Auch andere Opfer würden das nicht tun ...
Spoiler
For the past couple of months, I’ve been juggling my day job with helping my wife, sister-in-law and brother-in-law to provide care in our homes for two elderly relatives with serious health conditions, cancer and diabetes among them. We removed them from their assisted-living facility when the first covid-19 case hit there. “GET THEM OUT!” their doctor demanded, and he was probably right. Cases there quickly grew to more than a dozen. Though our lives became a blur of doctors, quarantines and prescriptions, we figured that if we could keep them safe for a while, federal and state governments would fix the group-living problem with the necessary testing, equipment and infection control.
That didn’t happen. Now we’re sending them back to the facility, aware that it could be a fateful choice. But they would be no safer with us as the economy reopens: Kids return to their orthodontists, camps and schools, and we return to postponed appointments and eventually offices and mass transit.
Our struggle between two bad choices is nothing compared with what many Americans have had to confront. Some 40 million have lost their jobs (not to mention the nearly 100,000 who have lost their lives). More than 8 million are in the care of long-term facilities, home health-care agencies and the like. One in 5 U.S. households handles caregiving for family members, most of them old — and few of them have the luxury of juggling hours or taking time off to do it.
For frail seniors in the United States, there simply is no haven. The unspoken, if inherent, trade-off in reopening the economy without safeguards is the lives of our elders. Two months ago, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas who was about to turn 70, argued that those his age and older are “willing to take a chance on [their own] survival” to reopen the economy. Now they have no choice.
Geriatric psychiatrist Nicholas Schor, president of the Washington, D.C.-area chapter of the American Geriatrics Society, pleaded with local officials nearly two months ago, in a letter signed by 30 local practitioners, for a better pandemic response at long-term care facilities, saying “testing and proper PPE are widely unavailable.”
And now? Schor says that of the nearly 40 facilities he works with, only 30 percent are doing sufficient testing (testing all residents and staff every two weeks). With flawed tests yielding false negatives of 12 percent to 40 percent, even facilities trying hardest can’t reliably fight the virus.
The lack of protective equipment is also glaring. Virtually all facilities are reusing single-use equipment, he said, and one facility uses gloves made for cattle birthing. Staff attrition has been high — the low-paid workers know their own lives are at risk — and residents live in “fear and isolation.”
“I don’t want to express complete futility,” Schor told me. But “Pandora’s box has been opened,” and not just in senior facilities. The virus “is going to run its course. Everybody’s going to get exposed eventually.”
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, where Schor has concentrated his effort, has led one of the country’s most aggressive responses to the pandemic. Yet even there, 1 in 5 cases, and 3 in 5 deaths, have been in congregate living facilities. Nationwide, more than one-third of deaths have been in care facilities, and about 80 percent of deaths have been people 65 and over.
Seniors are well aware that the current administration has essentially offered them up as sacrifices on the altar of economic recovery.
Back in March, three-fifths of those 65 and over approved of the federal government’s response to the pandemic. Now a majority of that age group disapprove. Poll after poll has shown Trump in the past two months losing his lead among 65-and-over voters, a crucial demographic for Republicans, both nationally and in battleground states. The political handicapping site FiveThirtyEight observes that Trump won voters 65 and older by 13.3 percentage points in 2016. At the moment, Trump trails Biden by 1.0 points among such voters in an average of national polls — an enormous swing.
Near the end of his life, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee, said that “the ultimate moral test of any government” is how it treats the most vulnerable, including “those in the twilight of life, our elderly.”
By opening up commerce without a haven for our seniors, the Trump administration and its gubernatorial mimics have failed that moral test utterly.
Spoiler
I’ve studied genuinely rigged elections across the globe. The tactics, context and strategies vary enormously from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. But one trait they have in common is this: The winner doesn’t claim they were rigged.
Not so with Trump. In 2016, when he narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote by a historic margin, he claimed that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally. That is a lie. But it raised an obvious question: If Trump claimed that an election he won was rigged, what will he do with an election he loses?
Already, he has insinuated that Democratic victories are the result of rigged elections. It’s part of a deliberate strategy to discredit the legitimacy of his political opponents, but it also endangers the peaceful transfer of power, which is a cornerstone of democratic government.
It’s worth reiterating that Trump’s claims are lies. The evidence is clear. Voter fraud is a minuscule problem in the United States. One comprehensive study found 31 cases of voter fraud out of more than 1 billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, a rate of 0.0000031 percent of all votes. And lest you think that study was somehow biased against Republican claims, George W. Bush’s Justice Department went looking for voter fraud and basically came up empty. Indeed, as Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Rutgers University has noted, in 2005, more people were charged with violating migratory-bird statutes than voter fraud. And that was while Bush’s administration was actively seeking fraud cases to prosecute.
Even the logic is absurd. Trump falsely claims that fraud is largely carried out by undocumented immigrants in California. To believe that, you have to believe that undocumented immigrants (who generally go to extreme lengths to avoid interaction with a government that could deport them) eagerly waltz into polling locations. You have to also believe that they eagerly risk going to jail or being deported to cast a ballot for a candidate that they already know will carry the state by a wide margin. As Minnite put it: “It’s like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.”
With any president, an attempt to delegitimize elections that your side loses can be destabilizing. But with Trump, it’s dangerous. For years, Trump has pumped out a Twitter stream of endless victimhood complexes, bogus accusations against a mythical “deep state” lurking in the shadows and the mainstreaming of lunatic conspiracy theories. Those messages are aimed at a group of people that is also disproportionately armed.
Consider his now-infamous “liberate” tweets, in which he called on his supporters to rise up against state governments that were following the official public health guidance given by the White House. In one tweet, he twinned that message with a message about the Second Amendment. Was that an accident? Or was it a not-so-coded signal to pair displays of weaponry with MAGA-driven political intimidation? The photos of heavily armed militias who heeded his call — including one man who took a break from protesting to order a Subway sandwich while carrying an antitank rocket launcher — provide the answer.
What will happen if Trump loses and then takes to Twitter to say he actually won? It’s not hard to see how deadly that could become, particularly given that Fox News personalities are already absurdly throwing around the word “coup” to describe lawful investigations and oversight of the president’s conduct. When people in positions of authority and influence invoke the language of political violence and then lose power, violence often ensues. It would be a mistake to assume the United States is somehow immune from that possibility.
Republicans who care about the republic must act now: They need to call out the president when he spreads lies and stokes fears about voter fraud that are rooted only in conservative mythology. Otherwise, we can pretend to be shocked, but nobody should be surprised if Trump tries to discredit the 2020 election — no matter the consequences — if he loses.
Thema: Donalds Antrittsrede (Gelesen 235958 mal)
