Ignoring COVID-19 Won’t Make It Go Away

This week in my Introduction to Political Science class, we had to write a brief summary of a current foreign policy situation and provide our solution to it. It’s a fairly typical assignment for my online college course. I specifically chose not to write about COVID-19, since I didn’t feel like spilling 1000 words over how badly that particular situation was botched, and I had already written about Trump’s ill conceived and ill thought out response to tariffs before.

Another classmate wrote about the tariffs instead. He argued, as I had argued, that it made no economic sense to increase tariffs on China, as China simply raised prices on American goods, and then dropped their demand for United States products to practically nothing, devastating industries such as soybean farming.

And then there was Doug.

I call him Doug because I’m not about to put the guy’s actual name on the internet. I’m sure he means well. I’m sure he’s a good guy with a nice family, and he’s just as scared as the rest of us are during this latest apocolypse. I also know that Doug is a Trump supporter, because he will never not take an opportunity to praise something Trump’s done.

 “I disagree with pulling back tariffs”, he wrote. “We as a country have never stood toe to toe with China, and trade punches with them. It has been all talk, until President Trump.” (The lie detector determined this was a lie, but what can you do?)

“Although I wouldn’t argue that tariffs [don’t] have some impact on Americans, it does seem China is taking the biggest hit considering their economy shrank in the 4th quarter. Fixing our economy is simple. Reopen it now. Before COVID, our economy was strong and growing. We have flattened the curve, which is the only thing lockdown was designed to do. We can’t stay inside forever. We need to protect the vulnerable and get back to work. Easing tariffs isn’t the answer to fix our economy, in my humble opinion. Getting back to work is.” He continued.

I hadn’t wanted to talk about COVID-19, but COVID-19 had found it’s way into a discussion on tariffs.

There was a whole lot to unpack there, so much so that I had to step away from the keyboard and hang out with my wife so I didn’t spend an hour on the internet, trying to prove to someone who is pre-disposed to not believing facts that what they said was simply ridiculous.

But as I sat there, my mind running while I watched “24 Hours to Hell In Back with Gordon Ramsey”, I tried to put into proper context what he said, and why anyone would believe it.

Donald Trump is already attempting to move past the coronavirus. The coronavirus task force has been shoved into the background. Administration officials responsible for providing the President and the public with information have either been fired or demoted.

Trump keeps recontextualizing the data in a way that is both optimistic (for him) and dispiriting (for people who hate people dying). “If I didn’t [close the country], we would have lost 2 million, 2 and a half million, maybe more than that,” said in a Fox News interview. “And we’ll be at 100,000, 110 [thousand deaths] — the lower level of what was projected if we did the shutdown.”

Here sits the President of the United States, shrugging his shoulders, as if 100,000 people disappearing from existence is a minor inconvenience.

But that’s what happens when a narcissist crafts a reality that is more soothing than the one we exist in. This is why Trump surrounds himself with douchebag, glad-handing yes men (and women) who tell him what he wants to hear, and why he punishes anyone around him who delivers information to him that is contrary to that.

Trump even shrugged off the 14% unemployment rate, saying “Even the Democrats aren’t blaming me for that.” In Trump’s reality, he is both responsible for everything good and absolved from anything negative that happens. He is the decision maker, but also he is powerless to do anything. He’s the boss, but he’s also just along for the ride.

That ignorance of facts can be soothing to those who are fearful. Doug’s assertions that all we need to do to repair the economy is to simply re-open everything is an extension of Trump’s delusions. In his mind, we’ve “flattened the curve”, so now it’s time to move on.

This is partially a failure by the politicians who actually give a shit to mention that there was a step after flattening the curve. Mitigation was supposed to be the first step, not the only step. Nevertheless, this is the mindset; we’ve flattened the curve, so it’s time to go back to work and undo all that progress.

Even his tepid acceptance of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods hurting American consumers gets washed aside from Trump’s rhetoric. Doug’s ethos, and Trump’s ethos, and Republican ethos in general is the belief that you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette. If some Americans have to pay more for shit because of a trade war they have no say in, so be it; we just have to stay “tough” on China, even when it doesn’t make economic sense. If thousands of Americans have to die in order for the economy to re-open, so be it. We can’t afford to make the numbers on the Wall Street ticker that no one really understands go down any further.

