pension and health insurance obligations to police officers, firefighters, teachers, and state and city workers who have devoted their lives to public service.
Conservatives who followed the hardline austerity policies promoted by the Koch brothers have succeeded:
- Forget any thought of a social safety net.
- Forget Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
- Forget school lunches, daycare, or health insurance.
And four decades of the Republican con job of privatizing government services has rendered the public incapable of embracing the scale of either the public health medical intervention or the fiscal stimulus that other countries have done.
The Trump/McConnell administration has actively downplayed the threat of the virus for purely political reasons. Republicans believed the virus was not a threat because Fox News said it wasn’t, or didn’t care because the first wave of infection mostly hit people of color in Democratic urban areas.
Now faced with the reality that truly defeating the virus would require mobilization of medical resources, contact tracing, and social assistance, the Trump/McConnell administration has declared defeat.
We’re not going to “learn to live with it”!
“Learn to live with it”? That is not who we are!
While we do have a history of partisanship, distrust of our national government, and multicultural divisions, when the people of our nation are united we can do the difficult and achieve the impossible.
We need leadership that actually unifies and leads, instead of dividing and surrendering. We need leadership that cares about the people of our country, instead of just their rich donors.
This fall, let’s retire the Trump-McConnell cabal. Let’s put the leadership we need in place, and tackle the challenges that face us. Let’s be the strong, caring people we can be.
Vote Democrat in November!
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