The demonstrations against the coronavirus shutdowns came to upstate New York on Monday, with a lunchtime “Gridlock Buffalo” protest, at which cars and trucks blockaded Niagara Square, in the heart of the city. The event was specifically directed at Governor Andrew Cuomo, who recently extended his stay-at-home order until May 15th, but it was similar to protests in Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Wisconsin, and other states.
According to the Buffalo News, the person behind Monday’s protest was Rus Thompson, a local conservative activist and supporter of Donald Trump who was involved in a pro-Trump protest last summer timed to coincide with a pro-impeachment rally. This is not surprising. A demonstration in Lansing, Michigan, last week which attracted national attention was organized by “a group founded by a pro-Trump state representative and his wife, Meshawn Maddock, who is on the advisory board for an official Trump campaign group called ‘Women for Trump,’ ” the Associated Press reported. And, according to the New York Times, a protest outside the statehouse in Austin, Texas, which took place on Saturday, was organized by Owen Shroyer, the host of a radio program from Infowars, the right-wing disinformation Web site.
The fact that Trump supporters and right-wing entities are instigating the protests doesn’t mean they don’t have any popular support, of course. But it should figure more prominently in media coverage. So should the scale of the demonstrations, which, in many cases, has been modest. The biggest was the one in Lansing, which attracted several thousand protestors, in cars and on foot, local police said. In Brookfield, Wisconsin, and Annapolis, Maryland, the participants numbered in the hundreds, according to local news reports. In Frankfort, Kentucky, last Wednesday, “about 100 people” called on Governor Andy Beshear to reopen businesses, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported. And in Madison, Wisconsin, “a few dozen people marched around the Capitol,” on Saturday, the local weekly Isthmus reported.
These gatherings pale in comparison with other mass protests we have seen in recent years, including the Tea Party rallies in 2009 that attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. Immediately after Trump was elected, several million Americans took part in local and national versions of the Women’s March. Following the February, 2018, high-school massacre in Parkland, Florida, the March for Our Lives drew hundreds of thousands of people to Washington, D.C., and other cities. As recently as last December, tens of thousands of people marched to demand Trump’s impeachment.
Another thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is that the vast majority of Americans are staying at home, obeying social-distancing guidelines, and doing all they can to prevent the virus from spreading further. And they aren’t behaving like this merely because the government has told them to: opinion polls show overwhelming support for the restrictive measures that states all across the country have introduced. In a national survey carried out by the Democracy Fund and U.C.L.A.’s Nationscape project, eighty-seven per cent of respondents said that they supported encouraging people to stay at home; eighty-five per cent expressed support for closing schools and colleges; eighty-four per cent said that they supported closing businesses where people gather, such as bars and restaurants.
Drawing attention to these findings on Twitter, on Monday, John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, noted that the field work for this survey was carried out in late March and early April. Since then, public attitudes could have changed, but more recent surveys show little evidence of such a shift. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that was released on Monday, the surveyors asked, “What worries you more, that the United States will move too quickly in loosening restrictions or take too long?” Sixty per cent of respondents said that they were concerned about going too quickly, and thirty per cent said they were worried about taking too long.
The new poll also indicated that, when it comes to dealing with the virus, the American public has much more faith in local officials and in the White House’s medical advisers than in the President himself. Sixty-six per cent of poll respondents said that they trusted what the governor of their states said about the virus, and sixty per cent said they trusted the word of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. Just thirty-six per cent said that they trusted what Trump says.
Findings like these indicate that, at least so far, active opposition to the shutdown measures is largely confined to ardent Trump supporters, many of whom take their lead from the President’s Twitter feed and from his mouthpieces at Fox News and other conservative outlets. Even some Republican governors are being cautious about relaxing the restrictions they have imposed. Over the weekend, Florida reopened some of its beaches. But the rest of the stay-at-home policy issued by Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump favorite, remains in effect, and on Saturday he said that the state’s schools would remain closed until the end of the school year. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has reopened the state’s parks but he, too, ordered its schools to stay closed. On Monday, there were some notable exceptions to that prudence. Governor Bill Lee, of Tennessee, announced an April 30th expiration for his state’s stay-at-home measures, and Governor Brian Kemp, of Georgia, announced that bowling alleys, barber shops, and gyms could open as soon as Friday.
Experience has taught us that whenever Trump senses political trouble his instinct is to retreat to his base while also looking to shift the blame. That is what we have seen in recent days, as he has lashed out at members of the media and posted inflammatory tweets calling for the liberation of several Democratic-run states; simultaneously, he has tried to place the onus, and the responsibility, on the states to make actual policy decisions about reopening the economy.
During the day on Monday, Trump largely refrained from further rabble rousing on his Twitter feed. He even noted that he had had a “nice call” with Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, one of the states that he had called to be liberated. Perhaps he had taken note of the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. Or perhaps he was stewing over the tongue-lashing he had received over the weekend from his old pal Piers Morgan, the British media hound, who said that he had watched the President’s daily briefings about the coronavirus with “mounting horror.” In a moment like this, Morgan told CNN, people need a leader who is calm, honest, authoritative, accurate, and empathetic. “And on almost every level of that, Trump, at the moment, is failing the American people.”
The President will go back on the offensive, of course. But the reality that Morgan pointed to isn’t one that can be wished away with another round of inflammatory tweets, another attack on a reporter, or a few more ginned-up protests.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we have scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
