A viral plea to let grandparents sacrifice themselves captures a truth about Trump
[T]he virus is the underlying cause of the threat to the economy. Indeed, it’s worse than this: As Will Wilkinson argues, the current Trump/Patrick line is that we should risk millions more dying, even though we’d only be guessing that relaxing social distancing would help the economy, when in fact the mounting deaths would take their own economic toll.
We don’t have to choose between unbearably high mass death totals and an economic collapse that dooms the American experiment. The government can send people money in sufficient sums and fortify the welfare state to save them from personal economic calamity, while bailing out small and large businesses with tight conditions that sagely protect taxpayers and working people.
The federal government could have done this while also offering a robust response to the crisis from the outset that itself would have minimized deaths. But Trump didn’t do this, because he feared taking the novel coronavirus seriously would rattle the markets and imperil his reelection.
What Trump is really proposing here — and what Patrick is justifying — is a further washing-of-hands of responsibility for this whole affair. Trump would not put it quite this way. But this, at bottom, is what he’s asking us to accept. And we don’t have to.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/24/viral-on-air-plea-captures-an-essential-truth-about-trump/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
= new reply since forum marked as read
