Austin writes:

The unexpected scale of the pandemic in Detroit and Chicago, and its pronounced impact on African-American communities in cities across the Midwest, lays bare a longstanding reality: The older industrial cities of the Midwest are home to America’s sharpest Black-white divides.

More specifically, Austin documents the disproportionate percentage of urban African-Americans suffering from the pandemic:

In Milwaukee County, black residents account for 27 percent of the local population, but 51 percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases and 57 percent of Covid-19 deaths.

The same pattern emerges in Illinois and Michigan, Austin writes:

In the city of Chicago and suburban Cook County, Ill., the rate of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people is nearly 470 for Black residents — more than twice that for white and Latino or Hispanic residents. Covid-19 death rates for Chicago’s Black residents are more than four times as high as for other race groups. In the city of Detroit, Black residents account for 79 percent of the local population, but 88 percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths.

In fact, Hispanics are also disproportionately stricken by Covid-19. USA Today reports, for example, that

In New York, a grim tally tells the tale: Latinos make up 29 percent of the population but are 39 percent of those who have succumbed to Covid-19.

The racial divisions in the Midwest, Austin writes, were crucial to the outcome of the 2016 election:

Racially divided regions such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee fed the rise of Donald Trump, with his scapegoating of people of color and nostalgic appeals to white working-class voters yearning for a return to the “good old days.”

Bringing the issue back to the present election, Austin pointed out:

In our state capital of Lansing, an April 15 rally ostensibly protesting social distancing measures was notable for its participants’ use of Trump and Confederate iconography.

The pandemic has, in turn, inspired a renewed Christian right critique of America’s cities. Erick-Woods Erickson, the conservative evangelical American blogger and radio host, posted on his website “A Theology of Cities and The Pandemic” on April 19. It is a diatribe against urban America:

It is no coincidence in scripture that the first city came from Cain, filled with the inbred product of his and his sisters’ relations. Time and time again, God’s people are poorer and in less urban areas. Bad things happen everywhere, but a lot of bad things are magnified in urban areas. Jesus died at the hands of an urban mob. Babel’s residents decided they could rival God.

Now, however, the unbelievers whom Erickson contends populate American cities are getting their comeuppance: “Those who’ve had a good life now outside the presence of God will find nothing good while those who believe will live in splendor.”

Trump and his allies are not only supporting the anti-lockdown movement but providing their own variant of moral justification for it.

Stephen Moore, a White House economics adviser, described the protesters in such states as Michigan and Minnesota as following in the footsteps of Rosa Parks, a heroine of the civil rights movement. “I call these people modern-day Rosa Parks. They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties,” Moore said, according to a report in The Washington Post.

Trump, in turn, joined the chorus. On April 19 he declared:

I have never seen so many American flags at a rally as I have at these rallies. These people love our country. They want to get back to work.

I asked Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and author of the book “White Identity Politics,” about the likelihood of Trump succeeding in capitalizing on the differing percentages of whites and African-Americans suffering from the virus. She replied:

It does not surprise me that Trump tries to shift blame for the pandemic onto communities of color in urban areas. The urban-rural divide is also a racial one, and many of Trump’s core supporters are white people from rural areas that have thus far been somewhat insulated from the disease but not from the economic fallout.

In addition, Jardina continued, it is

unsurprising that most of the people protesting the stay-at-home orders appear to be white. The depressing reality, however, is that it’s likely to be Black and Latino Americans who suffer the most economically from the pandemic. Black unemployment is already at least twice as high as white unemployment, and that gap is likely to grow.

Trump is egging on lockdown protesters in order to generate enthusiasm and drive turnout on Election Day, but Ron Brownstein, writing in The Atlantic, warns that this gambit could backfire.

The Coronavirus pandemic appears destined to widen the political divide between the nation’s big cities and the smaller places beyond them. And that could narrow Donald Trump’s possible pathways to re-election.

The concentration of the virus in cities, Brownstein writes,

threatens to exacerbate one of Trump’s most conspicuous political vulnerabilities: his historical weakness in big metropolitan areas that are full of the minority and white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

Brownstein cites data illustrating the urban- rural split: “The counties in New York State that fall under the largest metro category — New York City and its environs — have 12,454 cases per million residents.” That compares with 915 per million in the nonmetro counties. In Michigan, “the caseload drops from 4,787 per million residents in the largest counties” to “just 346 in the nonmetro counties.”

If the economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic follows the same pattern as the pandemic itself, Brownstein writes, it will force Trump “to generate even bigger margins in small communities to offset a potentially weaker performance than last time in the largest ones.”

That, in fact, is Trump’s current strategy.

Will Bunch, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is more outspoken in his critique of Trump and the coronavirus liberation movement, arguing that the protesters are unknowingly fronting for the wealthiest Americans:

Right-wing special interests, like the billionaire family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are terrified that the 22 million unemployed will demand a social welfare state.

Their goal? To “shift blame away from Trump’s multiple failures on the coronavirus and instead onto public-health-minded governors.”

“These billionaires and millionaires,” Bunch continued, “have zero moral qualms about working with some of the worst white-supremacists or neo-fascists in order to make sure a crowd turns out.”