Americans of all persuasions are locked into a 24/7 duck-and-cover mentality that has become our new reality.
In 2020, we are under attack from a deadly enemy that has raced halfway around the world to hit us where we live and work, without regard to those trivial, tribal, us-versus-them divisions that too many of us once thought were important. Some of us have been here before.
Sixty-nine years ago, little Donald Trump was a kindergartener just embarking on the privileges of a private school education in New York City’s borough of Queens. Just a few miles away, a U.S. civil defense movie crew, at P.S. 152, was filming the public school children who lived not far from the Trump family’s 23-room mansion. They were rehearsing what to do when and if their enemy, half a world away, attacked them with another sort of weapon.
“… Fire is a danger … automobiles can be dangerous too,” the film’s somber announcer explained. “… Now we must be ready for a new danger — the atomic bomb!” Then we saw the children from Trump’s Queens, ducking under their desks and covering the backs of their necks with their hands — in case of flying glass.
“Duck and Cover” was a cultural classic that defined the fearful world of our Cold War era and the lives of several generations. Today, America’s children, their parents and all of us are overdosing — not on fear but on fact — every time we look at our news screens.
But the first version of Trump’s history in mishandling the coronavirus pandemic as president has already been chronicled. It is a fact-based tale of delay and deny. Trump and his team blithely ran all the red lights — failed to prepare and prevent, until it was too late.
Trump was given repeated warnings by his intelligence experts that America could soon face the peril of a new incurable killer disease, coronavirus, that was devastating China and could soon endanger us all in the USA. But for two months, Trump failed to heed his experts’ warnings. In shockingly inaccurate public comments, Trump repeatedly insisted the disease was under control. When the first 15 U.S. coronavirus cases were reported, Trump bizarrely claimed that “within a couple of days (the number) is going to be down to close to zero.” This Thursday, the United States had more than 75,000 coronavirus cases — and more than 1,000 deaths.
Tragically, Trump’s America now leads the world with the steepest (meaning most rapid) increase in confirmed coronavirus cases of any country in the world. Charts prepared from data gathered by Johns Hopkins University show America’s crisis at a glance: the U.S. increase is skyrocketing almost straight up — faster even than the increase that occurred in China, where the coronavirus was first detected and spread rapidly while officials hid the problem from the world. It has climbed faster than it did in Italy, or Spain, or anywhere so far.
Trump needs to ask himself this: Why were China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan all able to lead the world by reacting quickly with bold and dynamic steps that enabled those countries to flatten out the once-rapidly soaring level of their increase in new coronavirus infections? The answer: They quickly tested their populations, isolated and quarantined infected individuals.
Also: Why did the United States fail to do what these other nations did? While those East Asian countries’ case numbers stopped climbing and leveled out, the U.S. increases are still soaring.
This week, a Fox News anchor claimed that shutting down the U.S. economy — the “cure” — may be worse than the “disease.” On Tuesday, Trump quickly — and seemingly unilaterally — made the Fox News anchor’s phrase his new policy slogan. He repeatedly said we can’t let the cure be worse than the disease, insisting that he’d like to end the economic shutdown on Easter.
Endanger the elderly to revitalize the economy? It seemed like Trump’s loyal congressional Republicans would develop political laryngitis and stay silent, yet again. But finally a loyal Trump-supporting Republican had the guts to just say no! Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., a staunch conservative (and yes, Dick’s daughter), tweeted a warning that was simply commonsense sanity:
“There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus.”
This time Trump had no place to duck, no way to cover. So on Thursday he began undecorating his Easter eggs, painfully clarifying that he really didn’t say what he said. Our video recorders all repeatedly misheard.
Whatever.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at martin.schram@gmail.com.
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