Health Care/Joan Retsinas

The Dirtiest Trickster of them All

Forget Watergate: stealing office files is amateurish. Forget the Willie Horton ads against Mike Dukakis. Forget the Russian cybermeddling in the last election. Savvy computer nerds can unmask the hacking.

This time you, the Trickster-in-Chief, seized on the ultimately incredibly most malicious strategy of all: kill, or at least sicken, your opposition. Do this openly — no stealth required, no illegal shenanigans, no ad hominem attacks (though these are your forté).

Instead, seize upon COVID as a gift from the virus-gods.

The confusing mishmash of directives, the “this will vanish by Easter” predictions, the scorning of masks as a political statement, the refusal to ramp up testing, the urge to re-open stadiums, churches, rallies, the suggestion to drink Clorox, the lies upon lies about the virus — all have left us with 170,000 dead, and 5,400,000 identified cases. Our pace is now 1,000 deaths a day. Blame China; blame the Democrats; or, better yet — blame Fate (“it is what it is”). European countries have tamped down the virus, heeding the message of Dr. Fauci: masks, social distancing, hygiene. But disparage Dr. Fauci. Let the virus surge.

The results? An uptake in your election chances.

The people who disproportionately suffer are minorities and poor people — the people who work in nursing homes, supermarkets, retail establishments. Add to them the residents of prisons, nursing homes, any institution. Throw in the medical staff working in hospitals and as first responders. They wouldn’t be voting for you anyway. Kill them and — presto — you have cut down your opposition.

Sickening them can work as effectively. Some people will recover quickly; others will suffer for months. Will they vote? Not if they are home waiting to feel healthy enough to take a walk. And nobody in a hospital, suffering from COVID, will plead for an absentee ballot to vote for you. They will probably be too sick to plead for a ballot to vote for your opponent. Count this as a win.

As for the people in quarantine, they can’t vote if can’t leave their homes. They too wouldn’t vote for you. A week in quarantine will dampen the enthusiasm even of “forever Trumpers.”

Parents stuck home with children who are supposed to be staring at computer screens, but are running amok, might want to vote against you. You blithely urged schools to open in the face of the scary statistics. But the scary data prevailed: most schools will not open their doors. Families’ lives have been upended. Some families face not just loss of income, but eviction. Can those families muster the energy to vote against you?

Finally, the virus has made voting in person a game of roulette. Do I risk entering a crowded polling place? How long will I wait in line, with people who might be asymptomatic carriers? That assumes that cities can muster enough hardy souls to staff polling places, that cities can find places to set up polls. (Nursing homes and senior centers don’t want an influx of outsiders).

As a fillip to your election, make votes-by-mail a challenge. Fight efforts to extend mail ballots. (Colorado, Oregon.Washington, Hawaii, and Utah have done this for years with no evidence of fraud.) Cut back the postal service, lengthening the time for processing. Maybe a slew of votes won’t make it to the count. At the same time, you will be slowing the delivery of prescription medicines - another tactic to sicken more people.

Your voters will be generally healthy, generally white, generally affluent, like the members of your golf club (initiation dues: roughly $300,000) who, unmasked, attended your press conference where you boasted of your efforts to give unemployed Americans a weekly $300 for a limited time. The golfers-for-Trump care about the Dow, not their mortgages, their food budgets, the public schools, or the country’s fraying social net.

Yo Donald Trump: You made a deal with the Grim Reaper. What a strategy!

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2020

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