Democrats need to run on Covid, not run away from it.

Time to take on "Trump amnesia" for real.

So far, the Biden campaign’s strategy is not working. 

As we explored last week here in Both/And, most Americans are not (yet) as concerned about Donald Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies as are, I would suspect, most readers of this newsletter.  They are concerned about the economy, they are confused as to the actual economic situation, they are experiencing real and profound anxiety about the cost of everyday expenses like food and rent—and they think that Donald Trump will “handle” the economy better than Joe Biden.

The fact that, for most voters, the 2024 election is about the economy shows the power of what Democrats are calling “Trump amnesia.”  People have forgotten the chaos of Trump’s time in office, have minimized the events of January 6 (after all, things turned out alright), and are treating Trump like just another candidate. They’re not worried about encroaching authoritarianism. They remember that prices were lower.

The Biden camp has released its first TV ad to address this problem, but it doesn’t go far enough. Because the place the campaign needs to go is where it has so far refused to tread: Covid.

There are at least three reasons why Democrats need to run on Covid, rather than run away from it.  First, the pandemic connects the dots between Trump’s ineptitude and people’s actual lives.  Second, the narrative of the pandemic is rapidly being rewritten in a dangerous way, with Democrats and science as the villains. And third, the trauma of Covid is still with us and is still animating the politics of Trump supporters, RFK supporters, and ordinary Americans.

Ending the Covid-19 pandemic should be seen as Joe Biden’s greatest achievement.  But because Democrats are afraid of talking about it, it’s becoming one of his greatest silent liabilities.

1.        Trump’s Weakness and Shortsightedness Led to Unnecessary Death and Suffering

The liberal internet had a nice laugh two months ago, when Republican VP-wannabe Elise Stefanik resuscitated Ronald Reagan’s old question about whether you’re better off now or four years ago.  Four years prior, America was totally shut down, devastated by a pandemic for which we had neither adequate preparation nor competent leadership.

But Stefanik’s gaffe is part of a much deeper amnesia.  And we need to snap out of it.

Can you remember March, 2020?  I remember feeling that the pandemic might destroy our society, and that we had the worst possible “leader” to confront it.  Even in the worst days of the pandemic, when thousands of people were dying every day, Trump denied the severity of what was going on, failed to provide federal assistance in a timely and effective way, and completely abdicated the president’s role as both commander in chief and symbolic leader of this country. 

On February 10, Trump said that the coronavirus would simply “will go away in April.” Two weeks later, he said, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”  March 12: “It’s going to go away.”  April 2 (26,706 new cases per day): “It is going away.”  All in all, CNN tracked 38 times Trump made that groundless and false prediction between February and December, 2020.

These comments should be replayed until Americans know them by heart.  Because Trump wasn’t just “a little over-the-top” as his lukewarm defenders put it; he was absolutely dead wrong, in defiance of all the data being presented to him, and his actions cost thousands of American lives. It didn’t have to be this way.  It was the way it was because of Trump.

Nor was Trump simply taken by surprise.  Trump was warned about Covid-19 in January, 2020, including in a eerily prophetic memo by trade advisor Peter Navarro that predicted the loss of life and economic damage. But he did nothing for six weeks, other than limiting travel from China and trying to score political points. No gathering of supplies, no preparation of the healthcare system, no effort to ramp up testing. And so, brave doctors and nurses worked themselves to the bone with inadequate equipment and shortages of essential supplies. People died in respirators. Do you remember?

And all the while, Trump sowed the seeds of anti-scientific misinformation that are ubiquitous today (witness the widespread skepticism of sunscreen), Trump and his propagandists on Fox News promoted harmful, ineffective ‘treatments’ like hydroxychloroquine, which we now know actually increased the risk of death from Covid by 45%.  He refused to be photographed wearing a mask until July 12, and mocked mask-wearers numerous times. And yes, he mentioned injecting bleach into your body.

(Ironically, the one success Trump can claim is the rapid development of vaccines, part of the government’s Operation Warp Speed initiative. Yet anti-vaxx conspiracy theories have become so mainstreamed in the Republican Party, he has often equivocated about this accomplishment in his speeches.)

Moreover, Trump failed as a leader.  He provided no comfort, no guidance, no counsel to Americans.  As Paul Krugman put it, “part of what made [the pandemic] a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.”

One of Biden’s first actions as president was a memorial to the one million Americans lost to Covid-19 – finally, we had a chance to grieve, something not allowed in the Trump/Roy Cohn dogma of never showing “weakness.”  But it was Trump who was weak – just re-watch his press conferences from early 2020, when he seemed utterly deflated and defeated, the very opposite of the strong image he tries to present.  Americans need to be reminded of that. 

Midjourney AI continues to get things interestingly wrong.

2.        The Scientists Were Right and Republicans Were Wrong: Masks and Vaccines Worked

Right now, however, the opposite is happening. The story of Covid is now being retold in false and troubling ways.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, who liberals recognize as a hero who filled the gap in leadership left by Donald Trump, has been regularly vilified in right-wing media as a symbol of the deep state, the nanny state, the Big Pharma state, or whatever state conservatives and diagonalists seek to oppose. More broadly, resentments against masking and social distancing rules have been allowed to simmer, and Covid-era rules are regularly invoked as examples of ‘Big Government.’  

Lost in all this is that those regulations saved lives, despite Trump’s adolescent mockery.  A massive 2021 study published in Nature found that, among 198,077 participants, “individuals living in communities with the greatest social distancing had a 31% lower risk of predicted COVID-19 compared with those living in communities with poor social distancing. Self-reported ‘always’ use of face mask was associated with a 62% reduced risk of predicted COVID-19.” 

