Gone all wobbly
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said on a news show Sunday that we’re “not going to control the pandemic” and that we must await a vaccine and try in the meantime to keep people from dying.
That represented an abject Trump White House surrender to the spread of a virus that other governments and societies have been better able to contain if not control.
For the record: Meadows went on to give lip service to the masks the White House won’t formally recommend and at which his strange boss often scoffs.
But he’d already made the headline of surrender. It contradicted the long emphasis—from the White House’s own task force down to governors such as ours—on virus-pre-emptive measures such as wearing masks, keeping distances and washing hands.
It also belied a general emphasis on pre-emptive measures to try to avoid overstraining the medical care infrastructure. Instead it referred everyone to that medical care infrastructure. And it did so at the very outset of the fall-winter season in which cases are expected to spike, perhaps alarmingly.
Thus, here is your current presidential administration’s policy on the virus: Americans should continue doing as they wish and keep the nation economically open. They must risk getting sick because we’re powerless to do anything about that. The unlucky 1 percent or 2 percent who get really sick must depend on our doctors and hospitals to tend to them medically because we’re getting better with the right medicine. Otherwise most people can survive to get a vaccine in a relatively short while.
It’s no wonder Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is leading in public opinion surveys on the coronavirus issue, and may well win the presidency as a result.
Appearing to factor death into the equation suggests that the elderly and other medically vulnerable Americans are calculated war casualties.
I’m not sure Biden could scare enough fracking fans in rural Pennsylvania to rival the recoiling by the elderly and suburban women to that concept.
On the morning of Meadows’ announced national surrender, our state’s Trump-supporting governor, Asa Hutchinson, was on CBS on “Face the Nation” expressing concern about the fall-winter spike and encouraging mask-wearing.
But would Asa dare make explicit criticism of the Trump administration?
Oh, no.
Asked to square his concern for prudent precautions with the president’s stated indifference to, even contempt for, masks, Hutchinson said only that we need consistency in statements and actions from our leaders.
But then he pivoted rapidly to say he’d seen the president wearing a mask the day before while waking into a polling place. He hastened to say it was true that a vaccine was the eventual solution. He said he was in close touch on that point with hardworking administration officials.
To my surprise and mild pleasure, our governor was maybe a tad more forthcoming to me later Sunday in an email exchange.
What did he think of Meadows’ statement? Hutchinson replied: “Well, he went on to say that we should all follow CDC guidelines and wear a mask and socially distance. I agree with that … . It is absolutely essential that we do not give up on reducing the number of cases every day because (1) it saves lives, (2) it keeps our hospitals from being overrun, and (3) it allows us to live life from school to work to sports. Meadows was in a heated discussion and while we can’t ‘control’ a virus, I am concerned that his story will convey to some people that we are giving up and simply waiting for a vaccine. We can’t do that.”
As to whether he was essentially criticizing Trump for inconsistent messaging by saying we need consistent words and actions in our leaders, Hutchinson replied: “Enough said on this topic.”
As one who wrote Tuesday that there was a time and place for Biden to punt on the issue of transitioning from oil, I suppose I’ll just have to faircatch the governor’s 35-yard wobbler on Trump.
There’s a similarity, for sure, in the political challenges of Biden’s trying to transition from fossil fuels to renewable ones and stay competitive among the fracking sites of rural Pennsylvania, and in Hutchinson’s trying to speak responsibly on the virus while not criticizing his leader.
The only small difference is that Joe is right about transitioning from oil and Asa is not right to defend Trump.