CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Is it possible to impeach a president twice? We all know that the guy, currently holding the job in this country, doesn’t like to accept blame for anything.
He loves to take credit for everything, but taking personal responsibility for his own errors? Not so much. Even in a context where accepting responsibility would seem presidential – a press conference where he was asked about the delay in closing down the country – he seems psychologically unable to admit fault at any level.
When it was simply a matter of venal politics – raping the environment through his appointments to the cabinet, endangering college women through changes to rules about investigating assaults, these were merely the outrages of the day. But now we are at a point where the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans are at stake, and the president is entirely oblivious to the momentous nature of his decisions.
We know that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has already put in thousands of hours to develop a plan that would give Americans the best chances to go back to work and to get a haircut, all while preserving as best as possible our safety in this very-much-underestimated epidemic. The reality is -- according to the best estimates of people who actually know about such things – that haphazardly reopening the country will subject additional millions of Americans to viral infection, and that we can expect around one percent of the clearly infected to die as a result.
If, for example, another twenty million Americans needlessly get a symptomatic case of the virus, we can expect somewhere around two hundred thousand additional deaths.
Right now, we are already at around 80,000 dead from the epidemic just in this country alone. We have surpassed the previous leaders – China, Italy, Spain among others. We have, since March, surpassed the American death toll of the Viet Nam War, and within the next month, we are on track to double that number.
So what is this country doing about it? Instead of buckling down to continue our precautionary measures, we are in the middle of a political fight over how and when the reopening should take place.
It is being done in the most irresponsible way possible, and we have the president to blame. Admittedly it’s not just the president. We have Fox and talk radio to blame as well, but the president is just that – the president – and he is the one who should be held responsible.
What is he doing? Instead of a carefully enunciated appreciation of the difficulties, we have Donald Trump hyping a phony argument that the epidemic is a hoax, that it is just another flu, that masks are unneeded, and that we can all get back to business. These inflammatory positions have made their way to Trump’s lips over the course of several months, but for the more rabid of Trump’s supporters, they are treated as truth. That’s why we have seen the mass demonstrations in midwestern capitols and at Huntington Beach. It is why states like Georgia have opened themselves to influxes of shoppers and tourists from the surrounding states. It is why Florida continues to show new cases and additional deaths. It’s also why a few incredibly misled people have hurt themselves by ingesting cleaning products as an attempt to stave off the virus.
His actions have undercut the thousands of hours of work done by the CDC to establish guidelines for bringing the American economy back from the brink. His actions have demoralized the entire scientific establishment. These are people who have devoted the better part of their adult lives to work and study. They are serious people who worry about getting things right. This is exactly opposite from Trump’s approach, which is to say things he thinks his listeners would like to hear, without regard to facts or truth.
The reality is that social distancing has been somewhat successful, or at least we have reason to believe so. The evidence is in the curves showing the growth (and now the slow descent) of lives lost in the United States. Unfortunately, the current trend is basically a plateau, with the death rate holding at about 5.5 deaths per million Americans each and every day. This is just under two thousand dead per day. It is not declining very fast – in fact, if you look at the curve over the past couple of weeks, it is hardly declining at all.
Not what is going to happen if additional millions of people act like those people who crowded in line to get into the one restaurant that opened its doors in San Clemente, or who go shopping in Georgia? What we know now is that even one infectious person – and this does not require being symptomatic, just pre-symptomatic – can infect one or two or dozens of other people, depending on how many virus particles he breathes out, and how long the other people are in close proximity. And when it comes to close quarters in a restaurant waiting room or a department store, for example, the viral load in the air can become substantial.
Careful calculations predict that the American death toll could actually rise to as many as 3000 per day if we are not careful. Right now, a considerable fraction of the states are intent on not being careful.
What should we be doing? It makes sense to tell people that the problem has not gone away, that we need to continue with our precautions, and that lives do depend on it. That’s what the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor have been saying.
