The protests did and will 100% happen regardless of what epidemiologists say. What I wish these analyses would grapple with more is the real risk people will get sick and die if there’s a crucial public health warning and vulnerable groups ignore it because of their actions now. https://t.co/SlPHxC1yxr— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) June 6, 2020
If there is a spike in coronavirus cases and/or deaths (God forbid!), it will be 100% Donald Trump's fault.
“How can a health expert look those people in the eye and say it was worth it now?” Diamond quotes right-wing writer Drew Holden, who launched a viral Twitter thread making similar arguments.
That’s an easy one: Health experts can say that the public largely cooperated with lockdown procedures and bought the federal government some time, which the Trump administration squandered through its usual combination of corruption, incompetence and outright hostility to public well-being. Republicans in Congress also failed us by refusing to pass robust relief packages to make sure that the country was able to both avoid economic ruin and save lives.
Here, let's lay it right at Trump's feet:
“You can’t be in lockdown for 18 months,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told Ezra Klein of Vox on May 13 — when George Floyd was still alive and no one on the left was considering public protests. “We’ll destroy society as we know it, and we don’t know what we’ll accomplish with it.” Does that sound like someone advocating an “all-or-nothing” approach?
On the contrary, as Osterholm told Klein, “What we need is a plan.” Not only did Donald Trump fail to provide any sort of plan, he repeatedly got in the way of letting other federal officials create one either.
Were the protests inevitable, even foreseeable? No, of course not. But returning to ordinary activities was, and Trump yesterday chided the reporters at his press conference Friday for sitting closer to each other, even though they had no choice: the White House had arranged the chairs to be close because it looked better. Trump is still threatening to take his speech and go home if he can't have a packed-to-the-rafters convention crowd in August. And despite the fact it's June, I think he still wants schools to reopen now.
Nobody saw these protests coming. But the anger in the streets is not just over George Floyd:
What liberals wanted was an temporary and necessary lockdown to buy time for the federal government to ramp up a testing regime and other health care capacity to deal with the virus.As I said: "It's the incompetency, stupid."
Trump refused to use the time to do any that, and so it’s no wonder the progressives — who are just as fed up with staying home as conservatives — are exploding in the streets right now. Of course the primary reason for the protests is police brutality, and the motivating incident was the police murder of George Floyd. But the anger fueling the movement has many causes, including three and a half years of the Trump presidency and rage at the federal government for failing us so miserably with the coronavirus response.
Aerial footage shows magnitude of Black Lives Matter protest in Philadelphia: Looks bigger than Trump’s inauguration. https://t.co/BJGTejf3cM— Khanoisseur 🐶🤦🏻♂️🌎 (@Khanoisseur) June 6, 2020
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