Trump Reopening Plan Provides Cover for Extremist Agitation
The president and his allies are hoping to foment a right wing rebellion to distract from the administration’s failures with the coronavirus epidemic.
Fact checkers at the Truth or Fiction website have been busily documenting a wave of recently established Facebook groups with at least twenty “gridlock”-related events scheduled in more than a dozen states.
The only California event I’ve seen thus far was slated for Sacramento on April 20 on a now-deleted (presumably by Facebook) event page organized by a vaxxer group calling itself The Freedom Angels.
Like a zombie contagion, these attention-seekers and ideologues will undoubtedly start popping up locally. The same people who brought us the Proud Boys and anti-immigrant protests in Murietta will undoubtedly show up to protest the largely laudable efforts of the County Supervisors.
President Donald Trump, building on fringe conspiracy theories and misinformation spread by his allies in the media, is now calling for the “liberation” of specific states, including Virginia, Minnesota, and Michigan.
It’s no small coincidence that those states all have Democratic governors and are key parts of any strategy to win the electoral college come November.
The White House rolled out “Opening Up America Again” on Thursday, a slogan no doubt created by his Committee to Reopen America to mirror his Make America Great Again election slogan.
Just days after asserting he had ultimate authority over decisions to relax coronavirus restrictions, President Trump has pivoted to “let the states decide.”
Given the administration’s utter failure at just about everything related to the pandemic, this might have seemed like a good idea, notwithstanding the CoronaVirus inability to recognize political boundaries.
Today we’re learning the punt back to the states is part of a larger scheme, one where the Trump campaign attempts to ramp up the rabble to create the impression that the state governments are responsible for economic damage.
Call it Tea Party redux if you’d like, but the ranks of the mobilizing disaffected also include assorted “Medical Freedom” groups, who’ve latched on to the coronavirus crisis in the wake of their failures to persuade state legislators to encourage measles epidemics among school children.
As Mark Sumner at Daily Kos noted:
Going forward, Trump can always talk about how “my plan calls for...” (insert something great here) while those pitiful governors are just not getting it done. So vote out those governors and replace them with someone who will deliver Trump’s plan!
It’s a fail-safe strategy, provided the news media acts as a stenographer, because should cases of the coronavirus surge, the White House can dodge the consequences.
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Yesterday the popular social media platform announced it would begin informing millions of Facebook users about online posts they have seen containing misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.
The conspiracy-mongering website Infowars is also promoting an event aimed at local authorities in Austin Texas who they say have instituted authoritarian lockdown orders. Additional rumors about protests are circulating on Twitter using the hashtag #MayDayMutiny.
It’s reasonable to expect Trump will hold his very own “Mission Accomplished” moment on May 1st, and the rabble will be on tap to create negative publicity for any official not willing to play along.
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America will not undo the changes wrought by the COVID-19 virus. Like it or not, the economic, social, and political environments will never be the same. That’s okay, it’s an opportunity to do better as a nation.
But we cannot start down any road to a new or old normalcy until massive testing occurs. And, two months into this crisis, the country still lacks the ability to track who is infected and/or who has been infected (and maybe developed immunity).
Lacking a national public health system, the chaos over screening can be attributed to the patchwork of health systems and the inability of the federal government to mobilize and organize a response.
A big part of the reason why the President’s March 6th boast “anyone who wants a test can get a test” hasn’t materialized is simply the lack of experienced managers, as opposed to the loyal hacks busy looting the national treasury.
There also is no single administration official working on testing. The government has been unwilling to compel test manufacturers to dramatically increase the number of tests produced by invoking the Defense Production Act.
States are also still struggling with acute supply shortages for tests, including swabs and reagents, that Washington has not addressed.
From the Washington Post:
On the conference call Thursday with governors, Trump played down the significance of testing.
“Testing is very interesting,” Trump said, according to the audio recording obtained by The Post. “There are some states where I think you can do with a lot less testing than other people are suggesting.” He told the governors that they have “a lot of leeway” in determining how many tests they conduct.
Trump has heralded a new rapid-response test from Abbott Laboratories that can deliver results in as few as five minutes, and has taken pride in his administration’s role helping distribute the machines nationwide. But when Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) said they got the “great Abbott machines” two weeks ago but still don’t have testing kits required to use them, Trump replied that the states are “going to lead the testing.”
https://twitter.com/matthaig1/status/1250781371087441920?s=20
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