The primary reason we are in December watching helplessly as cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to grow is Trump’s decision to not only give up on distancing after 2 weeks in March, but to use distancing orders as a political bogeyman.

We had the opportunity to enforce strict distancing, provide subsidies to everyone to alleviate the economic pain, and get cases down to a low level. We’d use that time for crash course dev of mass testing, standards for distancing rules, and create a national plan for tracing.

We had the will then to push through strict distancing. Many of us did it voluntarily. Most would have with leadership from the top. With cases down to a low level, we could have used mass testing and tracing to identify outbreaks and stop them.

Even if we weren’t able to do so as successfully as South Korea and Taiwan, cases since then would have been much smaller. And during that time, we could have been investing heavily in rapid tests, including at home tests. We could be screening people as a matter of course.

We never tried. Instead, after 2 weeks of distancing in March, the president decided “opening up,” and attacking distancing rules, was in his political interests. So he said we’d be open by Easter, and cast distancing rules as leftist tyranny. He politicized it for his benefit.

States rolled back measures to the extent they had them. Republicans mouthed the new talking points, turning Americans against measures to slow spread. Cases never got under control, then began rising again across the nation. And our will to sacrifice was spent.

Meanwhile, the president never invested heavily in testing the way he did vaccines. Or in tracing. Or in national distancing standards. All of that contradicted his political message that the virus wasn’t that bad, he handled it, and it’d soon disappear, so please vote for me.

So here we are in December, with cases/day at a level we couldn’t imagine a couple months ago and rising; our hospitals overwhelmed; with thousands dying every day. No help from the federal government coming. States forced to choose between slowing spread and people’s jobs.

And the worst part is because we have dealt with it since March, and because the president politicized the pandemic to help his campaign, our will to sacrifice to help others has been spent.

Since we have no help from the top, we argue and fight amongst ourselves, trying to get people to do the right thing. We mock, scream at, and condemn regular people who have been lied to and left to die by our leaders.

Leadership matters. Leadership failed us all.