'Malicious': Columnist reveals how bridge collapse exposes this 'feature of MAGA politics'

30 March 2024

After a cargo ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland — prompting it to collapse into the Chesapeake Bay — its restoration has become politicized by the far right. One columnist says that's no accident.

Following the bridge collapse, President Joe Biden vowed to fully fund its reconstruction with federal money in order to quickly restore Baltimore to normalcy. The bridge's destruction has not just impeded local traffic in the area, but effectively shut down all traffic in and out of the busy Port of Baltimore, which logistics website Visiwise ranked as the 13th busiest container port in the United States. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned that the Key Bridge's collapse would cause "major and protracted supply chain issues" throughout the US economy until it was rebuilt.

Despite the Biden administration's push to quickly rebuild the bridge and get Baltimore's port reopened as soon as possible, some hard-right Republicans are threatening to hold bridge repair funding hostage and are turning it into a hot-button culture war wedge issue. The New Republic's Greg Sargent opined that this is MAGA Republicans' modus operandi. As an example, he pointed out to former President Donald Trump's politicization of Covid-19 relief funds for predominantly Democratic states.

"Republicans and right-wing media figures who are demagoguing the Baltimore bridge collapse aren’t quite doing what Trump did during Covid. But it falls somewhere on the same spectrum of malicious public conduct," Sargent argued. "It’s the ultimate absurdity that in this case, the disaster really is a problem for MAGA country as well for Baltimore and blue America."

Sargent predicted that emergency legislation to fund the reconstruction of the Key Bridge would be exploited by MAGA Republicans in Congress based on the rhetoric of some fringe GOP figures. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin), for example, suggested in a tweet that he may oppose federal funding to restore the Key Bridge by arguing that the shipping companies involved in the crash should first see if insurance would cover the damages — which could cost nearly $1 billion.

Likewise, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) recently complained to far-right network Newsmax that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law indirectly led to the bridge's collapse. Her rationale was that it emphasized more energy efficient infrastructure over traditional infrastructure like roads and bridges. Sargent noted that Mace nonetheless took credit for road and bridge projects in her district funded by the law she voted against.

"It is not a new thing for Republicans to treat disasters in blue areas as less deserving of our collective attention than disasters in red areas. But Trump supercharged these tendencies," Sargent wrote. "[Journalist] Brian Beutler urges us to remember that during Covid, Trump didn’t merely neglect blue areas of the country; he used the pandemic to actively threaten retribution against parts of the country that didn’t support him."

"This kind of thing has become a feature of MAGA politics, as opposed to an incidental by-product of a particular governing vision," he continued. "Trump actively flaunted his treatment of blue America as a zone of disease and debauchery that all but deserved to be abandoned to a fate of mass death and suffering by dint of its moral inferiority to MAGA America. Make no mistake: His very public relishing in his power to do this was central to this performance and, one imagines, to its appeal to the MAGA masses."

Sargent added that some Republicans "appear prepared to step up with a bipartisan response," though Trump is still likely to make the Key Bridge's repair a contentious issue on the campaign trail.

"[W]e deserve to know now what his intentions as president toward the region’s long-term relief effort truly are," Sargent wrote. "More threats and extortion, perhaps?"

Click here to read Sargent's column in full.

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