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One of the enduring puzzles this year has been why the GOP and the Trump administration in particular didn’t take an emerging pandemic seriously and didn’t act with any urgency from the outset.
Certainly we know the seeds for the current failure were sewn over the past few years as the administration took a sledgehammer to global disease surveillance and pandemic preparedness, but we can presumably chalk that up to standard rightwing ideological abhorrence of both good government and administrative competence.
But once the virus emerged, the 'strategy' quite transparently was: test as little as possible to stay in the dark on actual case counts and spread, pretend it'll go away, and forget about it. And try and make some Culture War hay out of public health measures. With hindsight of course we know that failed miserably from a public health perspective, but also was profound political malpractice. But surely even six months ago it was obvious that botching a pandemic would be a political liability?
If you assume the Trump folks are rational political animals, they either must have not seen this incompetence and non-response as a political liability or they knew they were in over their heads and were simply resigned to failing (which certainly seems to be Trump's posture now). If the former, why wouldn't it be a liability?
The obvious and unsettling possibility is that they saw it as a blue state problem for which they wouldn't take an appreciable political hit--indeed, perhaps they could even turn their failure against political opponents in those states. That's a horrifying thought, but it does find some support in a recent article on the national testing fiasco:
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
Certainly we know the seeds for the current failure were sewn over the past few years as the administration took a sledgehammer to global disease surveillance and pandemic preparedness, but we can presumably chalk that up to standard rightwing ideological abhorrence of both good government and administrative competence.
But once the virus emerged, the 'strategy' quite transparently was: test as little as possible to stay in the dark on actual case counts and spread, pretend it'll go away, and forget about it. And try and make some Culture War hay out of public health measures. With hindsight of course we know that failed miserably from a public health perspective, but also was profound political malpractice. But surely even six months ago it was obvious that botching a pandemic would be a political liability?
If you assume the Trump folks are rational political animals, they either must have not seen this incompetence and non-response as a political liability or they knew they were in over their heads and were simply resigned to failing (which certainly seems to be Trump's posture now). If the former, why wouldn't it be a liability?
The obvious and unsettling possibility is that they saw it as a blue state problem for which they wouldn't take an appreciable political hit--indeed, perhaps they could even turn their failure against political opponents in those states. That's a horrifying thought, but it does find some support in a recent article on the national testing fiasco:
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.