Thursday evening, President Trump announced his administration’s guidelines for reopening the economy. Flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and other members of the coronavirus task force, Trump explained his administration’s three-phased plan for the country to return to work. The plan is comprehensive, science-based, and reasonable. It demonstrates the president’s focus on protecting the health and safety of our citizens and ensuring that the coronavirus doesn’t rebound when the economy reopens. The plan, and the country, will succeed unless we let politicians and the press pit us against each other.
The politicization of the crisis, coupled with the liberal media’s unwavering desire to pin any deaths from the coronavirus on Trump, provides the blueprint for failure. Over the last several weeks, two vocal camps have staked out incompatible views on the government’s response. The one extreme declares the government did too little, too late, causing countless deaths. This view maintains that the economy must remain closed for the foreseeable future — economic harm be damned. The contrary position holds that the pandemic models were wrong, the government overreacted in shutting down the country, and the economy cannot be held hostage for a small at-risk population threatened by the coronavirus.
Of course, reality is somewhere in the nuanced middle ground, but it is the extremes that make the narratives.
These positions only hardened as conflicts arose between the dueling contingencies. Some, believing the government overreacted, blatantly ignored the stay-at-home orders, throwing parties and other large gatherings. At the same time, some state and local politicians and law enforcement agencies overreached: Police in Colorado arrested a dad for playing ball with his daughter in a park, a Mississippi city handed out $500 fines for Easter worshipers at a drive-in service (thankfully, the city reversed course), and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order permitting lottery ticket sales but banning retail stores from selling gardening seeds or paint.
Americans are reasonable — so long as the government is reasonable. After that, all bets are off. That’s where we were when Trump, seemingly sensing our country was at a breaking point, announced his plans to reopen our country.
Now is the time for us to abandon this fight and come together. The dichotomy must be set aside. Maybe, just maybe, the truth lies in the middle, and a temporary shutdown was needed to design and distribute millions of tests, to prepare doctors and hospitals, to research therapies, and to establish a tracking system robust enough to provide a tool to prevent COVID-19 from gaining a stranglehold on our country. Without the shutdown, the New York City and New Orleans scenarios could have been replicated nationwide, risking our national defense, public safety, food sources, and medical infrastructure.
Yes, death is an inevitability of life, but would our country have tolerated people dying because of a lack of medical supplies or hospital beds?
We must also ignore attempts to pour blood on Trump’s hands. That will be a difficult task because death is devastating. For years, politicians and the press have hawked the line “if it saves just one life” to sell any favored law, leaving the public susceptible to this tack.
We saw the start of this approach already on Thursday, when a reporter asked the president if “the government modeled the possibility of how many deaths might occur,” using the three-phased reopening plan. “How many deaths are we talking about?”
Trump wisely neither answered the gotcha question nor slammed the reporter for asking it.
Unfortunately, there will be deaths either way. But there will be far fewer deaths if we embrace the three-phase plan and ignore attempts to politicize the pandemic.
Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and current adjunct professor for the college of business at the University of Notre Dame.
