No Plan To Be Found: Why the Administration Refuses to Lead and Fails the People

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was outmatched. Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, host Dana Bash asked the hard questions, and by hard I mean questions that literally anyone could have seen coming. DeVos embarrassed herself over and over again by repeating the same tired lines and blinking like a hostage victim trying to relay an S.O.S. to anyone watching from home.

DeVos’s appearance was part of the Trump Administration’s aggressive push for public schools to open for in-person classes in just a few weeks. The Secretary and President Donald Trump have been adamant that all schools open, even as the coronavirus spikes in states around the country. The pandemic holds no way for them, however, as the opening of schools is integral to any plan that might spur the economy and possibly lead to Trump’s reelection.

The children, after all, can be sacrificed if it means four more years of this madness.

DeVos is a natural fit for this administration. She is willfully and proudly ignorant of the department she heads, and is, in fact, aggressively anti-education. When she’s not spending her family’s massive fortune creating false movements to reopen the country, she’s using that wealth to attack public education as an institution. She seeks to destroy the school system in order to privatize it, profit off it, create academies of political and religious indoctrination, and, like other advocates of “school choice,” she wants to create a new, post-segregation segregation.

The Trump Administration is dedicated to political theater of this sort. Nearly all of Trump’s secretaries, save for the ones in charge of war and profit, have been publicly opposed to the departments they head. Rick Perry infamously wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is an open-skeptic of climate change and a veteran energy company hack. This isn’t government - it’s anti-government. Like other authoritarians, particularly authoritarian kleptocrats, Donald Trump is providing the illusion of government while dismantling government with every passing day.

Let’s be very clear: it would be great for students to return to classes in the Fall. In-person schooling is incredibly important for the well-being of children, both in terms of their social experience and actual education. And we could do that safely, if we were so inclined. By pumping the public school system with investment and resources, we could use this moment of crisis to remake an aging, decrepit system that has been attacked and vilified by every Republican for decades.

But that isn’t what Trump or DeVos is interested in. They are explicitly focused on making this a political issue they believe they can use to their benefit, and they are focused on using public education as a daycare so that parents can get back to work and jumpstart the economy on behalf of Trump’s reelection. We could have real, mature conversations about what in-person options look like, but this is a driving through of a bad plan for bad reasons and there will be bad outcomes.

There is no plan because plans are expensive and plans are intended to have outcomes that are beneficial. Trump doesn’t want to spend public money on public good. He would rather redistribute wealth to himself and his cronies. DeVos literally wants to starve public education and any injection of resources might stave off the collapse she so desperately desires. And, in following the Republican line of economic thinking, some people are going to have to suffer and die if this project of wealth redistribution and privatizing is going to be achieved.

We must stop treating the Trump presidency like it is anything but abnormal and dangerous. We grant them legitimacy because the truth is too horrid to accept easily. They will sacrifice children. They’ve already let hundreds of thousands of Americans die, and more will follow. There is no plan. There never was, there never will be. They simply do not care.

Muckrake EIC Jared Yates Sexton discusses Betsy DeVos and the war on public education in his weekly “Bourbon Talk.” These Q&A sessions take place every Sunday at 8pm est. Subscribe to his YouTube channel for updates.

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.