The Government Has Dismantled Our Ability to Grieve as a Nation

Grief is an unwieldy weapon, and the GOP has shown it would rather mock death than mourn it.

Activists in San Francisco honor victims of Covid-19 who died while incarcerated Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Over the past few weeks, as the number of deaths across the country from Covid-19 soared past 80,000, the media expressed a mix of surprise and dismay that President Donald Trump appears utterly uninterested in mourning the dead of this pandemic — or even acknowledging death at all. Thirty-four years after Ronald Reagan earned the sobriquet “mourner-in-chief” for eulogizing the astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger Disaster, the current White House cannot even muster an effort for the most basic and ineffectual of gestures: lowering flags to half-mast.

“In his daily news conferences,” Peter Baker writes in The New York Times, Trump “makes only perfunctory references to those who have died as he stiffly reads opening remarks, exhibiting more emotion when grieving his lost economic record than his lost constituents.” Journalists have described Trump’s “empathy deficit” as simply another function of his narcissism. But it would be a mistake to understand this deficit as entirely attributable to Trump himself.