Something I expect we’ll be seeing at the surface of the news more and more is what I think of as the more ordinary scandal material of the pandemic—a bad policy choice got covered up, an opportunity was squandered, officials were corrupted, people got rich off human misery, etc.

And I think it’s important to remember why that remained to some degree submerged for so long.

For more than a year, US national leadership, state Republican officials, and their media adjuncts were in the grips of surreal delusional thinking about the pandemic. They said it wasn’t real, wasn’t deadly, was imminently disappearing, was a communist plot, was the flu.

The Trump admin, amidst its shifting fogs of denial, frustrated nearly every serious effort. It would refuse to take measures to slow the spread of disease and then organize against them when they were taken privately. Jared arranged bum fights among the states for supplies.

You know these stories, of course. I’m pointing to them again because it’s important to remember how they got in the way of covering other malfeasance.

For instance, for over a month at the start, the CDC was recommending against wearing masks and telling people they were not effective outside a hospital setting. That’s a huge fuckup. (A truer message would’ve been that they’re effective but in desperate short supply)

But for many more months the Trump admin was saying masks are bad and the disease would soon disappear and moreover it was magicking away the masks states were trying to buy. It could not be taken to task about the CDC mask blunder because it wouldn’t accept reality more broadly.

The first tier scandal of the Trump administration doing nothing about, and/or sabotaging efforts to address, this horrible disease was a trauma that sucked almost all the oxygen out of the room. Only with them gone can a lot of the second and third tier awfulness come to light.