Loeffler seems to have sensed danger. But that’s not what she said to the public. “Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on #Coronavirus readiness,” she said on Twitter in February. “Here’s the truth: @realDonaldTrump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe.”

(For her part, Loeffler denies any connection between her stock market activity and what she learned as a senator: “This is a ridiculous and baseless attack,” she wrote on Twitter late Thursday. “I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisers without my or my husband’s knowledge or involvement.”)

In February, Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, co-wrote an op-ed in which he assured the public that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.” A few days later, however, he sold somewhere between $628,000 and $1.7 million in stock, according to ProPublica. And a few days after that, NPR reported, he warned representatives from select companies and organizations (including donors to his 2016 re-election campaign) that the virus might move local communities to close schools and force the federal government to mobilize the military in response to acute medical need.

“We’re going to send a military hospital there; it’s going to be in tents and going to be set up on the ground somewhere,” Burr said. “It’s going to be a decision the president and DOD make. And we’re going to have medical professionals supplemented by local staff to treat the people that need treatment.”

It’s tempting to say that now is not the time for partisan recrimination. But this is the second consecutive Republican administration to lead the United States to disaster. The difference is that it took George W. Bush most of his two terms to bring the country to the brink of economic collapse — Trump has done it in less than four years. He’s even hit some of the same milestones; Bush let Hurricane Katrina drown New Orleans, Trump let Hurricane Maria destroy Puerto Rico.

In other words, now absolutely is the time for recriminations, because it’s the only way we might avoid another such administration in a country where control of government moves like a pendulum.

The public needs to know that the Republican Party is culpable for the present crisis, just as it was culpable for the Great Recession, even if it did not originate either. It needs to know that in the face of a deadly pandemic, some Republican lawmakers appear to have looked to profit rather than to prepare. It needs to understand that the deadly incompetence of Republican governance is a feature, not a bug.