By Liu Xing
Four years ago, the Time magazine named Donald Trump, the 45th President-elect of the United States, “Person of the Year” and labeled him “President of the Divided States of America”. There is a world of difference between the United States and the divided states. The magazine later explained its sensational statement: “This is the 90th time we have named the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year.”
Today, the US has once again come to an election year, when it’s as clear as daylight whether Trump has brought better or worse influence. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US has indeed “topped” the world in terms of the number of confirmed cases and deaths, laying waste to its world’s best medical facilities, best medical personnel, most advanced medical technologies and greatest national strength. That the world’s only superpower with such vast resources could do such a disastrous job in fighting the pandemic is enough to prove the rationale in calling it the “divided states of America” under the Trump administration. However, it’s unfair to pin all the blame on Trump. In the context of American democracy and election politics, it doesn’t make much of a difference whoever is on the stage. America has long been stranded in its persistent and chronic malaises of political polarization, bipartisan strife, hierarchical hostility, and social division.
Looking back, we are actually not very surprised by the chaos and riots that have been troubling the US for about half a year. It could all boil down to the election! When the pandemic first broke out, the Trump administration tried hard to downplay its severity, and all those in power across the country collectively turned a blind eye to reality.
According to an article published in USA Today, “As early as Jan. 3, his administration received its first formal notification about the outbreak of a novel virus in China. Scientists, the CIA, epidemiologists and national security aides raised warnings in the following weeks. But he squandered it by continuing to downplay the danger and provide false information about the availability of testing.”
The Trump administration has fooled the American people time and again for no other reason but that he was worried about losing votes over the pandemic-hit economy. The Democratic Party is also playing up the “pandemic card” for the election by bashing the Trump administration for its catastrophic work in prevention and control. Ironically, the hardest-hit states are mostly run by Democrats. In the State of New York alone, nearly 400,000 people have been infected with over 30,000 dead. Nevertheless, the Democrats do not seem to feel ashamed of that.
Gregg Gonsalves, an Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at Yale, said something right to the point: what is happening in the US is purposeful, considered negligence, omission, failure to act by our leaders.
Trump tweeted on March 16 that “Just had a very good tele-conference with Nation’s Governors. Went very well. Cuomo of New York has to ‘do more’.” Governor Cuomo responded, “I have to do more? No—YOU have to do something! You're supposed to be the President.”
Winning the election is more important than controlling the pandemic - this is a consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats, and this is why they have been entangled in endless partisan strife to keep their votes. At the end of March, the Trump administration launched a USD 2 trillion economic stimulus package to win more votes by handing out money directly, which quickly spurred his ratings up. The Democratic Party also proposed a pandemic aid bill worth USD 3 trillion in mid-May, which the Republicans said would never get through the Senate, and the White House said Trump would veto.
There is another interesting detail here. The United States Postal Service first received a USD 28 million appropriation from the Trump administration to print “President Trump's Coronavirus Guidelines for America” postcards that highlighted Trump’s name for 138 million American families, which drew fire from the critics and was misread as a piece of campaign literature. The USD 3 trillion bill proposed by House Democrats also included a USD 25 billion appropriation to the United States Postal Service for secure postage of ballots to ensure that the pro-Democratic ethnic minorities, the elderly, and the disabled can all vote.
Evidently, instead of jointly fighting the pandemic, both the Republican and Democratic parties have axes to grind and have turned the pandemic into a business of scrambling for votes, blatantly exploiting public undertaking for self-interests.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a magic mirror that has brought to light the hypocrisy and meanness of American democracy. What’s described in Running for Governor, a short essay written by Mark Twain 150 years ago, is still staged repeatedly in today’s US. Whether in or out of power, the political parties, who wear the mask of “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights”, have never jumped out of the circle of cheating, shifting blame, being debunked yet feeling no shame. One and a half-century has passed, but they have genuinely learned nothing from history.