President Donald Trump is getting what he wants: The country is opening up come what may, despite alarming indications that the coronavirus pandemic is intensifying its assault.
Trump says the virus is now reduced to just the “embers” and “ashes” of a spent pandemic as patience for nationwide lock downs fades and states aggressively open up.
The facts say the opposite. Another 1,299 Americans died on Tuesday and more than 112,000 people in the US have died from the disease. There are now more than 2 million confirmed cases in the United States.
Trump is not marking these deaths, just as he was reluctant to immediately honor the first 100,000 Americans who passed away before that terrible milestone was reached — barely two weeks ago. And this is well before the feared fall resurgence of Covid-19, in the absence of reliable treatments and with a vaccine still months away.
The President has been cajoling for reopenings for weeks, banking on the ebbing patience of a gregarious and industrious people who don’t take well to being told to stay home. He’s been ostentatiously moving around the country without a mask — even if such behavior by the head of the government sets a poor example and shuns precautions that could keep Americans alive. Trump is not just defying the virus — he’s poking a stick at officials’ warnings to avoid large gatherings, planning a rally in Oklahoma next week and others in four states where infections are heading up after that. Vice President Mike Pence — who heads the White House coronavirus task force — on Wednesday tweeted a photo of his visit to crammed-together campaign workers, none of whom were wearing masks or social distancing. He later deleted the tweet.
Increasingly, as airlines add flights, schools prepare classes for the fall and Americans balk at the idea that trips to the beach are off, it seems he may have made a shrewd bet — at least within the narrow political calculus that motivates his actions. More and more people seem willing to live with the disease and its awful cost — at least those who have not personally experienced its deadly potential — if it means recapturing a semblance of their normal lives.
“Americans are on the move and they can’t be tied down and they can’t be restrained,” Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said on Wednesday.
But such decisions are coming without the honest, unprejudiced advice of a President whose most fundamental duty is to keep Americans safe and who has suppressed the ability of public health officials to speak to the nation from an authoritative White House backdrop.
The notion of a prolonged battle against a virus that is the “worst nightmare” of the government’s top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, doesn’t fit into the President’s electoral plans. That’s one reason why Fauci, and the administration’s other top coronavirus expert, Dr. Deborah Birx, haven’t been seen at a presidential podium in days.
The default position of the President and many state governors is now implicitly that the country has stopped trying to halt the disease in its tracks — but will just have to live with it — though the apparent position has been reached without public discussion. There’s been no moment when the President has come clean about the costs of opening up with the nation he claims has already “prevailed” over the disease.
“We want the continued blanket lockdown to end for the states. We may have some embers or some ashes, or we may have some flames coming, but we’ll put them out. We’ll stomp them out,” Trump said Friday.
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