Thread by @Zathras3

Let's do a short thread about surrender, per this commentary by @DrLeanaWen. It's only the government that gets the option to surrender, of course, in a fight against #COVID19. The country has to live with it; people infected have to live with it. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

Be that as it may, the Trump administration and the Republican Party have indeed chosen to surrender to the pandemic on behalf of the government. They will let public health experts keep their jobs, but will not let them drive a national strategy to suppress the virus.

Republicans will fill the airwaves with talk of vaccines and therapeutics, to the development of which they contribute nothing. They will remain inactive as the pandemic-stricken economy continues to contract, confronting millions of Americans with the prospect of destitution.

Commentators are jumping up and down on White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for making surrender to #COVID19 explicit on a talk show yesterday. In truth, though, the white flag went up months ago -- and in the Republican Senate as well as the Executive Branch.

State governments struggling to implement public health policies; universities & schools seeking to make adjustments needed to reopen safely this fall; small businesses & individuals needing assistance because the federal government failed to suppress the virus last winter --

.....all these were offered the help they needed by the House last May, and stiffed by the Senate immediately thereafter. The Senate Republicans leadership thought its long annual summer vacation was a far more urgent priority than #COVID19 relief legislation.

Also more urgent: replacing Justice Ginsburg with a Federalist Society-vetted replacement. This was done within 38 days of Ginsburg's passing. The new Justice Barrett won't help people in states like, say, Kentucky with rent, protective equipment for health care workers,....

....or contact tracers to limit the spread of the virus. But Barrett is a signal personal victory for Sen. McConnell; what started the night Justice Scalia died as an act of flamboyant disrespect by one white Southern Republican toward a black Democratic President ended with....

....a supermajority of Republican-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court, able to use the law to protect the GOP's financial backers and promote its electoral interests. This was the battle McConnell cared about, as @AmyMcGrathKY has been trying to tell people.

People in Kentucky, laboring under the burden of the pandemic, will just have to accept that McConnell is a big shot who deserves his victories and they are only little people. It's a formula that has gotten him reelected in the past.

McConnell is hardly the only Republican who surrendered to #COVID19 because he cared more about his personal interests. Trump craves adulation at his disease-spreading rallies while he tries to figure out how to keep the election close enough for his allies to steal for him.

Pence labors with dogged resolve to please his master, as he has always done. Mark Meadows works more fitfully (per @jdawsey1 here) toward the same goal. God knows what Health Secretary Azar, now taking orders from a nitwit Hoover radiologist, is doing. washingtonpost.com/politics/meado…

The bottom line is that approximately a quarter million Americans have died as a result of a pandemic that is, at this moment, getting worse. Trump and his party are responsible for their deaths, and upheaval in Americans' daily lives, and for making of the United States --...

....until very recently the acknowledged global leader in the ongoing struggle to keep people safe from disease -- an object of other nations' pity. The government of no developed country, indeed of scarcely any country, has responded to #COVID19 less effectively than ours has.

The Republican Party, anxious above all things to keep its Leader in his personal happy place, chose not to adopt a platform at its convention last summer. The Republican platform is whatever Trump wants at any moment, and what he wants right now is surrender to #COVID19.

Trump figures his supporters are such marks, such chumps, that he can tell them the pandemic is about to go away and they will believe him. He has been right so far. The salient fact of American politics today is that a President can screw up worse than any of his predecessors,

....leaving leaving tens of thousands of dead Americans behind him, and still retain the loyalty of 40% of the voting public, give or take. 40% is not enough to win an election, not if everyone else votes and has their votes counted. But it's still pretty impressive.

The American Founders warned us of the appeal of demagogues seeking to replace loyalty to freedom and free institutions with personal loyalty to themselves. We are seeing their warnings embodied in the Trump Presidency and in the party following fecklessly behind it.

I didn't think I would see such a thing in my lifetime. I was wrong. I didn't think I'd see a vast national catastrophe met with distraction, shameless dishonesty, and literal surrender. I was wrong about that, too.

We won't get out of the hole Trump and his Republican party have dug for America in this election. In the absolute best case, all we'll be able to do is resolve as a nation that we want to stop digging deeper. [end]