About a month after the 2016 general election, George drove me home from practice. He was, as we all were, very worried about the consequences of the decisions that the country had made and the experiment in extreme laissez-faire that was about to commence. The American governing apparatus, he believed, was a machine too powerful and too globally consequential to put in the hands of an operator who refused to read the owner’s manual. George felt that it was likely we wouldn’t live to see the end of a Trump Administration, and ticked off the ways it could all go wrong. There could be an atomic attack, or an old-fashioned nuclear accident. Social divisions could be exacerbated to the point of violent insurrection. Rollback of environmental protections meant that we stood a pretty good chance of getting poisoned in one way or another. George — and I recall this clearly — also predicted that the country would be unprepared for a pandemic.
Politicians make scary choices. Those in power are always threatening our lives, and livelihoods, in one way or another: prioritizing certain groups at the expense of others, making decisions that expand or contract different segments of the economy, stoking the engines of their future campaigns with the hot coal of public discontent. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chief executive do anything as deliberately, unforgivably, irrationally dangerous as the boneheaded thing that Donald Trump is determined to do tonight.
We don’t know everything about the coronavirus, and we’re unlikely to get a complete picture for years. But we’ve developed a workable transmission model, and that model tells us that packing thousands of unmasked chanters in an indoor arena — and keeping them there for hours! — is indefensible. That the White House feels at liberty to act in contradiction to the germ theory shouldn’t be a surprise; nevertheless, the brazenness with which they’re flaunting their defiance of basic science in the midst of a pandemic that has already affected millions of people worldwide is breathtaking in its irresponsibility. Some of the people who’ll attend tonight’s rally no doubt believe that prayer will see them through. I’ll be praying for Tulsa, too. I pray that they remember that God gave them brains, and He expects them to use them, even when the authorities refuse to use theirs. Especially when the authorities refuse to use theirs.
I try not to write about the President. This disinclination of mine isn’t hard to maintain, because the President does not tend to do interesting things, or say interesting things, or make choices that are salient to the health emergency we’re facing. Since he lacks organizational skills and intellectual discipline, I didn’t expect him to make a productive intervention in the progress of the pandemic, and boy howdy, he has not. All I ask of this administration and its enablers is that they don’t exacerbate a terrible problem. They’ve failed to clear that very low bar. Tonight, they don’t even plan to jump; they’re just going to run straight into the bar at top speed.
You may suspect that they have genocidal intentions. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, but.. that gives them too much credit. There’s no plan I can see other than the consolidation of power at all costs. They’re more than happy to throw you straight into the volcano to appease the hunger that remains their only motivation. The President’s poll numbers haven’t been good. He wants a televised rally, because television and rallies are all he understands. If he has to jeopardize or even sicken people to get what he wants, well, that’s tough luck for America.
Defenders of the administration are using a tit-for-tat argument: they feel that the recent street demonstrations have given them authorization to stage an event of their own. If you can set aside the batshit insanity of this and look at it squarely, it actually tells you a lot about the mentality of the President’s supporters. They’re not interested in scientific models and probabilities; they’re not interested in the pandemic at all. They’re certainly not interested in social justice movements. Everything in the world is filtered through a simple, elemental calculus — does the item under consideration help Donald Trump, or does it hurt him? Entrenching the President’s position becomes the foremost priority, and all else is secondary, including a global health crisis that endangers everybody on the planet. It is astonishing to me that any politician can have this sort of effect on his followers, let alone one who doesn’t seem to be able to string together a coherent sentence, but here we are. Trump has an uncanny ability to draw objects of all sizes into a dark orbit around him. Don’t get caught up.