One of the many things Donald Trump has done badly for the country in recent months is focus this debate – largely around himself – about whether to ‘open up’ or not. This argument is good for generating intractable arguments. But it’s not terribly productive. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Obama administration official involved in the US ebola response and other international aid efforts, suggests this analogy. Your house is on fire. You can shut the windows to deprive the fire of oxygen. That will slow it down. But eventually you’ll suffocate. We’ve now got a public debate which amounts to whether to be incinerated or suffocate. What we need is the fire brigade to show up and hose down the house. The fire brigade, as Konyndyk explains, is a system of widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation for the infected and beefed up hospital capacity to make an interim new normal possible.
This is very hard work to do.
It would be too much to say that’s not happening. Various states are groping toward a version of that. Some is happening at the federal level. But it’s not happening anywhere fast enough. Nor is it being done on an organized national basis. We’re largely distracted by this open vs don’t open food fight in which the President is on one side or another each day depending on his mood and who he’s talked to in the previous few hours. Different parts of the country will require different approaches. But having each state devise their own strategy is as ridiculous as leaving it to individuals to make their public health decisions. Life in general is a constant mix of cases in which we are either individuals or parts of a much larger social organism. In a time of epidemic disease we are emphatically in the latter category.
TPM Reader TB flagged another key point for me. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has now become that comic figure, the dutiful party lickspittle who in his eagerness to ingratiate gets just slightly out ahead of a mercurial paramount leader and then gets cut off at the knees for having zigged when he was supposed to zag. (Read more: The Great Distractor - TPM)
Six weeks ago I mentioned that it was now conceivable that for the second time in a generation a Democratic President – and perhaps a Democratic Congress – could come to power in January 2021 charged with picking up the pieces for a financial collapse on the GOP watch. Suddenly deficits which haven’t mattered for three years will matter again with a vengeance when it’s Democrats doing the spending.
We don’t know what the result of the November election will be. But what is remarkable is how Republicans and actually Trump himself haven’t even waited for Trump to be driven from office. Trump is now both the head of state saving the country from the global pandemic and the hidden leader of the resistance to pandemic overreach and the forces which destroyed the best economy in the history of the universe. He is both fearless leader and embodiment of the state and rebel commander goading supporters to ‘liberate’ their country. [ed. Emphasis added. Maybe this is why everything seems so surreal?]
The Trump administration has always had similar features: Trump both leads the government but often remains out of sync with or rebelling against many of the people he has appointed to run the government. (...)
Governors who are holding the line against a premature reopening of society are sometimes pointing out that they are actually operating in line with the guidelines President Trump himself has at least nominally promulgated. But Trump’s partisans know instinctively, if only because he says so so often, that Trump doesn’t support them at all. Or rather, that he supports them when he does and not when he doesn’t, whenever it is situationally convenient to do so. (Read more: Schrodinger’s Trump - TPM)
[ed. See also: We Are Living in a Failed State (The Atlantic). Recommended. And: The President is Unwell (The Week)]
This is very hard work to do.
It would be too much to say that’s not happening. Various states are groping toward a version of that. Some is happening at the federal level. But it’s not happening anywhere fast enough. Nor is it being done on an organized national basis. We’re largely distracted by this open vs don’t open food fight in which the President is on one side or another each day depending on his mood and who he’s talked to in the previous few hours. Different parts of the country will require different approaches. But having each state devise their own strategy is as ridiculous as leaving it to individuals to make their public health decisions. Life in general is a constant mix of cases in which we are either individuals or parts of a much larger social organism. In a time of epidemic disease we are emphatically in the latter category.
TPM Reader TB flagged another key point for me. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has now become that comic figure, the dutiful party lickspittle who in his eagerness to ingratiate gets just slightly out ahead of a mercurial paramount leader and then gets cut off at the knees for having zigged when he was supposed to zag. (Read more: The Great Distractor - TPM)
***
One of the enduring features of the early Obama administration and the 2008/2009 global financial crisis was how quickly the Republican party pivoted to being the chief critic of efforts to clean up the mess their incumbent President and party had in many respects created. Suddenly the GOP barely knew George W. Bush and the 43rd President was retrospectively rebranded as the exponent of something called ‘big government conservatism’ that the GOP absolutely had nothing to do with and had never truly supported. Months into office Barack Obama was the spendthrift leading the country toward hyperinflation, decadence and ruin.Six weeks ago I mentioned that it was now conceivable that for the second time in a generation a Democratic President – and perhaps a Democratic Congress – could come to power in January 2021 charged with picking up the pieces for a financial collapse on the GOP watch. Suddenly deficits which haven’t mattered for three years will matter again with a vengeance when it’s Democrats doing the spending.
We don’t know what the result of the November election will be. But what is remarkable is how Republicans and actually Trump himself haven’t even waited for Trump to be driven from office. Trump is now both the head of state saving the country from the global pandemic and the hidden leader of the resistance to pandemic overreach and the forces which destroyed the best economy in the history of the universe. He is both fearless leader and embodiment of the state and rebel commander goading supporters to ‘liberate’ their country. [ed. Emphasis added. Maybe this is why everything seems so surreal?]
The Trump administration has always had similar features: Trump both leads the government but often remains out of sync with or rebelling against many of the people he has appointed to run the government. (...)
Governors who are holding the line against a premature reopening of society are sometimes pointing out that they are actually operating in line with the guidelines President Trump himself has at least nominally promulgated. But Trump’s partisans know instinctively, if only because he says so so often, that Trump doesn’t support them at all. Or rather, that he supports them when he does and not when he doesn’t, whenever it is situationally convenient to do so. (Read more: Schrodinger’s Trump - TPM)
[ed. See also: We Are Living in a Failed State (The Atlantic). Recommended. And: The President is Unwell (The Week)]
