Get Bloomberg's Ad Team Ready

What's so incredible about the modern GOP, the party of Trump, is how adept they are doing the worst thing at the worst moment.  Let's start with Trumpist congressman Matt Gaetz. He mocked the seriousness of Covid-19 by wearing a gas mask to the floor vote for emergency spending (even as he voted for the funding). A constituent of his has died.  More will. Nice look from one of the biggest assholes in the House.

And then, of course, Trump himself. His press appearances have been so bizarre and off-putting that public health officials are no doubt driven to drink by his utterances.  Every time Trump - or Larry Kudlow - makes a statement that the virus is contained, they are writing the inevitable attack ads that will be aired against them. You have them actively undermining health officials in order to keep the economy perky. Meanwhile, there was a Tweet from the American Hospital Association that suggested this could be the impact over the next two months in the US:

96,000,000 infections 4,800,000 hospitalizations 1,900,000 ICU admissions 480,000 deaths vs flu in 2019: 35,500,000 infections 490,600 hospitalizations 49,000 ICU admissions 34,200 deaths

Those are startling numbers. The absolute deaths is roughly similar to the 1919 flu pandemic (although from a larger population with better overall health care). If that's true, the odds of you losing a loved one or a friend from this illness are high.  To have Trump blithely making his usual idiotic statements in front of cameras...(At this point, if Biden doesn't get Covid-19 himself, he will win in a walk. Same goes for Bernie.  It's odd that the race for president will come down to three men in their 70s in the middle of a pandemic that is especially hard on men in their 70s.)

Italy basically quarantined a population the size of greater NYC. That's simply impossible here.

Here's some basic political science.  A government's ability to act is largely controlled by two factors: capacity and autonomy.  Capacity is simply the technical and economic ability to act.  The US has typically been a pretty "high capacity" country. The US government can exert force across the globe, keep law and order, promote economic growth...it is able to act.  Trump, however, has bled a great deal of this capacity away from stripping the government of experts.  We are seeing this daily. Autonomy is the freedom to act. Democratic governments have pretty low autonomy, because the government is usually bound by law and the will of the populace.  Trump has shown no respect for the rule of law or popular opinion, but he does represent the Fox News POV that all government action is bad, except that which makes him personally rich.  The US government can't quarantine Washington State or any other Covid-19 hot spot, because our system of government won't allow it and our government is currently being run by anti-science morons.

By the time we get our act together, it will be too late, and those numbers above will be the reality.