By failing to lead, Trump left governors dirty work
Icame of voting age during the Reagan Revolution, a time when big government was bad, small government was better and no government wasn’t possible — but something a has-been actor could sell while out on the stump.
It may have been the worst of many bad things to take hold in the ’80s, because the theory — less government is good government — provided the kernels of doom that flowered through the COVID-19 disaster.
As we watch Arizona, Texas and what seems like half the country overrun by COVID cases, wincing in anxiety as the acid eats that much closer to New Mexico and its fragile health care system, I’m reminded of the Trump administration’s incomprehensible reaction to the crisis in its early days.
Even if you give President Donald Trump a pass on his reaction to the severity of the novel coronavirus — it’s no big deal, it’s under control, he told us — there’s no way to overlook, let alone forgive, the fact he basically re-created the Articles of Confederation after COVID-19 became the nation’s biggest nightmare in the past 80 years.
Under Trump and the let’s-diminish-government Republican Party built during the Reagan years and beyond, there is no real federal glue that holds America together anymore.
When it comes to COVID-19 — and really, what else is there? — we are simply 50 oddly shaped states, flailing about.
A fellow by the name of Doc Rivers, coach of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, said it succinctly as he tries to figure out how a multibillion-dollar sports business is going to try to play games in a state (Florida) rife with the virus.
“It would be great if we had national leadership, which we have zero on this,” Rivers told Yahoo!. “And so unfortunately, everyone is left to do their own thing from state to state and in some places from city to city. It’s absurd.”
From Anthony Fauci to David Scrase to Rivers, always listen to the Doc. Rivers is right, of course. Without strong federal intervention in the virus’s early days, and even today, states are left to fend for themselves, think for themselves, decide for themselves on just about every aspect of the pandemic. It’s mind-boggling, really. New Mexico, which even in the best of times is playing with pennies compared to a place like California, found itself bidding against the West Coast and just about every other member of the Union for personal protective equipment, respirators and myriad vital supplies.
We weren’t alone. A lot of other states, if not all of them, were in the same leaky boat.
It didn’t stop there. Arizona, Florida and Texas reopened their economies against the advice of many public health experts — only to shut down bunches of businesses again after their ERs became the scenes of dystopian nightmares. New York, once a COVID-19 disaster area, doesn’t want to go there again — its governor, like other governors, is asking visitors to quarantine.
Go down the alphabet, Alabama to Wyoming. Everybody’s doing something different. Quarantine? Shut down restaurants? Limited openings? Mandatory masks? It’s a crapshoot, depending on the airport, the freeway, the time zone, the city limit, the man or woman in charge.
And that’s precisely the problem. The lack of a single game plan gives 50 state governors the authority to do almost anything — wise, stupid or something in between.
I completely get the befuddlement from New Mexico hoteliers and others about Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s most recent public health pronouncements. They appear unenforceable. They smack of desperation. But what choice does she have? Sit silent as caseloads detonate? An activist governor like Lujan Grisham basically has to take the best bad option and speak loudly, even if the stick is wet linguine.
In 17 months, Lujan Grisham has shown herself as one of this country’s better governors, a potential vice-presidential candidate, if for no other reason than her world view is informed by the 21st century, and not — as is the case with Texas’ inexplicable Greg Abbott
and Arizona’s Doug Ducey — 1982.
But remember, Ducey, Abbott and Lujan Grisham are just state governors. The only reason they’re making these life-anddeath calls is because there’s a guy who turned the government of the United States of America into the town council of, say, Clovis.
Donald J. Trump. Trump.
Had he been president in
December 1941, with America’s Pacific Fleet at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, you could almost see him yelling at the Cabinet as Kansas, California and Arkansas are dispatched to take on the Japanese (“Dominate!), while Maine, Florida and Wisconsin get ready for the Germans.
And everyone else? On their own.
Trump, ever the leader, would handle Mexico by himself.