America’s Poor Health Is an Invitation to Tyranny
President Donald Trump’s chief of staff stated plainly on Sunday that the administration does not intend to stop the spread of the coronavirus. “We are not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper. This approach is consistent with the president's own experience: He did not observe standard public-health measures, he caught the virus, and he received excellent care free of charge. The rest of the country has suffered, and will suffer, in an entirely different way.
In normal democracies, health care is not the preserve of an elite, and citizens count on both the prevention and the treatment of disease. Universal health care serves as the moral bridge between citizens and their governments. In this sense, the United States is not a normal democracy. Untreated illness and uncertain care fill our politics with unnecessary fear and rage. Our president pushes this logic by offering insecurity instead of security as the aim of politics. Meadows only clarified what has been true all along: Trump’s form of politics works with a plague, not against it. Among the president’s notable responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been the from tens of millions of Americans. This is not inefficiency or neglect. It is a pattern evident all across the Trump administration: Governing is not about problems to be solved, but emergencies to be magnified.
