Two Stolen Years
By 
Michelle Goldberg gets right to the bottom line:
If you’re lucky enough to live in New Zealand, the coronavirus nightmare has been mostly over since June. After more than two weeks with no new cases, the government lifted almost all restrictions that month. The borders are still shut, but inside the country, normal life returned.
It’s coming back elsewhere too. Taiwan, where most days this month no new cases have been reported, just held the Taipei Film Festival, and a recent baseball game drew 10,000 spectators. Italy was once the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and remains in a state of emergency, but with just a few hundred new cases a day in the whole country, bars are open and tourists have started returning, though of course Americans remain banned. According to The New York Times’s figures, there were 321 new cases in all of Canada last Friday.
And America? We had 68,241. As of last week, the worst per capita outbreak on the planet was in Arizona, followed by Florida. The world is closed to us; American passports were once coveted, but now only a few dozen nations will let us in. Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, told me he doesn’t expect American life to feel truly normal before summer 2022. Two years of our lives, stolen by Donald Trump.
On July 18 Canada had 322 new cases in a country with 37.5 million people. The same day, Florida and its 21.48 million people reported 10,327. And it’s not like Canada has been blessed with uniquely stellar political talent to be in charge — Trudeau is a cromulentish dynasty candidate, and two of the country’s four largest provinces are governed by below-replacement-level reactionary goons. But Trump, DeSantis et al are so far below replacement level they couldn’t see it with an electron microscope, and even many Democratic governors (including the one presiding over the nation’s largest state) have been completely outclassed in their COVID response by Doug Ford for Chrissakes.
And yet this is still how the Trump administration thinks:
Some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers are adamant that the best way forward is to downplay the dangers of the disease. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, has been particularly forceful in his view that the White House should avoid drawing attention to the virus, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Meadows has for the most part opposed any briefings about the virus, while other Trump advisers, including Hope Hicks and Jared Kushner, have been open to holding briefings so long as they are not at the White House — where Mr. Trump could show up and commandeer them. Mr.Pence’s team would like to hold more briefings with the health experts, but some of Mr. Trump’s communications aides do not want the vice president to be part of them.
A large number of rank-and-file Republican lawmakers share Mr. Trump’s aversion to the disease-control practices.
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican closely aligned with Mr. Trump, issued an order on Wednesday blocking local governments from mandating mask-wearing, then sued the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, for imposing such a requirement. Mr. Kemp’s edict came hours after Mr. Trump visited his state, declining to wear a face mask at the Atlanta airport.
There’s no EMAILS! waiting in the wings that can cause people to overlook the fact that their grandmother died alone and their kids can’t go to school and they’re facing eviction. But a lot of lives will be ruined by their delusions in the meantime. And the countless elite journalists who were faced with a genuine national crisis in 2016 and responded by rubbing their thighs raw over a bunch of inane bullshit should never be forgiven.