Miami Beach Mayor Calls Out Trump, FL Gov. DeSantis for Downplaying Pandemic Surge: ‘Everybody’s Become the Mayor in Jaws
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber not so subtly invoked one of the most well-known cinematic examples of political cravenness in calling out President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for their incessant downplaying of the threat from the surging Covid pandemic.
Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Gelber addressed the conflicting messages that local, state, and federal public officials are offering the public.
“Your governor continues to say the situation is the result simply of more testing and that these younger people won’t see as high a fatality rate,” Blitzer noted. “How can you keep Floridians safe when the governor keeps downplaying the reality?”
“Well, I mean, the problem is that it’s not obviously positive tests, because there are 343 people in intensive care today. That was less than half that number 14 days ago,” Gelber pointed out. “I know those people and their families obviously would disagree that this is just about more testing. We are in the midst of a very, very vicious spike in our community in Miami-Dade county. And one thing you can’t have is for a governor or a president trying to downplay it as if it’s not an urgent thing we need to pay attention to. I sort of feel like everybody’s become the mayor in Jaws where it’s fine, the water’s fine, just go on and swim. And that’s not healthy right now because people need to know the challenge so they know what to do about it.”
Gelber was invoking the infamous Jaws scene where Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn, desperate to attract tourists to his town, happily tells a reporter “The beaches are open,” right before the great white shark stalking the area strikes again.
“How worried are you, mayor, that the hospitals in Miami beach, in Miami itself throughout the county could be overwhelmed fairly soon?” Blitzer followed up.
“The real problem is that because this thing shows up two weeks after a spike, the spikes we just saw, we are not feeling yet in intensive care or in ventilators and in the sort of the critical care that a lot of those folks need,” Gelber noted. “The real concern we just saw this weekend in these last four days is going to manifest itself in two weeks in ways that we’re not prepared for. So this is real, and I think everybody needs to understand that because if they did, they would know what to do. They would wear masks. They would socially distance themselves. They would take precautions that every doctor I know tells them they should take.”
“The only thing I can say is that you can’t tell people this isn’t a problem if it is a problem,” Gelber continued. “It’s like a doctor telling you not to worry about something he knows is going to really impact you. There’s no upside to doing it. At some point we’re going to face the real repercussions of this in a very, very terrible way. I hope the governor does it soon. He needs a mask mandate, just so people will start to comply with it the way they did when we gave them the requirement to wear seatbelts. People listen to a unified message from their political leaders, we just don’t have one right now.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
