Wake Up, Mark Meadows: Your Failure to Lead is Costing Lives
At the end of March 2020, with a global pandemic raging, Mark Meadows opted to advance his political career by abandoning North Carolina’s 11th congressional district to assume the role of Trump’s Chief of Staff. When his constituents needed answers and leadership, Meadows chose to leave us to fend for ourselves and left us with no representation during these times of unprecedented uncertainty.
This self-serving decision came after Meadows was one of many members of Congress to vote against protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions in 2019. Instead of listening to the needs of the people he represents, many of whom have been struggling long before the pandemic hit because they were kicked off of Medicaid, he is relentlessly trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Mark Meadows clearly does not care about our health, safety, or our future.
As current White House Chief of Staff, Meadows is tasked with coordinating the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of laying politics aside for the benefit of the American people, however, Meadows is only concerned with acting to the benefit of Donald Trump. Meadows stopped holding daily morning meetings with health professionals and now instead meets with “politically oriented aides.” He regularly criticizes the expertise of Drs. Birx and Fauci and monitors their public appearances to ensure that they “stay on message.” What message? That Trump has the pandemic under control.
Generally, it would seem that data is not something Mark Meadows allows to inform his actions. Meadows has become one of the principal participants in Trump’s disinformation campaign to undermine the credibility of mail-in voting. He is supporting Trump’s attempt to steal the election by touting the idea that universal mail-in voting increases fraud, despite evidence to the contrary.
Mark Meadows’s hold on North Carolina’s 11th congressional district was arguably the result of strategic gerrymandering implemented to deny representation to and to silence the state’s BIPOC voters. One cannot help but notice the blatant hypocrisy of his participation in this “campaign against voter fraud” after we witnessed Meadows participating in and benefiting from egregious voter suppression during his time in Congress. It’s clear that Meadows doesn’t care about protecting our right to vote, and we will not be fooled by his disingenuous concerns for American democracy.
Our generation is done with politicians who ignore, silence, and abandon us and use their power to drive us straight into crisis. He will continue to deny the crises he has helped create. But we are wide awake, and we will not rest until Mark Meadows meets our demands or gets out of the way.
Mark Meadows thinks he can control what happens in our district, and he’s trying to hand off his seat to the candidate of his choice. He and Trump think that they can defeat our movement by stealing our vote. They’ve lined up behind Madison Cawthorne in an attempt to capture the energy of our generation. But Cawthorne does not represent us, and we will not let him speak for us.
Our generation will not be fooled. And we will not hesitate to hold you accountable for your failure to act when we needed you most. Wake up, Mark Meadows!