But you can’t just ignore COVID-19 into not existing. The unbridled optimism that all that needs to happen for things to get better is for the economy to re-open is so far removed from actual, tangible reality that it is only by wholeheartedly accepting countless preventable deaths as inevitable and not a big deal that one can arrive to that conclusion.

That is ultimately the message that Trump and his sycophants are feeding to the masses. That people dying is okay. That just re-opening businesses will immediately bring back the jobs lossed. That America simply isn’t capable of being closed for long. That the way we beat this is to turn a blind eye as our loved ones, neighbors, friends and colleagues die, to put your head in the sand and hope for the very best.

But COVID-19 isn’t going away. Cases are still rising. Hospitalizations and deaths have plateaued. All the numbers will keep climbing as more and more people interact, and are forced to file back into office buildings and factories and retail jobs.

And that’s assuming that people even will go back to work once state and local governments allow it, or that they will frequent restaurants again, or that they will go out shopping again, or that companies who have laid off and furloughed thousands of employees will suddenly have all those jobs just sitting there waiting for them again.

If Trump were serious about re-opening the economy, he would invoke the Defense Production Act for something other than the most petty of bullshit to produce more tests kits, possibly to line the pockets of his rich friends. You know what else would make Silicon Valley happy? If Trump threw some funding their way to build contact tracing apps, apps that they could even sell ads on and mine private data from if they wanted to. He could throw more money to more rich people to build and maintain expensive isolation hotels, retreats and resorts, where sick people who could afford it could go and get better. There is so much money to be made, so much grift to be grifted, if Trump actually cared about the economy in any sort of way. And there is no better time to exploit Americans who are desperate.

But Trump is, first and foremost, obscenely stupid, and utterly incapable of that kind of next level thought. Secondly, he doesn’t actually want to be President, and the only thing worse for Trump than being forced to watch re-runs on TV is to be forced to actually have to work a little to make money. Trump only wants things to re-open because, on a surface level, he believes that the image of people re-opening business, sitting in restaurants and going to beaches will look good on TV.

He was only interested in doing the coronavirus daily briefings when they were bringing in ratings and occasionally earning him tepid praise for being able to string a sentence together without sounding like the complete goof that he is. The second Trump’s rapidly sunsetting brain allowed him to muse about injecting disinfectant and using ultraviolet inside the body out loud, and the second he was roundly criticized about doing it, he stopped wanting to do them and decided he wanted to move on.

Ignorance isn’t simply bliss for Trump. It is his perpetual mind state. Life is just a TV show; “only 100,000” dying is just a temporary dip in the ratings following the mid-season finale, right before he kicks the coronavirus’ ass to bring the ratings back during sweeps.

And people like Doug desperately want to believe that reality. Doug is the man on Twitter who truly, desperately believes that an online petition will get the corporate meanies at Reality Studios to “RELEASE THE TRUMP CUT”, wherein COVID-19 was stopped dead in its tracks weeks ago, Trump has defeated the evil nation of China with wit and cunning, and the entire “a black man became President” subplot was dropped.

But real life isn’t a movie. There is no twist reveal that the coronavirus was defeated by simply insisting that it wasn’t real, or that it is fake news. As more states push to re-open, and as Trump continues to make a public health issue yet another thing Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on, more people will die. Trump’s “rosy” projection that only 100,000 people will die will (probably) be surpassed. His insistence that there is no need for more testing while he frequently makes sure the staff around him are regularly tested will cost more American lives.

And for Doug, there is no bright future where the great American economy comes roaring back to life, and COVID-19 fades into memory. This will be effecting us for years. Pretending COVID-19 doesn’t exists can not, and will not, make it go away.

A point that I find myself coming back to is Doug’s saying that we have to “protect the vunerable” while “getting back to work”. It implies, as Trump often does, that the virus will pass “the strong people” by, while only the weak will perish.

There are tens of thousands of Trump supporters who died believing that same thing. One only wonders how many more have to die for the rest to get the message.