It’s time to admit it: There is a method to the madness, if you’re willing to put all morality and ethics aside. This is why Trump flip-flopped from “I have the power” to tell the states to open their economies, to the more recent “It’s up to them to decide (but we’ll be watching and giving ‘advice’).
It also explains Trump’s mystifying intransigence in refusing to allow the federal government to bring resources to bear to help states provide the scale of testing necessary to provide the public confidence necessary to open up their economies safely.
It explains why the message from the administration is so bifurcated, one side encouraging compliance with social distancing measures and SIP directives, while Trump encourages ‘liberation’ from ‘draconian’ SIP directives—particularly when the governors instituting such measures are Democrats. Even the mixed message chaos suits the strategy. What IS the strategy? The strategy that looks for the shortest possible route to ‘herd immunity’.
The basic premise of herd immunity is, when enough people have been exposed to the virus and survive, the virus, at least in a non-mutated form, is no longer infectious on a scale that disrupts society. Go back to work, open your stores, live your life.
I believe that Trump believes his goal is to get America to a place of herd immunity. In his mind, it makes everything bad go away. Testing becomes a non-issue. Vaccines become less immediately important. People stop dying (in large numbers). And he thinks he gets to have the election he intended to have...by November. And he believes with only the herd immunity ‘survivors’ he comes out the ‘hero’. Trump ‘wins’. Yah, sure, getting to that immunity that quickly might end up costing up to 500,000 unnecessary deaths.
But hey, in Trump World that’s called the ‘cost of doing business’ if he can point to an economy steaming ahead to normalcy. The only problem is, he can’t quite come right out and say “We’d all be better off letting the virus ‘wash over the country’”, as Dr. Fauci is purported to have once heard Mr. Trump muse out loud, to his horror.
Trump wants herd immunity. He just hasn’t quite figured out how to get there without being asked how many deaths it will ‘cost’.
And right on cue, not to be left out of the fun, ‘Moscow Mitch’ McConnell, senate majority leader, admitted today that any further federal financial support for the states is basically over after this last Relief bill is passed. Asked whether the states should come to the federal government for future debt relief as already tight budgets reach the breaking point in a few months time, McConnell replied “I’d much prefer the bankruptcy route”.
Of course he would. There’s the ‘tough love’ we’ve come to know and expect from the GOP.
Talk about “never let a crisis go to waste”! Sure, Mitch and the GOP would prefer states declare bankruptcy, because it would allow the GOP to be in a position to renege renegotiate public pension debt, held mostly by states the Trumpists have always felt were far too generous in contract negotiations with public sector unions in decades past. Nevermind the cratering of the American economy that would result from trillion dollar writedowns of lost equity, if that ever came to pass.
But, sadly, America can never presume these guys won’t steer the ship-of-state right toward those rocks on purpose. For them, this is the moment the nation gets to “reinvent itself” into the Libertarian Paradise the GOP donors, along with their evangelical fellow travelers, have always wanted. Just let the FN/OAN propaganda do its work writing off the generation of voters that got us into this mess in the first place. All will be well. And we can become comfortably numb together again. With Trump. For another four years. Of this.
PS: If you think countries doing SIP and reemergence correctly will be able to out-perform the United States economically, guess again. We will make sure they can’t ‘take advantage’ of us because we will punish them with tariffs if they try. That’ll show them who’s boss! “Privatize profits, socialize losses.”