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Governors Need Help Fighting Covid-19. Trump's Sending the Tea Party.

Governors Need Help Fighting Covid-19. Trump's Sending the Tea Party.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- On Thursday, President Donald Trump declared that he trusts America’s governors to make their own decisions about the lives and livelihoods of their constituents. Then on Friday, via Twitter, he incited residents of three states to rise up against those very same governors.

Thursday Trump and Friday Trump don’t really disagree. The president’s vague plan to help states reopen doesn’t provide them with the one thing they need to make informed decisions: testing. So when governors aren’t able to make their states safe to restart commerce, he wants blame to fall on them, not him.

In lieu of federal leadership, governors and business leaders will have to figure things out on their own. The abdication is stunning — but not quite as amazing as Trump taking potshots at governors as he slinks from the battlefield on which he left them defenseless. His MAGA troops are now in a pitched rearguard action against political leaders fighting the spread of Covid-19.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has received the most attention, for obvious reasons. Trump has attacked Whitmer personally. While Trump often finds powerful and successful women intolerable, Whitmer is more than a popular swing-state governor. She is a potential Democratic candidate for vice president.

Other governors, including Kentucky Democrat Andy Beshear, are under similar pressure. But perhaps the most interesting case is in Ohio. Mike DeWine, who was the nation’s first governor to shut down schools, is a Republican who has set himself against his party’s emerging consensus to let the virus have an open field and see what happens.

Unlike Republican governors in Maryland and Massachusetts, DeWine is not catering to a liberal/moderate electorate. The titular leader of Trump’s reelection campaign in Ohio, DeWine has so far avoided Trump’s Twitter wrath, but he has not escaped the protesters Trump is inciting.

Last Monday, about 100 of them arrived at the state capitol in Columbus to demand that DeWine open nonessential businesses and lift his stay-at-home order. The protest was captured in an iconic photo showing middle-age whites, two in Trump hats, pressed tightly against a statehouse door, screaming. At the protest, a man with a bullhorn announced to the crowd: “When I say ‘tyrant,’ you say ‘Mike DeWine’.” 

The protesters may not have public health expertise but they have support from Republicans in the state legislature, who have attacked the state health director, Dr. Amy Acton, while pushing for the removal of restrictions on public commerce.

Removal of restrictions is what Trump wants, too. It’s also a message regularly reinforced on Fox News, where some hosts are promoting the idea that the cure (economic freeze) is worse than the disease (Covid-19). 

This 2020 reincarnation of the Tea Party is no more cognizant of scientific evidence or respectful of the broader public’s rights than the original crew, which waged war on the Affordable Care Act. Now they are being enlisted as MAGA shock troops, helping Trump pin the blame for his incompetence on the very people left to manage the fallout.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.