Presidential historian Jon Meacham bashed President Donald Trump for doling out badly needed help to governors who flattered him, saying he was behaving like the king the American Revolution fought to overthrow.
Governors have reported they have to "tap dance" around the president as they ask for needed coronavirus aid, and Meacham was appalled that they had to flatter Trump to save American lives.
"One of the reasons we fought the American Revolution was to avoid having our fates be subject to the whims of the king," Meacham said. "At least in the popular imagination, that was a central force behind the creation of the republic. America was supposed to put reason at the center of the national enterprise, and I can't imagine another situation which is more designed, better for the centrality of data and the dictates of science."
Meacham noted with alarm the growing partisan divide over the virus and federal relief efforts.
"The fact that this sounds partisan is heartbreaking, but we're living in a polarized pandemic," Meacham said. "It's incredible. We have managed now to take everything, including a life-and-death, invisible and totally chaos-inducing disease and turn it into a red/blue issue. My heart sank last night when I was looking at the map of the outbreaks and realized how closely it seems to track the red/blue county by county map."
"I'd urge folks to look at that because, I think, tragically there's going to be some reflection of people, there's clearly a reflection of how people view the virus with their political views," he added.
The injection of partisan politics into a global pandemic has undermined public confidence in medical advice, Meacham said.
"One of the things we have to figure out a way to do in the midst of the fear and in the midst of the anxiety is, can we follow the data?" he said. "Can we follow the doctors and can the doctors, to go to your point, resist that monarchal pressure to make the king happy? Seems to me that's a central obligation of the medical professionals and of the citizens."
Meacham worried that blind loyalty to the president would directly lead to preventable deaths.
"If there's any way at all let's not fall into this ambient tribalization, you know?" he said. "You can disagree with the president on everything and still think maybe he has a point on this or that. You can be for the president on just about everything and think, you know what? I think he's got that wrong. That's called reason, right? That's called America. You know, you follow the data, and at this point, it's a matter of life and death."
