Even the Children: The Trump Administration Bullied the CDC and Used Them to Push School Openings at Any Cost
The war between the Trump Administration and the Center For Disease Control and Prevention has been simmering for weeks now. It has been a standoff mostly, with President Donald Trump calling their suggestions for school openings “tough” and Vice-President Mike Pence calling on schools to ignore them altogether. That war of words escalated on July 14th when the Trump Administration ordered America’s hospitals to cease sending their data to the CDC and instead report all numbers directly to the government, effectively neutralizing the agency in the midst of a massive surge of covid-19 infections. And then, Thursday, the CDC released a new, heavily revised set of guidelines titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall.”
Tellingly, the report is sloppily put together. Filled with typos, errors, and a redundant, droning appeal that matches the Trump Administration’s reckless call for reopening at all costs. To read the report is to understand that another semester of distance-learning would be cataclysmic for America’s schoolchildren, and that it is not only worth the risk of infection but absolutely vital that in-person instruction resume in just a few weeks.
It’s yet another instance of Trump and his cronies, including Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, bullying everyone in their orbit to both submitting to their demands and doing their dirty work for them. As previously discussed on The Muckrake, DeVos and Trump refused to provide even the most sparse plan for America’s schools, in part because they are ideologically opposed to public education, but also because, they refuse to lead in fear their decisions would be held against them.
The administration’s newest phrase for the worsening pandemic is “Learn To Live With It,” a call for Americans to learn to live with massive casualties and unending trauma. Now, this macabre “strategy” is being applied to our children, and their necessary insertion back into their schools so that their parents can return to work and Trump’s reelection might gain a slight and misleading economic bump. Trump is, and let’s be clear about this, calling for America’s children to be sacrifice upon the altar of the economy, yet another instance of this country’s hypercapitalistic system trumping the well-being of its people.
What even worse is Trump and DeVos’s refusal to take responsibility for this turn. Like other authoritarians, they would rather offload their cruelties on other individuals and organizations, which gives them what they want while shielding them from consequences and also, simultaneously, destroying public faith in institutions like the CDC. Again, the Trump Administration has no interest in using government for the public good. This is an anti-presidency dedicated to destroying government as a means of expediting personal profit, the consolidation of power, and blatant corruption.
They are not worried about your safety or the safety of your children. The pandemic, as they have now shown, time and time and time again, is simply an inconvenience they plan to ignore as much as possible. Your life and the lives of other Americans pale in comparison to these people’s drive to remain in power.
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. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
