With the 2020 election now history, the political pundit class is already treating the two months leading up to Jan. 20 as if they don’t really exist. Donald Trump’s “I wuz robbed” shtick has already worn thin in just the span of a week, and the dark, apocalyptic projections of a coup instituted in some fashion by electoral shenanigans have already been doused with cold water. What we are seeing now is mostly handwringing over the Democrats’ failure (thus far) to recapture the Senate and the haircut to its House majority. We are hearing preemptive howls of despair as the prospect of a perpetually divided government for another two or four years looms.
But the reality is that come Jan. 20 when Joe Biden is inaugurated as the nation’s 46th president, the country will most likely be in the same position it is right now, minus Donald Trump in charge, replaced by a competent executive. And however much malicious disruption he decides to inflict from wherever he plans to spend the coming four years (he may want to avoid New York City), Republicans will suddenly be without a leader capable of actually implementing policy. Even should they retain their Senate majority, they won’t be able to hide from the American public behind the persona of Donald Trump. Which brings us back to the interregnum that has been easy to ignore over the last week as Trump’s perpetual clown show rudely dominated our thoroughly frazzled nerves.
In the hyper-driven social media world we’ve allowed ourselves to become, those two months are going to be an eternity. The deadliest pandemic in over a century with people cooped up indoors as COVID-19 infections spike far beyond anything this country has ever experienced. Bars and restaurants that had spent the summer and early fall making the most out of “outside dining” are now forced to shut their doors; hospitals in state after state are hauling out stacks of bodies by the refrigerated truckload. Americans are about to find themselves a captive audience to the horrific consequences of Republican intransigence and neglect over the past year.
As reported by The New York Times, the next two months are going to be, objectively speaking, horrendous.
The nation is entering its third, and potentially most dreadful, coronavirus surge. Earlier this month, the daily nationwide case count reached 100,000 for the first time. On Thursday it passed the 160,000 mark. Hospitalizations are at their highest point yet. Unlike previous surges, there is no epicenter. The virus is spreading everywhere.
Even communities that ought to know better are responding with a mix of apathy and magical thinking. In New York City, officials are preparing to once again close schools, while they leave bars and restaurants open for indoor service (albeit at reduced capacity). In Texas, the governor has dithered about closing or restricting businesses, even as case counts pass the one million mark.
The biggest mistake Democrats could make right now would be to treat these next two months as some sort of political vacuum. That’s what Republicans will try to do. They’ll make some token appearances in the congressional halls between their absurdly long holidays, they’ll whine here and there about stimulus negotiations and the deficit and do exactly nothing, confident that under the state of suspended animation currently presided over by Sen. Mitch McConnell, “nothing really matters, any way the wind blows” for the next two months.
But the death toll from COVID-19 this winter alone is on track to exceed the numbers occurring over the entire previous year. As a result, many Republican voters in the proverbial Heartland—places like Iowa, Missouri, North and South Dakota, and Indiana—who for the last year clung to the luxury of pretending that the pandemic was really only impacting cityfolk and people of color, will have experienced the unpleasantness of spending the holiday season watching their loved ones lying in makeshift ICU beds that resemble something out of old M.A.S.H. episodes.
The next two months are going to leave profound emotional and economic scars all over this country as the virus cuts like a scythe through the illusions these people have spun for themselves. As observed by Eric Levitz writing for New York Magazine, neither the Trump administration nor the Republican Senate under McConnell have done anything to prepare the country for the wholly unprecedented experience of what is coming.
[W]inter is also shattering the fragile accommodations that many small businesses have made to the pandemic. Summer offered restaurants and bars relatively comfortable and safe conditions for serving their customers (when the rain was at bay). And by keeping case growth within certain regional and epidemiological bounds, the warmer months also enabled businesses in many fortunate areas — those with high levels of public-health skepticism and low levels of infection — to operate at something approximating normal capacity.
North Dakota’s Republican governor, for example, already sees what’s bearing down upon his state. Same with the Republican governor of Utah. And the longer South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, who apparently fancies herself the next Sarah Palin, dithers in mandating some type of mask-wearing restrictions, the harder it is going to be to deny the reality of overflowing hospitals and business closures, even as citizens in those states and others like them come face to face with this winter’s pitiless reality.
McConnell and his cohorts in the Republican Senate have, up to this point, prided themselves on their ability to say “no” to any effort by congressional Democrats to provide relief to the American people during this crisis. The election results have done nothing to dissuade this strategy, so it’s doubtful they’ll change their tune. As the economic and human calamity begin to unfold this winter, then, this is going to be the most opportune time imaginable for Democrats to permanently sear the image of the Republican Party’s collective disregard into the minds of all Americans. The GOP managed, in this election, to escape the consequences of abandoning the American public. They must be forced to own what occurs in the final days of Trump, as a direct result of that decision.
What Bard College professor Joseph O’Neill wrote in this outstanding (if a tad too hopeful) essay this past August for the New York Review of Books still holds true now.
Americans—whether they’re swing voters or party activists—must go to the polls in 2022 and 2024 with a strong (and valid) fear of letting the GOP back into power. Thus, always be negatively branding the GOP in the eyes of swing, or persuadable, voters. Exactly what approach to take in a branding operation is a complex question, but suffice it to say that it must be undertaken, and that the master narrative is: The Republican Party can no longer be trusted with power. Repeat this at every opportunity, then verify this narrative by investigating and bringing to light all Republican misdeeds. Brand them as Republican Party misdeeds, not as aberrant Trumpist corruption.
Call the disastrous Republican economy that Biden will inherit “the disastrous Republican economy.” Call the Republican pandemic crisis “the Republican pandemic crisis.” Always be trumpeting the success of your initiatives, always be talking about the danger of letting Republicans back into power...[.]
All of the magical thinking that led over 71 million Americans to stick with Donald Trump on Nov. 3 is going to collide head-on with the most virulent phase of this pandemic in a few short weeks—if not days. All of the “election fraud” nonsense, already evaporating, is going to meet grandma and grandpa and the shortages of hospital beds, medical personnel, and equipment. That Pfizer vaccine, even if it comes, won’t be widely distributed for six months at the earliest, because the infrastructure for its distribution and storage
simply does not exist, particularly in rural areas.
Donald Trump officially abandoned any pretense of fighting this pandemic on the day after the election. Most observers believe that after he departs to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays, he will not return to Washington, D.C. at all, literally leaving Americans in the cold. Trump is treating the country he’s failed the same way he has treated the businesses that he drove into the ground: walking away from them. Over the next two months the same Republican Party that tied itself to Trump throughout the 2020 campaign should own the consequences of that abandonment.