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Politicizing the coronavirus is hazardous to our national health

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

One of the most frustrating things about the protests aimed at reopening the economy ... is that we all ultimately want the same thing. We want to resume what used to be business as usual.

The problem is that we all have different ideas about reopening times.

"I'm with everybody," said President Donald Trump when asked about it in a Sunday news conference. "I'm with everybody."

Right. That was the same day that a man and woman in Denver, who identified themselves as health care workers, dressed in full scrubs and with masks, made international news by standing silently with their arms crossed to block a line of cars and trucks.

As captured by a news photographer, Alyson McClaran, the scene echoed the iconic "Tank Man" who faced off against Chinese tanks in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Colorado, along with Ohio, Minnesota and Kentucky, among other states, saw similar protests. In Illinois, a group called Reopen Illinois plans to hold rallies in Springfield and Chicago on May 1. On its Facebook page, the group says it trusts "the people to make the best decisions on how to protect our own livelihoods and businesses."

President Trump had faced criticism from governors in both parties over tweets he posted on Friday that appeared to support the protests.

"LIBERATE MICHIGAN!," "LIBERATE MINNESOTA!," and "LIBERATE VIRGINIA," he said in three of several tweets directed to states in which protests occurred.

His "LIBERATE" message was unusual for a head of state, especially since the liberation presumably would be from state governors in the nation over which he presides as chief executive. But, as we all know by now, Trump is an unusual president.

But the president insisted during the White House Coronavirus Task Force news conference that he was not taking sides. Right.

"The president's policy says you can't start to reopen under his plan until you have declining numbers for 14 days," Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican and chairman of the National Governors Association, said on CNN's "State of the Union."

"So then to go encourage people to go protest the plan you just made recommendations on Thursday," Hogan added, "it just doesn't make any sense."

 

Ah, but this also is a presidential election year, which helps us make sense of a lot of White House surprises, once you put them into a timely context.

The seemingly random and organic grassroots protests, for example, resemble the rise of the tea party movement: a mix of angry individuals encouraged and summoned to public squares by activists on social networks, who also include some paid lobbyists.

Some of the largest Facebook groups stirring up the fight against the quarantine include three far-right, pro-gun provocateurs targeting Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, The Washington Post reports.

Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called Minnesota Gun Rights, and his siblings, Christopher and Aaron, had about 200,000 members combined by this past weekend, the Post reported, noting that they seek primarily to poke the National Rifle Association as being "too compromising." Lovely.

Yes, the pandemic is a calamity that any responsible and respectable politician should try to hold above politics as usual. But in these times and under this administration, social distancing and flattening the curve have been pulled into the culture wars, pitting the life-preserving policy of social distancing in some cases against the freedom of religion and assembly.

Is it working? Polls by last weekend were showing a slippage in approval ratings of the president's coronavirus response, compared with his initial rally-around-the-president bump. Only 36% of voters in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday said they generally trusted what President Trump says about the coronavirus. That's 10 points lower than their approval of his overall performance.

Still, Trump's approval ratings among Republicans remain high, although not as high as some of the numbers he recently has tweeted. More troubling for Trump should be the overwhelming majority of voters who tell pollsters they would rather continue the lockdown than end it too soon.

With our lives and those of our families and friends at risk, most of us Americans have been willing to make reasonable sacrifices, as past generations have done, for the common good, not for politics.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)


(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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