Closing argument.
He said this about two hours ago as I’m writing this and I’m surprised there isn’t a Biden ad already circulating online to showcase the quote. Prominent Democrats are already highlighting it. Meadows is totally right, by the way. As an empirical matter, the window for containing the virus closed some time ago. Maybe it closed in February, when the CDC mangled its chance to get testing going before the virus had spread widely. Maybe it closed in April, when Trump decided that reopening for business would be his priority instead of suppression. Maybe it closed in August, when the public blew off warnings from experts like Fauci that if Americans didn’t go the extra mile to drive national case counts down to 10,000 or fewer before the weather turned chilly, we’d be in for a brutal winter. Or maybe there never was a window to contain COVID realistically. Europeans spent this past summer patting themselves on the back for locking down stringently in the spring while foolhardy Americans rushed to return to normalcy, seeding an outbreak in the south. How’s Europe doing today? Meadows isn’t wrong. But it’s one thing for this to be true and another thing for an influential government figure to admit that it’s true. It’d be like a top general confessing in the middle of a war that we have no realistic hope of stopping the enemy. Even if the facts on the ground plainly support that conclusion, admitting it is tantamount to admitting failure. Maybe there was a chance to win the war at some point and the administration blew it or maybe there was never any chance, but either way, the guys in charge are out of answers. Mark Meadows: “We’re not going to control the pandemic, we are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations.” Jake Tapper: “Why aren’t we going to get control of the pandemic?” Meadows: “Because it is a contagious virus” #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/1ahyatu6co State of the Union (@CNNSotu) October 25,2020 The Trumpist response to questions like this should be simple: What would you have us do that we’re not doing? They set up Operation Warp Speed as the vaccine equivalent of the Manhattan Project. They’ve got the FDA looking at potentially gamechanging therapeutics like antibody drugs. They have fast, cheap antigen tests being rolled out to boost local surveillance. A national contact tracing program at some point might have helped, but contact tracing only works well when there’s a smallish number of people infected and the U.
