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The argument used is not particularly deep, because of course it’s not. Donald Trump allocated other people’s money to attempt to find a vaccine, or at least did not actively block his administration from doing so when they recommended it. Since he could conceivably have not bothered to do even that in the face of an economy-wrecking mass death event, he should therefore get the most credit for the vaccine’s production and be celebrated for his role. It is the perfect conservative argument, after all: The true hero here is the guy who signed the checks. Without the checks, none of you expertise-having peons could have done squat.
When it comes to the column’s details, claims like “The genius of Operation Warp Speed was the decision to run the vaccine development process in parallel rather than sequentially” show that the American Enterprise Institute is still rigorously devoted to inanities. Yes, attempting several approaches at once—if only the world’s medical and scientific giants had been privy to such notions before the real estate tycoon appeared on the scene to say okay, sure, do that. And Trump truly is the master of attempting several approaches at once: From hydroxychloroquine to his soliloquy on what if we, like, figured out how to irradiate people’s insides, Trump has seized on every possible miracle cure that might post-justify his declarations that he needed to do nothing in particular to keep Americans from dying. He was perhaps only inches off from being declared hero of the pandemic due to the devoted efforts of the MyPillow guy.
But the true message of the op-ed, and message that Marc Thiessen and every last one of modern conservatism’s pundits return to after every incident of mass destruction, mass death, newly institutionalized cruelty, world-shaking crime, near-Great Depression, or whatever else has last proven a movement core belief to have catastrophic consequences when actually carried out, is that for the unity of the nation we must let bygones be bygones. That is the truth of truths, the be all and end all of conservative thought. The public cannot handle the stress of holding those that ordered war crimes accountable for those crimes—it would tear the country apart. The nation must not dwell on whether the Reaganites or the Bushites engaged in a bit of illegal crookery here or there for the sake of a good patriotic war that the movement specifically advocated for for years or decades; truly, it would damage the very soul of the nation to ask too many questions about such things.
Over and over. Every time. Thiessen’s particular conservative class of alumni base their most fervent premises on an all-encompassing theory that holding anyone accountable for the Iraq War and the absolute and indisputable destruction of every conservative theory as to why the war was justified, how it would unfold, and what the aftermath might be would result in the destruction of our very republic. The papers are absolutely littered with conservative demands that the real-world results of every past experiment with tax cuts with the wealthy, to use one very pointed example, be absolutely ignored because they did not count and will absolutely be reversed in the next demanded iteration.
To cut to the chase: All of punditry consists of incompetent blundering well-heeled cowards insisting that there be absolutely no repercussions for pundit-demanded actions that ended in mass ruin or mass death. That is all. The job description is to spout ideology with impunity, and sociopathic amorality with absolute confidence. The omnipresent threat used to keep the walls of consequence from being breached is the claim that if any professional price is paid for horrific wrongness ending in calamity, any at all, it is America that will suffer.
Like herpes outbreaks, these “unity” columns arrive in clusters after every powerful conservative’s tenure. They are the herpes of punditry—a rash that spreads through conservative ranks, an itch that demands scratching, that appear shortly after the incubation period of the latest worst decision.
Do we want unity, then? Do we want to heal the country, after the most dishonest, incompetent, and violence-stoking president in modern history acted with thick-headed apathy as a natural disaster struck? And does it fall on that malevolent flounderer’s opponents to provide that unity even as his supporters take up arms to intimidate local governments into abiding by his own demands for pandemic apathy, and to demand that a United States election be thrown out, simply thrown out, so that their figurehead be appointed its true winner? That is the requirement?
And this is best done by declaring that Dear Leader, not scientists or professionals, is the true reason the vaccine has been so quickly gifted to this nation and all others? That will cause Trump’s gun-toting allies to stand down, and cause malevolent conservative propagandists to stop spreading toxic and dangerous lies against all whose duties might tangentially brush up against the malignant narcissist’s own delusions of grandeur?
Fine. Then we will take Thiessen’s proclamations seriously, but adjust them so as to better achieve his intended result. I propose that there be two vaccines. One vaccine will be for Trump supporters. The other will be for the rest of America.
The two vaccines will, in fact, be identical. Same factories, same delivery protocols, same boxes. One will be the vaccine as prepared. The other will be the exact same vaccine, but in a vial with the TRUMP logo prominently affixed.
The Trump version of the vaccine will cost $200 a dose, and be available only to his devoted acolytes. His supporters will eagerly pay it, and launch the most vitriolic of invective at anyone who does not follow, and they will be inoculated against COVID-19 while paying appropriate homage to the true hero of the pandemic, Apathetic Adulterous Real Estate Television Guy.
The other vaccine will be free. Anyone who wants it can get it—if you are willing to be injected with a vaccine that does not carry Trump’s own branding or celebrate his own heroism.
There. Now all will be satisfied. Those who either believe the vaccine should not be made into a political toy for fraudulent conservative self-redemption or who simply do not care can get the unbranded version; all those who insist that we would not be here today without Donald Trump—and boy howdy is that one on-the-nose—can get vaccinated for Dear Leader, by Dear Leader, and at the free market markup that pays proper tribute to Dear Leader.
Don’t be such a maudlin little dipshit, Mr. Thiessen. The notion that Trump’s cadre of incompetent hyperconservative bunglers, a crew that shunned all expertise in order to proclaim that America did not need to follow the same pandemic guidelines that were used successfully to limit deaths elsewhere, the crew that to this day continues to ponder whether getting all of America infected at once, burying the dead in mass graves, and cleaning up the rest afterwards, should get participation trophies for not f–king up one response while catastrophically bungling all the others? That goes too far. At least have the decency to stand behind the products of the latest hyperconservative administration’s latest nation-shaking failures.
There are 300,000 dead, and it is because conservatism and its punditry demanded we abandon social distancing and masks in favor of something-something and freedom. There will soon be half a million dead, because when Trump defended his apathy towards pandemic preparedness with declarations that it would all vanish without his help, all of conservatism rushed to promote his delusion with allied proclamations that most of the deaths would be among the unproductive classes, or that doctors and nurses were lying, or that the pandemic only existed because Trump’s invisible enemies wanted to make him look bad, or a hundred other inanities, and intentionally promoted Trump’s notion that the public need not protect itself too diligently from a rampantly spreading and deadly disease.
If there is a participation trophy for that, let it come in the form of one last suckering of the people you and your allies have shown such grotesque contempt for. Squeeze the people doing the most dying for that one last dime, and call it honoring the dead. Call it unity.
And then tuck your murderous tails between your legs and simper out your latest warnings that we mustn’t look back, or assign blame, and by God must not prosecute anyone for anything. Go ahead, we’re used to it. That is what conservatism does. It kills people in astonishing numbers, it promotes poverty, it doles out cancers and calls them freedom, and then it scuttles back into its own infected colon and declares that next time it will work out better, just you wait.
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