Nancy Pelosi said on CNN over the weekend that President Trump was “fiddling” while people get COVID-19.
That will come as a surprise to anyone at the White House, or to those of us who receive briefings about the hard work being done there, or even to those who watch his daily media briefings.
President Trump is obviously not working harder than the doctors and nurses across the country, but he is working extremely hard to lead the nation’s response to the coronavirus crisis.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton. A few days ago, she tweeted a news headline about the United States passing Italy for the world’s most coronavirus cases, and gloating – in an obvious reference to President Trump – “He did promise ‘America First.’”
It’s astonishing to me that some people’s first instincts remain in the service of partisan politics, even at a time like this.
There are fair criticisms one can offer about the way various leaders have handled the situation.
From the decisions of governors to close restaurants and other businesses to the president’s actions concerning testing and use of the Defense Production Act, we can always take a look at these moves and scrutinize them.
But there’s a difference between analyzing a decision and gratuitously hanging a tragedy around someone’s neck just for political gain. There are moments in any nation’s history when the usual political sniping simply doesn’t have a place, and most decent people know how to recognize those moments.
Speaker Pelosi – an experienced politician who you would expect to get it – clearly doesn’t. Otherwise why would she have held up the CARES Act for five days while trying to stuff the usual Democratic goody items into it?
This was not the time to demand money for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, or more power for the UAW, or new emission regulations on airlines. Yet the speaker held up the bill for days, wasting precious time, demanding all of those things and more.
And at a time when people need to hear about protecting themselves from the coronavirus, she’s using her opportunity to go on national television to launch more partisan attacks against the president – and to drop the implication that she’ll launch yet another investigation of his handling of the crisis.
To the majority of Americans who approve of how he’s handling the crisis, that seems like a strange stance for her to take. But if partisan politics is all you know, then I guess you’ve got to find a way to deploy it no matter what.
I can understand Democrats’ frustration. They’ve been hoping for three years that we would have a recession so they could blame it on President Trump. Now we’ve got a full-on calamity – economic and otherwise – and they can’t blame any of it on the president. It was all caused by a virus that came out of China.
What are they supposed to do? Make the case that Joe Biden would handle it better? Good luck with that.
So they’re flailing away out of frustration. Their mission since 2016 has been to destroy Donald Trump in any way possible, and the coronavirus has completely re-set the board so that none of the strategies they’d planned on using against him have any chance of working.
Here’s a thought: Focus right now on helping the country through the crisis, on preventing people from getting sick, on supporting our doctors and nurses and hospital officials and on reminding people to stay inside for the time being.
There will be plenty of time for politics before the election, but nothing is normal right now, nor can it be. Maybe the normal political instincts of people like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi won’t work now, either.
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