Donald Trump is claiming that the United States can have it both ways on coronavirus. Literally. During his Fox News virtual town hall Sunday, Trump said “I think you can satisfy both” people who are afraid to go back to work and people who are raging against closures. “I think you can really have it both ways,” Trump continued. See, all that has to happen is that people who don’t want to go out, don’t, and … well, Trump didn’t really explain how that would work in practice.
But as long as Trump is insisting the U.S. can have it both ways, making armed protesters happy without jeopardizing the public health they were protesting against, it’s going to be a state-by- state issue and one too often influenced by fear of those armed protesters. It also means that even as states like New York and California strive to get the pandemic under control, coronavirus rates are spiking in states that never did the right thing to begin with—in Texas, numbers literally spiked as Gov. Greg Abbott announced the state would be reopening.
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Reopening remains viciously contested, even as a majority of people support closures and restrictions. The voices in favor of reopening—often led or supported by Trump—sure are loud, though, and it’s true that armed protesters storming statehouses will tend to make an impression on lawmakers. But a key problem—for Trump, anyway—with Trump’s blame-the-governors strategy is that Trump polls behind every single governor on his handling of the virus.
“Some of the most over-the-top claims we’ve seen about the relationship between federal power and state power are happening at the same time that the federal government is shockingly inactive in areas it could and should be,” Robert Chesney, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Washington Post. Translation: Trump’s all talk. Lots of talk, but when it comes to action, as Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, put it, “In the biggest crisis of our lifetimes, governors were on the front lines and taking charge. States had to make decisions and use their powers in a way I don’t ever remember in my lifetime.”
Hey, don’t worry, though. Because Donald Trump says we can have it both ways.