On the same week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) circulated a document warning that fully reopening schools and universities continues to pose the "highest risk" for spreading the coronavirus, Donald Trump demanded that schools reopen.
The 69-page document from the CDC, dated July 8 and obtained by The New York Times, was meant for public health teams in hot spots across the country. Though the Times did not verify that Trump had seen the document as it was circulated, both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence explicitly and publicly pushed the CDC to weaken its guidelines and are continuing to advocate for full school reopenings this fall.
"We don’t want the guidance from CDC to be a reason why schools don’t open," Pence said last week, as he promised the CDC would be putting forward new guidelines this week. The CDC declined to change its guidance a day after Pence's declaration, though additional guidance may still be forthcoming.
Trump, asked Monday what he would tell parents who are worried about the health of their children, responded bluntly, “Well, schools should be opened. Schools should be opened. Kids want to go to school. You're losing a lot of lives by keeping things closed.” Exactly which lives have been lost by closing “things” remains unclear.
The yawning chasm between the White House position and the warning laid out by the CDC is emblematic of a completely dysfunctional administration at best and criminal negligence at worst. At the very least, since the document became public neither Trump nor Pence nor Education Sec. Betsy DeVos has pulled back on their push to fully reopen schools this fall.
Former Obama Education Sec. Arne Duncan told MSNBC on Monday that Trump had no real authority on the matter because presidents don't fund schools. But Duncan skewered Trump's entire sociopathic push as reckless and divorced from reality.
"The real travesty here is that there is no body count high enough for the president to actually pay attention to science," Duncan said. "We could lose another 10,000, another 50,000, another 100,000, nothing would compel him to listen to Dr. Fauci and others who are actually fighting to try to save lives."
Duncan's observation is buttressed by The Washington Post reporting over the weekend that Fauci has been sidelined by the White House because Trump is "galled" by the fact that some two-thirds of Americans trust Fauci to relay accurate information on the coronavirus. Worse yet, NBC News reported that the White House was systematically working to undermine Fauci's credibility.
But on schools, Duncan said that if the administration had made reopening schools a top priority in any real way, Trump officials would have laid the groundwork with adequate testing and tracing and discouraged any states from reopening until their case counts were declining.
"The best thing we can do, is to reduce the number of cases in our community," Duncan emphasized, noting that schools don't exist in a bubble. The spike in new infections, he added, "makes it next to impossible" to go back to school.
At the outset of the pandemic reaching the U.S., Duncan said he had hoped the country could get the tools in place to start slowly reopening some education services by this summer. But the administration utterly failed to put the proper tools in place and now even fall reopenings may be too unsafe.
Here’s Trump reiterating that schools must reopen no matter what the harm to American children.