Commentary: Coronavirus pushed aside my draft columns about Biden-Sanders and the latest local guardianship hearing.
The virus has upended all our lives. As if we felt great but had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, everything is the same but different. We are uncertain, sluggish, a bit dazed. The garden is sunny and peaceful, yet everything feels strangely ominous. Each of us contradicting today something we said yesterday. So are most of our leaders.
I don’t know how our social/medical landscape will look in May. I hope the fears and dire predictions are exaggerated. And Coronavirus isn’t Donald Trump’s fault.
But the U.S. response has been slow and underwhelming, more like Italy’s disastrous hesitation than like South Korea’s coherent approach. This incompetence in a crisis might even bring home to folks the dangers of leaving the ship of state unhelmed.
We had a unit to foresee pandemics and jump-start a response. It was probably not adequate. But the Trump Administration abandoned it. Trump’s proposed budget savaged the BioShield account – set up more than ten years ago so the government could fund research on pharmaceutical responses to a pandemic or biological attack. But there’s nothing politically sexy about health preparedness.
For months, experts predicted Covid-19 would reach the U.S. Trump downplayed its significance, and misleadingly minimized the numbers. To oversee our response, he appointed Mike Pence, the failed Indiana politician he’d made Vice-President. A cartoonist should draw Trump standing smugly on a wharf, while a huge wave labeled “coronavirus” looms behind him.
After one recent meeting, Trump Administration figures revealed that finally Trump had focused on the problem, rather uttering disconnected discourses on his popularity or the evil Democrats. However, he refused Republican Senators’ request to let scientist Anthony Fauci direct the government’s response. That same day, Pence contradicted scientists’ advice by bragging that he was still shaking people’s hands. That night, an NBA player who had mocked the “panic” by touching microphones and recording devices after his press conference became the league’s first Covid-19 case. Trump joked that he might be resistant to the virus because his uncle was a super-genius who taught at MIT. Officials running our national response to a pandemic oughtta be smarter than a twentyish ballplayer.
Trump’s non-response to coronavirus symptomizes his approach to government: he attacks lower-level functionaries who’ve served Democratic and Republican Presidents for decades, hollowing out whole agencies; he clamps the Presidential hand over scientists’ mouths; if he can’t make some agency further his political fortunes or burnish his image, he destroys it; and his go-to response to questions is to attack critics and ramble on and on about Trumpian greatness. His nationwide address this week blamed other countries and wrongly claimed there’s little risk for Americans.
This won’t change. For many reasons – anger about globalism, distaste for Hillary, distaste for abortion, fear of having guns confiscated, a sense that things are going downhill for the country or for white men, and concern that dealing with climate-change might curtail corporate profits – we have elected a toddler-in-chief. Whatever the justifications for electing him in 2016, we can’t we afford four more years’ of watching the weeds grow in the doorways of government.
Is it bad taste to mention pandemics and politics right now? Maybe. If we were bailing your rowboat, I wouldn’t waste energy cursing you for not having plugged the leaks; but if you were steering us into an iceberg, I might holler.