Donald Trump is most singularly responsible for America’s more than 700,000 deaths from Covid-19
But Ron DeSantis is a close second.
America passed another gruesome milestone this month, as the 700,000th death from Covid-19 was officially recorded.
We can’t let this tragic moment slip by without noting who is most singularly responsible for leading America into the worst Covid-19 response in the world, both in terms of total deaths and case numbers, according John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
That man is obviously… Donald Trump.
From his initial trumpeting of Chinese government propaganda in order to justify his refusal to respond to a dawning global pandemic until his last day in office, the only thing that was more damaging than his utter incompetence was his insistence on politicizing every aspect of the war against this killer virus.
Every protest against masks, vaccines or any restrictions intended to slow this plague that will soon have killed more Americans than all of our wars combined bears the implicit approval and encouragement of Trump. Some will argue that he has made the case for the vaccine, only to back down when his crowd booed this endorsement.
This ignores how Trump made anti-vax the default position of his party. While he went on television to rip off his mask after extraordinary measures were taken to save him from the virus, he refused to even release a picture of him taking either dose of the vaccine.
Yes, he wants credit for supercharging the development of a vaccine that was developed despite him, but he’s refused to put the weight of his brand behind the one thing that could have prevented some of the worst of the horrid Delta variant surge that only now seems to be waning.
Which leads us the man seeking to succeed Trump both as the leader of the GOP and Covid-19’s new best friend — Ron DeSantis.
As millions of Americans were getting vaccinated every day, and Joe Biden’s approval ratings on Covid-19 were sky high, the governor of Florida seemed to sense what Fox News would soon figure out — the worst side effect of the Covid-19 vaccines would be a second Biden term.
DeSantis made the perfunctory efforts to vaccinate Florida’s citizens, especially his donors. But he fought efforts to achieve herd immunity and contain the pandemic infinitely harder than he ever fought the virus. He sued cruise lines to prevent them from demanding their passengers have either vaccinations or up-to-date Covid-19 tests. He made threats to school districts seeking mask mandates that have proven effective throughout the nation.
And Fox News rewarded him with a “striking effort” to raise his profile, and soon the entire channel joined in on his effort raise skepticism about the vaccine and prevent mandates that are working to increase vaccinations and draw down new case numbers.
DeSantis is taking his cues from Trump, no doubt, who realized his party would never punish him for racking up soaring death rates, as Florida has during the Delta wave, as long as it serves a larger mission of white evangelical male dominance. But the governor has also shown why he’s so popular with the party’s base.
What the party’s elite, especially the younger set that resented Trump’s Boomer gaucheness, loves about DeSantis is that he’s the Trump who looks like he might have a favorite craft beer. Ron resembles a 21st-sentury human male nearing middle age in a way that helps you forget his white supremacist connections and support or how he was elected by a rounding error in a state that Republicans have dominated for decades.
Like Trump, DeSantis also seems to implicitly understand political scientist Frank Wilhoit’s essential description of America’s prime mode of right-wing thought: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
While proposing freedom from mandates that could end the tyranny of this pandemic, DeSantis has proposed a range of assaults on the first amendment and free thought in general. Right wingers appreciate his innate sense that conservatism isn’t an actual ideology, it’s a method of getting and maintaining power that you’ve imagined you’ve wrongfully been robbed of.
Hence we got the DeSantis variant. Or Ron’s Revenge.
In the summer of 2020, Sturgis was a superspreader event that spread the pandemic. In 2021, DeSantis made sure his state was a never-ending Sturgis, a unbound vaccination destination, continually regurgitating the twice-as-contagious Delta variant throughout the under-vaccinated Southeast.
Deaths from the virus are finally trending down in Florida, but they’re still nearly double what they were during the worst of 2020 — before we had vaccines that prevented hospitalizations and deaths for around nine out of ten of those who get their jabs. The horror of this cruelty is so impossible to comprehend that the right has no choice but to continue to call it a success.
No one man will, hopefully, ever come close to doing as much callous damage to this country as Donald Trump — which is why we should bury the dead at Maralago, to mark him with the indignity of his malice and failures for as long as there is a still a South Florida.
But for a GOP desperate for vengeance on its perceived enemies Ron DeSantis is hoping his summer of needless death will suffice.