The Republicans Take America on a Death March

https://newrepublic.com/article/158394/desantis-florida-trump-devos-schools-coronavirus-death-march

Adam Weinstein/July 8, 2020
The Republicans Take America on a Death March
Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Betsy DeVos are willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives for nothing more than political points.


Late last month, Carsyn Leigh Davis turned 17 in an intensive care unit bed in Naples, Florida. Two days later, at 1:06 p.m. on June 23, she died at a children’s hospital across the state, in Miami, where she’d been transferred for last-ditch “heroic efforts” at saving her life. She was the latest of 3,281 deaths in the state from Covid-19 at the time; as I write this, less than two weeks later, the toll is now 3,841.

snip//

Keeping churches open—as well as beaches, restaurants, and dividend-yielding commerce—has been a big priority for Ron DeSantis, who, as Florida’s fourth consecutive Republican governor, serves two key constituencies: rich people in general, and one aged West Palm Beach snowbird heir in particular. In that spirit, DeSantis has resisted calls from medical experts and Florida residents to return to quarantine measures or shutdowns of nonessential businesses.

Like most of his fellow Republicans, DeSantis has spent the last few months in search of a communications strategy that might make people stop asking him things. There was the libertarian-dreamer gambit: “If everyone is, you know, enjoying life, but doing it responsibly, you know, we’re going to be fine,” he stammered in a July 2 press conference with Vice President Mike Pence. (People just need to exercise some lifesaving restraint, said the man who could actually mandate lifesaving restraint.) There’s been the denialist refrain: Theme parks are “safe” to open, he’s insisted over the protests of workers at those parks and in spite of rampant infections among Major League Soccer athletes at a Disney park. Then there was the fatalist who’d noted four days earlier that the median age of coronavirus carriers had plummeted to 40. “You can’t control … younger people,” he said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

But on Monday, Florida’s Republican leadership pivoted into coronavirus-era big government by, well, controlling kids. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran—handpicked for the job by DeSantis after serving as the Republican speaker of the statehouse—ordered “All school boards and charter school governing boards” to “open brick and mortar schools in August at least five days per week for all students.” The order was written to give local districts the power to shut schools if public health demanded it, but the Politburo is making clear it doesn’t want any rogue commissars: “Logically, I don’t think they could say schools aren’t safe if they are allowing people to be out in public,” a Florida education department spokeswoman said.

snip//


DeSantis and many Republicans continue to give lip service to “protecting the most vulnerable,” but they know some young people do die; some get sick and stay sick, possibly for life; and some spread the disease to older people, who will die or be maimed. They don’t give a shit. “I think we overreacted,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said last week. “We closed too much of our economy down.” One White House official told reporters last week that Trump would have a new, election-optimized P.R. strategy for dealing with the Covid-19 threat: “The virus is with us, but we need to live with it.” This is the message of the Dear Leader who told us in March that “the problem goes away in April.”

As I write this, the virus has killed 44 times more Americans than died on 9/11. Eventually, many of our political leaders will be seen for what they are in this: witting accomplices to homicide on a scale that Republicans might call genocide, if they watched it unfold in another country. Who says exceptionalism is dead?