Over the past week, an average of 2,605 Americans have died of COVID-19 every day, pushing the nation’s pandemic death toll beyond 900,000.
These fatalities, first and foremost, are tragedies for the families of the deceased. One of the great disgraces of the pandemic is the way our cultural conversations have sidelined the mourning. Yoked with grief, there are millions of the recently bereaved who deserve our focused empathy. The nation admirably offered it to 9/11 families two decades ago; now, we prattle on with unproductive and increasingly inflammatory arguments about mask wearing, school closures, vaccine mandates and who can and cannot be trusted.
The government’s COVID-19 response certainly deserves scrutiny – everything the government does deserves it – but the dipped-in-venom tenor of our COVID conversations, and the staggering amount of misinformation and hyperbole they contain, betrays both a rotten American soul incapable of compassion and a national intellect infected by anger, division, and an obsession with inventing enemies to destroy.
The American political right, in particular, deserves full-throated condemnation for hijacking the national response to the pandemic. Instead of encouraging unity and grace, instead of helping the broken-hearted heal and working to spare others from pain and suffering, factions within the GOP have dishonored the dead by relentlessly downplaying the virus that killed them.
Donald Trump, animated by his boundless compulsion for misinterpreting every problem as a personal attack, began this dangerous trend in February 2020 when he compared COVID-19 to the flu and boasted “we have it so well under control.”
But Trump’s bluster was irrelevant to the virus. ICUs filled. Thousands of Americans, gasping for their last unaided breath, had tubes shoved down their throats. Machines kept their lungs working, until they couldn’t. Many were ultimately deposited in makeshift morgues, their funerals delayed by social distancing requirements.
Yet, as the death toll climbed, Trump maintained an undimmed enthusiasm for making ridiculous COVID-19 predictions, as if to reassure himself that a national tragedy couldn’t possibly happen on his watch. The Recount, a digital news outlet, clipped together Trump’s steady stream of heedless pronouncements in a viral video that is surely among the most damning displays of presidential incompetence in American history.
So humiliating – so completely wrong – were Trump’s characterizations of the pandemic, that a public figure with the slightest inclination toward self-reflection would have ceded the bully pulpit. Of course, no one expected that of Trump, a man made invulnerable by his own shamelessness. But to the unforgivable discredit of the Republican Party, they too fomented an anti-science, anti-unity, and juvenile approach to COVID-19.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who long ago discovered that acting like an unbridled demagogue is the surest way for a pissant to stay relevant in politics, wore a gas mask on the House floor in March 2020. Gaetz was trying to mock face coverings. Days later, he had to quarantine because he was exposed to COVID-19 at a conservative conference.
At least Gaetz was willing to sequester himself. Rand Paul, the Senator from Kentucky who will likely spend the rest of his life tacitly campaigning for president, used a Congressional gym while infected with the highly contagious disease.
Rand, a trained eye doctor, has since positioned himself as a foil to Dr. Anthony Fauci. In contentious Senate hearings contrived for cable news pickup, Rand has leveled all types of accusations at the federal government’s top infectious disease expert. In sum, he claims Fauci is an arrogant liar, an apologist for the Chinese government, and a bad actor with bad intentions. Yet, none of Fauci’s myriad critics have adequately explained what evil ulterior motive Fauci pursues (words like “fascism” and “authoritarian” are used like punchlines with no setups.) But Rand’s motivation is obvious. His website – like the website of the GOP’s new standard-bearer, Governor Ron DeSantis – uses anti-Fauci smears in fundraising appeals.
This is all part and parcel of a contingent within the Republican Party that has decided it is too difficult to tame COVID-19, so it is better to politicize the virus and to use the safety measures it necessitates as a political cudgel.
For example, Sen. Ted Cruz, the opportunistic Texan, said in July 2020 that Democrats were intentionally overreacting to the pandemic in order to gain an advantage at the ballot box.
With a righteous tilt in his voice, the Republican senator expounded: “If it ends up that Biden wins in November…I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors, will say, ‘Everything’s magically better. Go back to work. Go back to school. Suddenly all the problems are solved.’”
Months later, Rudy Giuliani, then a close associate of the sitting president, told a group of Donald Trump’s supporters “people don’t die of this disease anymore.”
In fact, the deadliest days of the pandemic hadn’t hit America when those two Republican stalwarts – linked by their failed presidential ambitions – uttered their idiotic statements.
Cruz’s remarks have since become infamous proof of his unreliability, but Giuliani’s statement is particularly distressing since it manifests a personal decline that is mirrored in the conservative movement at large. The former New York City mayor, it is perhaps hard to recall, became a national hero by effectively responding to the 9/11 terrorism attack. Now he’s a national doofus, who can’t win a court case or make a public appearance without tarnishing whatever remains of his pillaged reputation.
Incredibly, the GOP’s cynicism has extended to the greatest public health accomplishment in generations, the COVID-19 vaccines.
Just last week, Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, indicated on a popular conservative radio show that “story after story” shows that athletes keep “dropping dead on the field” as a result of getting inoculated.
The senator offered no proof, nor does any exist. Predictably, however, Johnson’s claim has circulated on social media, where it has been championed by a legion of gullible but indefatigably wrong defenders.
To this obtuse group of COVID-19 contrarians, vaccine mandates and mask requirements are tyrannical, freedom-robbing, even murderous. They eschew consensus recommendations from the public health community and instead rely on internet rumors and the speciously credentialed.
The effort to make sense of this dressed-up garbage is nearly as taxing as understanding the shifting values of the political party that once championed personal responsibility and compassion. Republicans, not too long ago, led the self-righteous charge to admonish athletes who refused to stand during the national anthem, a symbolic gesture of patriotic unity. Now, many from this same ilk refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks, scientifically-proven measures to protect one’s community, particularly the elderly and the infirm, from a virus that has killed nearly six million people worldwide.
All of this hypocrisy, cynicism, and fear-mongering has prolonged the pandemic and exacerbated its effects in the U.S., which has a much higher death rate than all other developed countries. And because America’s partisan media environment thrives on conflict, all the unadulterated nonsense injected into the body politic by the GOP has short-circuited the way the political left has communicated about COVID-19. Liberals, worn down by misinformation and mockery, have too often become mean, stubborn, and petty. Consequently, ugly habits have emerged on the left, including the instinct to mock COVID-19 fatalities who perished after refusing the vaccine or disdaining neighbors who arrive at different good-faith conclusions about their risk tolerance.
It is to this nation’s great shame that things have turned out this way. But our fever will break one mind at a time. A surplus of grace, even if it’s initially unrequited, will aid our healing.
