When Donald Trump wanted a border wall and Congress wouldn’t give him one, it was a national emergency. Even though, as he himself said, “I didn’t need to do this.” Now that we face a global pandemic that’s spreading rapidly, except we don’t know how rapidly because the Trump administration hasn’t allowed widespread testing? Not an emergency. Yet. We’re waiting for Jared Kushner to decide it is, apparently.
Why isn’t Trump willing to declare a national emergency for pandemic when he was eager to declare one for a wall? “The president isn’t persuaded because [an emergency declaration] contradicts his message that this is the flu,” a “Republican who speaks to Trump” told Politico. The lie takes precedence over having an adequate response to the truth, in other words.
According to a former Department of Homeland Security official, the administration is “not comfortable with the optics of national emergency” because “That’s a big deal to Wall Street, a big deal worldwide” and “It would instill fear in the general public.”
Uh, guys? The fear ship has sailed. As has the Wall Street ship. We’ve reached the point where only the most die-hard Trumpists are following Trump’s instructions to clap louder, and Trump’s refusal to acknowledge and try to deal with the scope of the problem is making the public (and Wall Street) response more fearful.
Take this also as yet another acknowledgement that Trump’s 2019 border wall “national emergency” was a total sham. Where was the concern then about instilling fear in the general public? No, the concern then was about using a national emergency to tell people that they should be afraid—of immigrants—and there was no concern then that anyone would respond with real fear to the supposed emergency. The “emergency” then was fake, so the declaration of an official emergency could be used as a partisan messaging tool. Now that there’s a real emergency and real fear, Trump is suddenly afraid of how it would look to declare an emergency, even though not doing so deprives the government of tools to combat the real, existing emergency.
Instead, Trump is expected to sign a more limited designation that will try to accomplish part of what a national emergency would, without the scary name or the full powers.