The difference between doing the job and just appearing to do the job is rarely absolute. In the more than eight months since COVID-19 manifested in the United States, our public officials have demonstrated pretty much every gradation. Recently, President Donald Trump was ailing at Walter Reed hospital, both a victim and a symbol of his Administration’s lassitude and arrogance in the face of the pandemic. He’d failed to protect the country, and now he’d failed to protect himself—not to mention his staff, his supporters, and perhaps his opponent. Even after he returned to the White House, persistent obfuscations about how long he’d had symptoms and how serious they were called only more attention to the Administration’s negligence and bad faith. He continued to do nothing, and to urge the country, and Congress, to do nothing. Photographs released by the White House on October 3rd, of Trump supposedly working, depicted him using a Sharpie to sign his name on a blank sheet of paper. A boy practicing his autograph.
“It’s all been exposed,” Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, told me recently. “Trump was exposed. The lies are exposed. The incompetence is exposed. It’s like low tide in the ocean. Now the whole shoreline is exposed. There’s no question as to what was under the water.” Cuomo was busy contending with some other new COVID clusters—a dozen or so, many in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in and around New York City. The onset of autumn had brought a surge in viral transmissions and had complicated the delicate task of opening up while keeping numbers down. Last week, Hasidim were out in the streets, angrily protesting the Governor’s abrupt restrictions on religious gatherings in certain communities. In their eyes, he was doing too much, at least to them. Still, most New Yorkers felt that Cuomo had done a commendable and by some measures miraculous job bringing New York back from the brink. The image they’d formed of him, at the height of the pandemic, still pertained.
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