The U.S. had 22,000 cases of coronavirus diagnosed as of Saturday and 32,000 as of Monday morning. But Donald Trump is ready to start talking about going back to business as usual. He is sick and tired of this threat to human life disrupting the all-important markets, you see—and what’s most frightening is that some Republican lawmakers are reportedly on the same page.
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!,” Trump tweeted Sunday night, following it up with a series of retweets of supporters enthusiastically agreeing. As a reminder, the “problem itself” is projected to kill up to 2.2 million people in the United States if we don’t slow the spread of coronavirus. And 15 days of social distancing is not going to do that enough.
If this was just Trump’s bluster, it would be bad. But it may be something much worse.
“[A]t the White House, in recent days, there has been a growing sentiment that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, and there has been a push to find ways to let people start returning to work,” The New York Times reports. “Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with the White House to find ways to restart the economy, as financial markets continue to slide and job losses for April could be in the millions.”
The economic damage is indeed a disaster for millions of people, and one that the federal government should move aggressively to blunt. But Republicans aren’t particularly serious about fixing that, either, focusing more on a bailout for big corporations than on helping workers. And millions of deaths, plus millions more hospitalizations, would bring major economic fallout, even if we could ignore the horror and national trauma involved.
Donald Trump and Republicans like Rep. Jody Hice may not be intentionally trying to get people killed, but that could be the outcome of their statements—even if the official policy doesn’t end up following that disastrous path.
