CLARENCE PAGE: Donald Trump rallies are like story time — a horror story
Gather around, children. It’s Uncle Donald’s story time again.
In his first rally of the new year, former President Donald Trump didn’t offer much fresh material until he turned full demagogue over COVID-19 vaccinations and who was getting them — and who allegedly wasn’t. Instead, he offered something that his base doesn’t really need, a fresh — and false — reason to resent people who aren’t white.
Backed by a huge crowd, speckled with the usual dozen or so Black people in “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts, Trump falsely complained about public health authorities, who supposedly are denying the COVID-19 vaccine to white people because of their race.
Actually he didn’t blame “public health authorities.” He blamed “the left.”
“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating … white people to determine who lives and who dies,” he said. “If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.”
Wrong, say the various fact-checkers whom Trump manages to keep quite busy.
First, white people are not being excluded from vaccines, health officials say, and besides there is a plentiful supply anyway. Nor is there any evidence of white people sent to the “back of the line” for COVID-19 treatment as a matter of public health policy.
Trump appears to have twisted the facts in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece about New York state’s new treatment guidelines, not for vaccinations but for the dispensing of potentially lifesaving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals such as Paxlovid, which, unlike vaccinations, actually have been in limited supply.
That new treatment policy allows for race to be one among other considerations when dispensing oral antivirals to people at the most risk of severe disease from the coronavirus. That consideration is based on research such as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released last week, which found nonwhites to be less likely than whites to receive outpatient antiviral treatment.
That follows, among other research, a CDC finding late last year that Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people were about twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic whites and were notably more likely to be hospitalized.
Does taking such racially significant information into account amount to unfair and even counterproductive discrimination against whites?
That thought-provoking question is raised by the Journal piece, written by two prolific authors on social policy and political science whose even-handedness I’ve learned to respect over the years, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira.
Judis and Teixeira criticize New York’s guidelines, released in late December, for including not only the standard criteria such as age and medical conditions as risk factors but also simply being of “nonwhite race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.”
That’s not enough, they argue, for fairness or even, perhaps, legality if the criteria do not also ask about socioeconomic class. When you do ask about income and the incidence of COVID-19, they argue, you find that “the laid-off autoworker might also deserve some consideration from health officials.”
It is here, if we didn’t see it coming, that they bring up the former president. “Liberal political scientists and many Democratic officials seem determined to ignore class divisions, and instead divide the country up by race and ethnicity,” the authors conclude. “If it continues, Democrats could pay a lasting political price, which could threaten the welfare of groups Democrats want to help.”
Unfortunately, as uncomfortable as Americans might feel about race, we seem to be even less comfortable with talk about class. Trump apparently picked up the hint and predictably appears to be running with it, perhaps all the way to another presidential bid.
That’s a challenge to the rest of us. Our problems with health and other issues are more than skin deep. We need to hear the rest of the story.
Contact Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.
