As covid cases hit new records across the United States, we are beginning to cross into the dark winter that so many medical experts have warned us about for months now. According to The New York Times, the “average number of new daily infections topped 116,000, average daily deaths neared 1,000, and Covid-19 hospitalizations hit a record high of 61,964" yesterday. Yet, as the Times goes on to detail, the Trump administration has all but abandoned responsibility for trying to contain the coronavirus pandemic. This isn’t a surprise, given nearly a year of lying, gaslighting, and disinformation from the president; chief of staff Mark Meadows’ admission a few weeks ago that the administration has given up on trying to control the virus; and the president’s loss to Joe Biden last week, freeing him to no longer even pretend to give a shit about the pandemic. As the Times notes, even Pfizer’s announcement of a vaccine with a 90% efficacy rate could not be celebrated by the White House; instead, it became another opportunity for the president to rage about how he had been personally wronged by the coronavirus, now due to an alleged conspiracy between Pfizer and his own health officials to withhold the vaccine announcement until after the election.
It is not simply that the coronavirus has been allowed to run more or less unchecked across great swathes of the country because the federal government failed to promulgate adequate regulations and restrictions that would have slowed or stopped its spread. After ample time to prepare for what would inevitably be an uptick of cases in the winter, the United States has failed to do so:
[S]hortages of personal protective equipment are back, especially among rural hospitals, nursing homes and private medical practices that lack access to the supply networks that serve larger hospital chains.
Dr. Shikha Gupta, the executive director of Get Us PPE, a volunteer effort that matches available supplies to health care providers, said 70 percent of those requesting help from the organization last month reported being completely out of one type of critical gear. Masks, gloves and disinfecting wipes topped the list.
In other words, given plenty of time and incentive, and while refusing to rally Americans to obvious, life-saving measures like social distancing and mask-wearing, the Trump administration has simply failed to marshal the resources necessary to at least secure supplies to treat the waves of illness that were the unavoidable outcome of its refusal to take the virus seriously. And this double failure has been amplified by GOP state governors, who have refused to take the preservation of American lives seriously, and instead have insisted on various degrees of business as usual.
The fact that we are stuck with this leadership void for two more months inspires dread. I have seen estimates that as many as 400,000 will have died of covid-19 by the time Joe Biden takes office. The 230,000 and counting who have already passed must be counted as martyrs to our effort to drive him from office; it seems all too possible that without the horrible toll to date, the president may have eked out re-election. But all the American dead are rightly seen as martyrs to the Trumpist-GOP mindset that prioritized the president’s re-election prospects over full-scale measure that admitted the seriousness of the pandemic, and that placed short-term business continuity and profits over the preservation of human life and long-term economic prosperity.
Letting Trump and the GOP off the hook now that the president has been defeated would be absolutely the wrong choice, morally and politically. Even in defeat, the president’s total abdication of responsibility to protect the American people will haunt us, both during this deadly interregnum and when Joe Biden is finally empowered to address this escalating catastrophe. The fact that so many millions of Americans voted to re-elect this president, in light of such American carnage, changes nothing about the imperative for continuing to ensure that the president, and more importantly at this point, the party that enabled his murderous coronavirus policies, are held accountable.
Our democratic political system, and our society, will sustain extreme damage if one of our two major political parties pays no price for making itself complicit in the spread of mass death throughout the country. Denying the scientific reality of how the coronavirus spreads; propagating insane ideas about how mask-wearing infringes on personal freedom; suggesting that older Americans are expendable; refusing to criticize a president who unites and propounds all these hideous threads of malpractice: together, they compose an indictment of a GOP that has kicked free of adherence to the common good, protection of human life, and the subordination of business interests to those of the public health. In their entirety, the failures of Trump and his Republican enablers amount to such an abomination and offense against the American people that to let the offense pass is indistinguishable from inviting more of the same, now and in the future.
The fact that so many people chose to vote for Trump despite his obvious failure to take the coronavirus seriously, or to address it with a minimum of competence, does not mean that Democrats and others should cease holding the GOP accountable — it means they need to redouble their efforts to persuade the American people of the Republican Party’s culpability and its wholesale inability to navigate this crisis. Among other things, it’s possible that the horrific death toll we are likely to see in the coming months will turn at least some portion of public opinion against the GOP, strengthening Biden’s hand to take the common-sense measures necessary to save American lives. And at the level of basic political pragmatism, it’s clear that once Biden assumes the presidency, Republicans will attempt to turn the coronavirus into the “Biden virus,” to hold the new president retroactively responsible for the illness that preceded his time in office and that will surely dominate the early days of his administration. Against such predictable rhetoric, there is no point in Democrats letting up on critiques of Trump or the GOP in the name of “moving on” or “coming together.”
It is not through random chance that Republicans elected officials, from the president on down, largely embraced self-defeating policies around the pandemic. It is not just that they are incompetent administrators (though this seems to be the case with the basic failure to procure supplies in advance of the imminent winter acceleration of cases). There is a direct link between the Republican small government/pro-business philosophy and the failure to take adequate action to mitigate the spread of the virus. For many Republicans, it was simply unthinkable that the government should act decisively for the public good if that demonstrated the efficacy of government action. It was also unthinkable that businesses might be made to suffer through lockdowns and other measures in order to protect the public health, as was the notion that we might pay workers to stay home while we allowed real lockdowns to curb the virus’ spread. The indifference to the fact that the virus has disproportionately hit lower-income workers and people of color adds a distinct racist aspect to their gross negligence. And to top it all off, an un-American subservience to their strongman leader, not matter how foolish and insane his pronouncements, helped ensure that they would never arrive at sound coronavirus strategies. The coronavirus exposes the emptiness of the GOP governing philosophy, such as it is, in one grotesque, deadly package. It is inconceivable to me that the Democrats would fail to keep making this case when reality has already made it for them, at the cost of thousands of preventable lives lost. This should be not just a matter of outrage, but of rage, of political fire and public condemnation and contempt that leaves the GOP exposed and roasted for the failure that it is.