Trump Is Talking About 'Re-Opening the Country' by Easter. This Hurricane Hasn't Even Hit Yet.

From Esquire

The disaster we're all talking about has not actually hit yet. The hurricane is only just now making landfall, and some folks are talking about what color we should paint the schoolhouse when it's rebuilt. We're at the "Levees Will Hold" stage, not the Superdome stage. New York City is a beachhead—and now the epicenter—for the coronavirus pandemic on these shores, but there's reason to believe the crisis has only just begun in the nation's largest city. The situation in the city's hospitals is already dire, but it probably won't peak there for two-to-three weeks. The timeline is longer in most other parts of the nation. We are on pace to have the worst coronavirus outbreak anywhere in the world and it's scarcely begun.

And yet the president is pushing to "re-open the country" in the next week or so. In fact, he debuted his new line Tuesday that things should get back to normal by Easter. That's two and a half weeks away, and we quickly learned that he pulled this out of his ass. No public-health expert has endorsed this plan. No data set indicates it reflects the trajectory of reality. It is merely a projection of the Great American Bullshit Machine powering his every word and action. He wants it to be true, and he's used to making things real through sheer force of will and repetition. But it is not real, which he basically admitted to a Fox News host. He just likes the sound of it.

OK, let's just put aside for a moment the notion that Donald Trump is a big fan of Easter, or the larger cosmic joke that he is some sort of devout follower of Jesus Christ. The president is calling for churches to be "packed" in two and a half weeks. This is insane. It's a public health disaster. Elsewhere, he suggested he'd picked Easter because it's "a beautiful time."

By this time next week, this country will be plunged into full-on crisis. People will be dying in large numbers. The hospital system will be under severe, probably dangerous, strain. By that time, this week's idle talk that some will need to die for The Economy—which is, incredibly, the new consensus talking point for the American right—will seem barbaric. In a just world, the people saying it would be pariahs whom no one grants the time of day ever again. The president's simultaneous claim that somehow the virus will no longer be a major problem and everyone can go to church—which would seem to contradict his allies' position that old people will be dying for the Dow Jones Industrial Average—will seem completely delusional.

But none of this is guaranteed. The president and his allies seem to have successfully swept under the rug the simple reality that he downplayed and spread misinformation about the threat of COVID-19 for weeks on end instead of building out the country's response capacity in the form of tests, masks, ventilators, and hospital beds. 60 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the crisis, despite the fact that no public health experts do. He seems to be setting up fights with various state governors, perhaps in the hope he can blame them when things go bad, even though only the federal government has the power to get the number of ventilators and other equipment hospitals need. The buck stops that-a-way. He takes no responsibility "at all."

The question is whether his complete bungling of this will ever catch up to him, or whether he can avoid accountability as he has with everything else. This is the only major external crisis, apart from Hurricane Maria, that he's really had to deal with, and we are about to see the results. They are unlikely to be pretty, and it will be a direct consequence of his weeks-long refusal to ramp up testing because he thought it would look bad politically, and his STILL ONGOING refusal to use the Defense Production Act to task American industry with producing needed medical supplies like ventilators and masks.

And yet the Democrats have made themselves invisible enough, and Trump's grip on his cult may be secure enough, that he might just survive. Republican voters essentially only trust information from the president now, which is the danger of his Easter happy talk. He does not have the unilateral ability to "re-open the country," but his posture may cause 40 percent of the country to disregard public-health measures imposed by more responsible social leaders. Until the hurricane really hits, and all the talk goes flying out the window.

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