Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who led President Donald Trump’s team to transition him into the White House, apparently believes that Americans should accept potentially staggeringly higher death tolls from the Coronavirus as a “sacrifice” to preserve the “American way of life.” He shared these sentiments in an interview released this week that he did with CNN’s Dana Bash, to whom he questioned “what end” would be served by trying to keep as many Americans from dying as possible. In other words, Christie quite literally sounds like he was questioning the basic value of human life compared to the supposed value of the vague notion of “the economy.”
Today I got the idea to put together a thread of every public official, elected or appointed, who is advocating for or trying to normalize mass die-offs as a right and just sacrifice to make for the sake of The Economy ™. I'll start with Chris Christie https://t.co/WvWq07Ulee
— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) May 5, 2020
Christie commented:
‘Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can — but the question is, towards what end, ultimately? Are there ways that we can… thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?.. we’ve got to let some of these folks get back to work, because if we don’t, we’re going to destroy the American way of life in these families — and it will be years and years before we can recover.’
If they’re dead, then they will, in fact, never recover from the supposed impact that Christie cites.
This week, reporting emerged in The New York Times that officials in the Trump administration were privately projecting as many as 3,000 deaths a day by June 1, which is just weeks away. On Monday, the influential University of Washington forecast of Coronavirus cases and deaths also delivered a bombshell: their projected total death toll from the Coronavirus in the U.S. almost doubled, rising to a staggering over 134,000.
Christie acknowledged that that the U.S. is “in the midst of a pandemic that we haven’t seen in over 100 years,” but he insisted:
‘And we’re going to have to continue to do things.’
That’s self-contradictory. According to Christie, since the U.S. is in the throes of a crisis that hasn’t been seen in over 100 years… we should keep doing everything just like we did before, it seems.
He compared his ideal for the U.S. response to the Coronavirus to the way that the country responded to the First and Second World Wars, as if sky-high death tolls are inevitable. They are most certainly not, but the rhetoric to the contrary serves the all-too-convenient purpose of absolving Trump and Republicans of any responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths and counting that have unfolded on their watch.
Christie commented:
‘We sent our young men during World War Two over to Europe, out to the Pacific, knowing, knowing that many of them would not come home alive. And we decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life. In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life.’
This is the same kind of rhetoric that other Republicans have used. Texas’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, for instance, insisted that there are “more important things than living,” claiming that Americans must instead work to protect the economy. They’re trying to sacrifice lives to keep business booming.