In other words, masking and social distancing saved lives.

Now, it is true that liberal cities did sometimes go too far. For example, closures of schools (including in my then-hometown of New York City) harmed children and were based in fear rather than science, especially given that European and other jurisdictions had already reopened schools (with masking and distancing) with no increase in viral transmission.  Liberals often turned Covid prevention into a kind of virtue signaling for individuals and institutions alike; amazingly, this is still true in some progressive circles today.

It is also true that public health officials, even including Dr. Fauci, sometimes were not fully transparent about what we knew and didn’t know about the origins of SARS-CoV2.  They blew it when they initially told people not to mask up (to save supplies) and then told them to mask up after all.

But both cases, origins and masks, exemplify the conundrum of public health communication.  People want clear answers, and science usually doesn’t provide them.  So communicators have to decide, over and over again, how much to simplify the data to make it comprehensible – in other words, how much to bend the truth. (The Conspirituality podcast just did a great episode in part about this conundrum, and how the world is now so complex that we barely know how anything works and have to relinquish our agency to experts.)

But these are the footnotes to the story, not the story itself.  The story is that the sacrifices we made in 2020 and 2021, despite Trump’s dithering, saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

The same is true for vaccines – and once again, Republicans are on the anti-science, anti-life side of the equation.  A 2023 peer-reviewed study of 538,159 people in Ohio and Florida found that the “excess death” rate of Republicans was 15% higher than that of Democrats in 2020-21, and an astounding 43% higher after May 1, 2021, when vaccines became available to all, a gap attributed to vaccine hesitancy and other Covid-risky behaviors among conservatives.  Numerous studies have found that, overall, death rates were higher in “red” counties than in “blue” ones.

To take one example, in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, which declared an end to its state of emergency in June 2021, around 200 people were dying each day in August, 2021, far above the national average, when the “Delta” wave hit unvaccinated populations hard, in part due to Florida’s refusal to institute any limits or mask rules for indoor gatherings or schools, and to low vaccination rates among nursing home residents.

If Democrats don’t talk about Covid, “Trump amnesia” will not go away.  We remember the hard parts of the pandemic: losing people we cared about, of course, but also the stifling restrictions of shutdowns and regulations.  But we also need to remember that science-based policies helped people, and Republican opposition harmed them. 

Republican science-denial cost tens of thousands of lives.  And to this day, leading MAGA figures are promoting stupid, wrong, pseudoscientific bullshit.  This issue should be a winner for Democrats – if they talk about it.

3.        The Resentment is Still With Us

Finally, none of this is in the past, because the science denial, the resentment, and, I think, the unprocessed grief is still with us today.

For the last several weeks in the newsletter, I’ve been obsessed with denial, and how it operates  psychologically and politically in America.  I experienced a bout of self-denial recently, when despite a health history of chronic Lyme, I somehow didn’t realize that I was suffering from an episode of it.  Only once I got better did I realize how sick I’d been. That got me thinking about climate denial, which is a phenomenon both of denial in the psychological sense and of industry-sponsored denialism, and even vaccine denial and other forms of science denial, which are rooted, again, in both personal and political factors.

I think we’re still in a period of Covid denial – not of the science, but of the impact.  For nearly two years, we experienced the most disruptive and terrible thing to happen to America in decades.  A million people died, the economy was wrecked, and the ways we work, play, and live were forever changed. 

And yet, now it’s like it’s gone.

On the Right, the anger still seethes.  Democrats, long the party of Big Government and the Nanny State, are now also the party of masking, social distancing, closing stores and schools, and other things people hate.  Would we have the RFK Jr phenomenon without Covid, vaccines, and the calumnies against Dr. Fauci?  I don’t think so – not to this extent.  Would we have the right-wing campaign to take over school boards – and, if they fail, to behave like barbarians at meetings – without the precedent set by angry white parents screaming about Covid rules?  Almost certainly not.

And would we be experiencing the most profound mental health crisis in recent American history, felt by rural Trumpists and elite college students alike, without the profound disruptions of 2020-21?  Again, not to this extent.  Covid robbed Gen-Z of some of their best years; it showed them the fragility of public institutions meant to protect them.  It is a part of the “polycrisis” that underlies much of the legitimate fear and dread younger people are feeling about our world. 

I know, it may also inspire dread simply to contemplate Covid again, which no doubt is why we’re so busy denying it and why the Biden campaign doesn’t want to bring it up.  But denial doesn’t erase the pain it conceals.  On the contrary, it often makes it stronger, and when it comes to Covid, that pain is still driving a lot of resentment, alienation, and rage all across the political spectrum.

Democrats, beginning with Biden, need to remind Americans of the pandemic, not pretend it never happened.  They need to remind people how Trump made the pandemic worse, and give Biden’s leadership some credit for putting it largely behind us.  Otherwise, they’re letting the people who made the pandemic worse rewrite the story for their own benefit.

At the end of the day, at least 1.1 million Americans died, millions more got sick, and all of us had our lives completely upended.  We can pretend that we’ve forgotten, but deep down, we haven’t.

---

I’ve been mulling over this piece for months now — not surprisingly, it ran a bit longer than usual, but I wanted to get it as right as possible. Thanks for your support of this project which enables me to devote so much time to it. I hope you’ll consider circulating it widely — I really think the Democrats are making a historic mistake by running away from this issue.

By the way, the perhaps-definitive article on the “polycrisis” linked to in the text was written last year by fellow Substacker

Adam Tooze

. I commend it to your attention.