Callous, revealing tweet from top aide to DeSantis

Last April, David Steinhardt was having what before the COVID19 pandemic would have been an unimaginable conversation.

Steinhardt is senior rabbi at B’nai Torah Congregation just west of Boca Raton. Two congregants had lost their son — who lived in New York — to the virus. They couldn’t be with him when he died or attend his funeral.

“The magnitude of that pain,” Steinhardt said, “is just so great.” Simple human decency demands respect for those who have lost so much during the pandemic.

Yet last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ chief spokesman displayed the opposite.

Responding on Twitter to a Reuters editor about a photo display of virus victims, Fred Piccolo proposed using 99 photos of survivors for every person who had died. Such an arrangement, Piccolo said, would reflect what he considers the low fatality rate.

Piccolo’s comment mocked each family of the 21,300 people in Florida who have died. It mocked the health care workers on whom the pandemic has left scars.

Sadly, however, the comment also reinforced how needlessly political the pandemic has become. Though Piccolo deleted the tweet after a reporter spotted it, his attitude is familiar.

When COVID-19 deaths nationwide reached 176,000, a CBS News/YouGov poll found that 53 percent of Republicans considered that an “acceptable” number. The death toll has nearly doubled. Is 335,000 now an “acceptable” number? Will 500,000 be “acceptable” when we hit that terrible milestone early next year, even with a massive vaccine rollout?

When historians study how the nation best prepared to deal with a pandemic performed so badly, they will note the Trump administration’s many policy failures. Most recently, the Washington Post detailed how, under a Trump appointee, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was weeks late on a COVID-19 test.

But they also will note President Trump’s appalling lack of empathy. As former Mike Pence adviser Olivia Troye put it, after watching Trump in White House Coronavirus Task Force meetings, the president has a “flat-out disregard for human life.”

From that callousness came Trump’s view of the virus as an annoyance, not a potential crisis. On May 11, Trump boasted, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” Deaths have since quadrupled.

DeSantis typified the Republican governors who me-tooed Trump’s disdain for mask-wearing, contact tracing and other measures that might have led to different outcomes. Like Trump, DeSantis sidelined public health experts.

Also like Trump, DeSantis rarely expresses public sympathy for victims. After a critical Sun Sentinel editorial, DeSantis did issue generic condolences. But the roughly 21,300 who have died in Florida remain an afterthought to the governor’s repeated calls to reopen bars and gyms.

Perhaps the high concentration of cases and deaths among people of color caused many Americans — including many rightwing media types — to scoff at the early warnings. It wasn’t happening to people they knew. Such ignorance was costly then and remains costly.

That’s why a woman named Heaven Frilot went on Facebook last March to tell other Republicans in Kenner, La., that her husband was on a ventilator, likely catching the virus during Mardi Gras. The disease, Frilot warned, was not a hoax by the liberal media.

Happily, Mark Frilot recovered, after spending three weeks in the hospital. But it should not take friendship with victims or near-victims to inspire empathy. All of them are Americans. Their suffering is an American tragedy.

Yet rather than unite us, the pandemic has further divided us. Trump, DeSantis and others turned life-saving — and economy-saving — masks into symbols of weakness.

Piccolo compounded his insensitivity by promoting misinformation. The CDC advises mask wearing, even after a vaccination, until we reach herd immunity. “Ummmm. No,” Piccolo tweeted. Ummm. Yes. Vaccines may not stop people from transmitting the virus.

As we end this wretched year, Trump’s departure offers hope for a return of humanity to the White House. It also offers the ultimate irony about the pandemic.

If Trump had shown even modest compassion and not seen the virus as a plot, he probably wouldn’t have to lie that he won a second term. As he did in 2016, however, Trump ran on grievance. It’s all he knows. The magnitude of that failing is just so great.