Trump's Failing Coronavirus Response is Standard Issue Republicanism in 2020
“He’s got a certain talent for this,” President Donald Trump said of Vice President Mike Pence when entrusting him with the response to the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis. Pence’s perpetual grimace is the new face of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, after a chaotic week when the White House health team’s internecine squabbles and revolving-door corruption got a bit too public for Trump’s comfort. GOP operatives are likely relieved that their “adult in the room” has taken over. After all, Pence may be a fundamentalist zealot, but he is at least an actual “normal” policy-maker.
But a Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican. His coronavirus task force — which includes several Pence loyalists — is not particularly Trumpian. Its members are long-time political operatives, some of whom even have medical degrees. For the most part, their problem is not incompetence. It’s that they apply their competence and considerable resources in exactly the way a “normal” Republican administration would: protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the “other.” In the Pence coronavirus task force, we have a clear window into what a Pence presidency would look like. The answer should scare you.
For the last few days, reporters have granted an overdue spotlight to Pence’s foot-dragging response to an HIV outbreak in Scott County, Indiana while he was governor. Dirty needles drove the outbreak, but Pence’s refusal to set up a needle exchange led almost 10 percent of the county to be infected before any government action was taken. Pence’s current coronavirus response team includes long-time allies who had their own roles in the Indiana crisis, like Surgeon General Jerome Adams. He was appointed Indiana State Health Commissioner in October 2014, just before the outbreak. Though he rebranded himself as “a strong advocate of needle exchanges” after his appointment, during the crisis, Adams dodged repeated questions about whether he’d stand up to Pence on the issue. He showed the same loyalty on Sunday, when he told a panicked nation on CNN that President Trump “sleeps less than I do and he’s healthier than I am.” Perhaps his doctor should test him for sycophancy.
Then there’s Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Verma made her name helping Pence and other Republican governors add work requirements and exorbitant premiums to their state’s Medicaid programs — which, by definition, are designed for people in poverty. Scott County ranked last of Indiana’s 92 counties for poverty, unemployment and uninsured people as a percentage of the population. In other words, Verma earned reverence in conservative circles for oppressing the broke users whom Pence and Verma abandoned in Scott County. As HIV cases spread in Indiana, Verma both consulted on Pence’s Medicaid design and worked for one of the state’s largest Medicaid vendors. Today, Verma faces a Hatch Act lawsuit for publicly railing against Medicare for All, and spent a few million taxpayer dollars on a bid to make the cover of Glamour.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/coronavirus-pence-trump-response-republicanism-2020