May 8, 2020
The Long Haul
Day 50
Unanswered questions!
There are a ton of them. Here are just a few:
* Why are politicians relaxing or eliminating stay-at-home orders when they know thousands of vulnerable Americans will die?
* Why are Drs. Fauci and Birx still working at the White House?
* Who do Americans believe and who should they trust?
* Why is access to Covid-19 data getting worse not better?
There is a plethora of reporting everyday on the steady march of Covid-19 through the midwest from its original epicenters in Seattle, New York and Boston. Much of the reporting is breathless; the statistics are scary and can be overwhelming. The challenge we all face to survive is taking us into uncharted territory.
Unfortunately our response to the challenge is old, dangerous and well documented.
The questions raised above are all linked; the answers are simple. Politics trumps all else; pun intended!
Remember the three wise monkeys, one each with its hands over eyes, ears and mouth: “See no evil! Hear no evil! Speak no evil!
They have names: President Donald Trump, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Arizona Governor Doug Lucey immediately come to mind. The image would be funnier if it were not so terrifying. Lives will be lost because of the political decisions these quislings have made.
They are quislings because, like Marshall Petain, the French Vichy leader who made a deal with Hitler, they have signed a deadly contract with the virus. They are willing to let the virus spread and sacrifice lives for their own personal and political gain.
How do the politics play out?
Voters are scheduled to go the polls this fall. I say scheduled because, well: who knows?
The virus has replaced Trump’s self-proclaimed economic miracle as the key factor in the upcoming election. Control of the White House and the U.S. Senate are in play.
President Trump believes he needs to win the war he declared on the coronavirus if he is to win the election. He may be right. But the war is not going well. So the president is doing what he does best. He is lying, deceiving, obfuscating, and misleading the public.
At the GOP convention in North Carolina this summer Trump will surely declare the war has been won, his nomination address will be repurposed as a victory speech. He will demonize the Chinese; the blame game is his strong suit and he will show little real empathy for the thousands who have died.
By the way, North Carolina Republicans are nervous, not sure if they want the convention. They are worried about the influx of 50,000 people, some surely carrying the disease, into Charlotte from all across the country. Trump, who loves adoring crowds more than anything except himself, is demanding the convention be held.
Kemp and Ducey are moving quickly to reopen their states even as the number of cases and deaths continues to grow there. They will not face the voters in November but they are following a politically motivated reopening game plan scripted by Trump because the next election can never be too far away.
It is worth saying again, they are following Trump, not the White House.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force prepared a specific data-driven list of benchmarks that should be met before states move to open business, beaches and bars. Kemp was the first to completely ignore the data and guidelines and Trump immediately supported his decision. Trump ignored his own Task Force report and later he sidelined a more stringent set of guidelines proposed by the CDC.
Ducey does not want voters to know the truth about the virus. The data is inconvenient so it must be suppressed. The Arizona republican tried to sidetrack a team of academic experts hired by his own health departmnent because he did not like their conclusion: that the virus was still spreading and the peak was two weeks away. Under intense public pressure Ducey reversed his decision.
So why if the president does not listen to them, do Fauci and Birx remain at his side? At what point does it become morally unacceptable to continue to work for a man who ignores your informed counsel for his own political expediency?
It is easy to imagine that Fauci and Birx remain in a vain hope that science and health might defeat or blunt the political advice offered by Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller.
Is it better that they remain silent and sidelined inside the White House or should they be speaking their mind freely before the Congress and on CNN and MSNBC?
They should resign. At this point, the president’s only motivation is his reelection. If Fauci and Birx want to be heard they must leave the White House and speak directly to the public. If they do not do it soon, they will remain marginalized and lose credibility.
My last blog demonstrated that the polls make it clear that Americans are not clamoring to get back to work. Americans are afraid. A new detailed analysis further confirms this and it tells us a lot about who they trust.
A team of researchers at Northeastern, Harvard and Rutgers released a 300-page, 50-state-survey on April 30 that examined how Americans have reacted to government actions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The study can be seen here:
The study found 80 percent supported the decision to close non-essential businesses. A comfortable majority support social distancing measures and are opposed to the rapid reopening of the states. It found that state and city governments are more credible than the White House and the Congress and that they supported science-based, data-driven decision making.
Perhaps most significantly, the research found that President Trump’s approval rating is below every single governor.
Why then do Trump and his acolytes believe reopening the country is the best politics?
They are motivated by donors not voters. Elections are won at the bank, not the ballot box.
Trump has promised a fast economic rebound and a fantastic fourth quarter. If he does not deliver, there will be hell to pay in smoke-filled rooms from coast-to-coast.
The men and women, ok mostly men, who buy elections through massive donations to campaigns and Superpacs are watching their profits disappear. The economic miracle Trump proclaims was never about jobs; it was always about profits, for his pals. If those profits continue to be threatened his deep-pocket donors will look elsewhere for help.
Again as I have written before, we must protect ourselves. Our leaders can not and in many cases will no do that for us. Stay at home, work from there if you can, wear a mask when you are out, social distance and get tested if you are sick.
Stay safe!
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