A Denial of Crisis: Trump May Be Done With The Pandemic, But The Pandemic Isn't Done With Us
To turn on ESPN now is to become fluent in South Korean baseball. The network, left bereft without live sports and relying only on retreads of past glories, has gone all-in on covering the Korean Baseball Organization, fleshing out its culture and traditions for American fans desperate for literally anything to watch and cheer for.
What’s made the KBO’s opening possible was a stringent and serious response to the coronavirus pandemic that has made it the envy of the world. Despite its proximity to China, where the virus originated, South Korea has all but eradicated coronavirus in its country, limiting the number of its dead to under 300 while the United States sits and watches in horror as over 70,000 of our countrymen have died needless, agonizing deaths.
It is time for hard truths.
No. It has been time for hard truths for decades now, but we have reached a point where denial isn’t even possible anymore.
The United States of America has abdicated its position as leader of the free world.
President Donald Trump has overseen the final dismantling of American exceptionalism and in the first three years of his presidency has betrayed our interests, turned his back on our democratic allies in favor of anti-democratic authoritarians, and left the business of leading to autocrats, authoritarians, and the obscenely wealthy.
The pandemic has made clear what was should have been clear already. The United States of America has destroyed itself by prioritizing the obscene profits of the obscenely wealthy over the health, safety, and future of the people. This prioritization hid for decades behind the veneer of economic growth, but now that our economy has cratered and left millions unemployed, struggling, and terrified, there is nowhere to hide.
As discussed earlier, the Republican Party’s dedication to crafting illusory worlds where they can win elections over tending to the real world, where are consequences to political decisions, has left us without a government in a time where government would have saved tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead of a testing program, we get a daily briefing brimming with self-congratulatory lies. Instead of life-saving supplies, we get grift and organized crime schemes.
Now, word has gotten out that Trump plans on dismantling his coronavirus pandemic team even as internal documents show the administration expects upwards of 3,000 deaths per day in June alone and hundred of thousands of new cases. The rhetoric that it’s time to “reopen America” has nothing to do with the actual state of the pandemic and everything to do with the wealthy caring little for our fates and Trump desperately searching for reelection in November.
Whistleblowers and stories have shown that Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner have not only wrangled life-saving supplies from states and bungled the response, but that the process was so rife with corruption and ineptness that it’s caused lives. Now, both are congratulating themselves for a job well done and continually saying the crisis is behind us.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues to fight the plague and move on. In Europe, countries are slowly and safely emerging from their quarantine. They face economic depression but seem poised to begin the long trek to something approaching a new normal. In South Korea, baseball is being played in their stadiums and Americans watch from their homes, transfixed by their new heroes and villains, the same way the world used to look at us back when the world revolved around America, the lost superpower.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.