Trump’s lack of coronavirus action will only cause more authoritarianism

More than a month later, we know just how right that meme was. Trump fiddled while the coronavirus blaze spread. Now, no one, not even Trump, can stop what’s coming.

With his early actions (or lack thereof), Trump has all but guaranteed there is more authoritarianism in our future. That should leave a bitterly ironic taste in the mouths of people who voted for Trump hoping he’d limit government long term.

For as long as most of us shall live, each president, governor, and mayor will be measured by how quickly he or she shuts things down during a public health crisis.

No politician, whatever their ideology or party, will want to be compared to what the Trump administration could have done but didn’t in the month or two before widespread quarantines began in mid-March. Imagine sinister reports from public health officials in Kinshasa or Seoul or even Topeka, and you can already hear the echoes of talking heads of the future asking whether President-for-Life Kanye West will “pull a Trump” and delay when the situation calls for action. Politicians at every level of government will trip over one another in the bum’s rush to slam the city’s gates. We will certainly see that Trump fiddling meme again.

Trump might even have brought us closer to the conservative nightmare that is a national health program. Millions of people who have lost their jobs have also lost their employer-provided health insurance, and, given how little impressed viruses seem to be with personal net worth, even some conservatives now understand that social democracy is a form of social insurance.

While Joe Biden has promised to veto “Medicare for all,” he’s moved left on many issues, and there is an increasingly radicalized Jacobin class to his immediate Left who see his “back to normal” pitch as sinister bollocks. Anyone who thinks that bringing Biden to the White House will mean they’ll get some peace and quiet from national politics is in for a rude awakening.

Meanwhile, Trump’s failures have given aid and comfort to an army of sniveling public “leaders.” The only people in Washington who must be grateful for Trump’s “efforts” are Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Robert Morin, both of whom have done nearly all they could to make sure the poorest, brownest, and weakest among us are thrown into the bonfire.

Bowser kept the restaurants and schools open long after the danger of the coronavirus was apparent and certainly wasn’t spending any of that time bringing the city’s unemployment system up to date. The waiters, busboys, and dishwashers who stayed at their posts so that Bowser’s pals in the Restaurant Association could “earn” a few more bucks now find out just how good liberal Democrats can be at class war.

Morin, a former public defender, ignored increasingly desperate pleas from his old colleagues to close the jails and the courtrooms to everything but the most violent offenses. Now, people arrested for petty offenses, inmates who have already paid their debts and are “transitioning” through halfway houses, and the jailers who guard them are falling ill and dying horribly. D.C. Courts apologists have long argued that having judges appointed rather than elected means jurists won’t be swayed by the mob. His honor can proudly brandish the cowardice of his own convictions: He has blood on his hands.

Regardless of what happens in the future, I hope you and your family stay safe in the situation the nation finds itself in.

Bill Myers lives and works in Washington, D.C. Email him at [email protected]. He tweets from @billcaphill.