Instead, Trump has been acting like a willful child. He apparently thinks that wearing a mask would be weak, or unappealing, or something, so he won’t wear one. Vice President Mike Pence, the sycophant’s sycophant, didn’t wear one at the Mayo Clinic. Trump wouldn’t even wear a mask at a mask factory. Now that’s irony. Trump, in his usual way, refers to any facts he doesn’t like as fake news, and tried to blame all concern about the upcoming epidemic on the Democrats. It is hard to understand how even Trump’s followers could view thousands of deaths as a hoax, but they have been working hard to convince themselves that the dear leader is, in fact, a leader. They have to find some way to blame the liberals for something. They have focused on the lockdown, pretending that it is somehow unconstitutional (it’s not) or that masks are unnecessary. A few have gotten violent (with one shooting) in response to demands that they wear masks in public places.
The problem is that Trump has been stirring the waters about the economic closure, because he was running on the economy until just a few weeks ago. Mind you, he inherited a healing economy from Obama and didn’t put up growth figures that substantially bettered the Obama record, but Trump is nothing if not a braggart. So we got to hear about his wonderful record on the evening news.
And then, through only a little fault of his own, the unemployment numbers moved upward towards Great Depression levels. Suddenly the dream of reelection and a second term were in grave jeopardy. What to do?
This is where we need to consider the overall Trump record that stems from his warped personality. Let’s start with Trump’s recent remark that he learned a lot from Nixon. Whatever Trump might mean by that line personally, I notice a comparison. In the early days of Nixon’s first term as president, it was said that “everything is for sale.” We’re not just talking about the humdrum politics of giving ambassadorships to the big donors. We’re talking about serving the interests of the rich, to the disservice of the rest of us. We’re talking about getting what you want from the federal government as long as you made your donation into the right account. Or in the case of Nixon, cash that went into the big safe in the office of the Committee to Reelect the President.
Trump has taken it a step further than Nixon. Nixon had the political sense to recognize that a few things were beyond the pale. Trump bragged, early in his first campaign, that he was above that sort of thing. His famous line about being able to shoot somebody in the street and still keep his following kind of says it all.
First, he concentrated on making money – hotels, money from the inauguration, and appointing sleazes to run the departments; they did huge damage to Interior and EPA and so on. We might even wonder whether Trump’s obsession about having the most people in attendance at his inauguration had something to do with the huge amount of money that was collected for the inauguration, and has not really been accounted for.
And then they did the tax cut for the rich, and the remainder of the Trump administration history has been to pretend to move towards a balanced budget by cutting anything and everything that didn’t serve his right wing supporters or his own dictatorial fantasies. Along the way, the Republican Senate didn’t refurbish the supplies that would have served us in the early days of the epidemic – it was just one more line item that could be cut to open up money for the billionaires’ tax cuts. Of course the right wingers are now trying to blame that failure on Obama, because it originally happened during his presidency, but we all know what the political environment was in those days. A quick reminder – the Republican Senate, now willing to run a trillion dollar deficit to fund the Trump tax cut, whined and harped over the budget deficit as long as Obama was in office. And the failure to prepare for an epidemic through refurbishing supplies continued through the Trump administration.
But now we’re in a whole new universe of disgrace: In order to best protect his reelection chances, Trump is doing what he can to open up commerce and business whether it is safe or not. And the way he and his followers are doing it, we all know it is not going to be safe. The problem for the country (and, indeed, the rest of the world) is that Trump doesn’t just do something political and admit that this is what he is doing. We get all manner of tweets and nonsense, and it makes his supporters crazy. Trump has created an alternate universe of pseudoscience and peddles it unashamedly to his followers.
Trump has taken the Republican war on science to whole new heights. This week’s scandal is the censoring of the CDC’s efforts to define the process of reopening in a way that won’t kill millions of people. For some reason, bits and parts of that plan aren’t precisely consistent with Trump’s wishful thinking, so they had to go.
In the Trump universe (to borrow the old line about toddlers from a psychology class) wishing makes It so – hydrochloroquine and bleach and chlorine dioxide will make the virus will go away and we’ll have plenty of masks and tests and new drugs and a vaccine. None of these are real at the moment, but Trump is still selling his bottles of Elixir.
Addendum
We are now in the final six months leading up to the November elections. It is going to be a battle. People need to be reminded that the constant stress and pain we have been feeling from having this president can be made to go away. We need to remind people that it is possible to have a president who appoints competent people and who knows how to listen to expert advice. We can return to some semblance of political normality. At the very least, we can return to a time when the president of the United States didn’t willfully sacrifice tens of thousands of American lives just to pretend that he is the president of business growth.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
