wo months into the pandemic battle, national politics have hardened into an ugly, dispiriting limbo amid a sense that during a generational crisis, there is no one in charge.
Haunted by an invisible pathogen that has drained trademark energy and optimism from American life, the ordeal has clearly not drawn the country together — it’s tearing it further apart. And there is still no clear path out of the darkness.
The stasis is deepened because as every state moves toward some kind of opening, there is no convincing metric to show conclusively whether the battle is being won.
In 18 states, coronavirus infections are rising, in 15 states the numbers are steady and in 17 infections are ebbing.
Aggressive openers such as Texas and Florida might offer hope — but now there are reports that infection figures from those states and others may not be as optimistic or believable as they seem.
At the apex of political power, a President who ought to be unifying the country seems to be using his office to indulge his own need for attention and is exclusively talking to the sizable minority that supports him no matter what.
Amid crushing economic pain caused by shutdowns, a divided Congress cannot decide whether it wants to do more to help, compounding the impression that the fractured national political system and those in it are not equal to the moment.
Every four years, the instrument of political renewal, the presidential election, offers a pressure valve for partisan angst and, for all the nation’s acrimonious political divides, legitimacy to the winner.
This year the contest is stifled — with the presumptive challenger, Joe Biden, stuck in his basement. President Donald Trump is giving the distinct impression with false claims of voter fraud, which he escalated on Wednesday, that he’s trying to delegitimize an election he might lose — a scenario that could seed years of discord even if he is forced out of the White House.In the best of times, and the worst of times, the presidency often sets the mood of the age, in Washington and beyond. But it’s as if Trump, endlessly preoccupied with his reelection prospects, is not engaged in the worst public health challenge in a century and the most debilitating economic crunch since the 1930s.
Each day, he gets further drawn into his obsessions and personal feuds. Impeachment did not slow his testing of constitutional constraints, it accelerated them, as his firing of agency inspectors general and his Justice Department’s efforts to rewrite the narrative of his abuses of power show.
Trump is making clear that he plans to use every instrument of the federal government to ensure he wins a second term. This ranges from the seemingly trivial — the use of the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop to a boosterish Fox News town hall — to the more sinister, the declassification of intelligence to fuel conservative conspiracy theories.
On Wednesday, Trump threatened to withhold coronavirus aid from Michigan and Nevada — states trying to protect their residents by offering them the option of voting by mail in November.
Trump, who previously falsely claimed that millions of fraudulent votes cost him a popular-vote win in 2016, warned of “thousands and thousands” of fake ballots.
“This nation can’t go down that path. (It’s a) dangerous path to go down,” Trump said Wednesday.
This all came as the President — who is dosing up on hydroxychloroquine, a drug that his own government says is ineffective against Covid-19, made yet another of his victory declarations over the virus. He seemingly regards more than 93,000 deaths in a pandemic he had said would not trouble the United States as a marker not of personal failure but great success.
“We’ve done, you know, amazingly well,” Trump said on Wednesday in a meeting with the governors of Arkansas and Kansas.
The days when the White House, by showcasing top medical officials on television, thought it had a duty to inform the states and Americans about the way forward are long gone.
“There has been very little guidance from Washington,” said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber on CNN’s “New Day.”
“The CDC gave us guidelines on when to open — two weeks of a downward trajectory. They have been radio silent on what should happen now. They haven’t told us what to look for with spikes. “They haven’t told us when we should reconsider or tighten what we are doing,” said Gelber, one of a long list of local and state leaders from each party trying to do the best they can.
Trump seems more interested in his own political feuds.
He built his political career and bond with a particular segment of the electorate on the racist claim that his predecessor Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
With polls finding Biden in the lead, Trump has shown he plans to build another campaign on false claims about Obama — this time alleging criminality in the investigation mounted into his own 2016 campaign’s many and unusual contacts with Russia.
It’s an extraordinary spectacle: a President running for a second term and focusing not on his own record but pinning hopes on falsifying the conduct of his predecessor.
