Trump’s COVID Response Was Worse Than We Remember

He misled the public, mismanaged the crisis, and missed chances to save lives.

From The Bulwark, by Mona Charen:

A MORE SOBER COUNTRY, recognizing that another pandemic sometime is a certainty, would look back at our COVID response and perform an after-action report. What did we do right and what did we do wrong? Should we stockpile PPE, ventilators, and other equipment or would they decay too much over time? How should we ramp up testing and contact tracing when the next new bug arrives? Did lockdowns prevent deaths? Did we keep schools closed too long in light of evidence that children were not very vulnerable to the virus? States were forced into an unseemly competition for resources during COVID. How much federal coordination do we need in anticipation of the next epidemic?

But a serious country would also look back at Trump’s greatest challenge during his presidency and remember how that went.

Rarely have we seen such an embarrassing failure. It began with denial of the problem. It wasn’t as if Trump was misinformed. He knew from the start that the virus was deadly. Trump told Bob Woodward in a February 2020 phone call that “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. . . . This is deadly stuff.”

But in his public statements, Trump repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the virus. On January 22, 2020, he said, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” On February 7, he tweeted:

Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days. . . . Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.

On February 10, he again reported on a chat with Xi, reassuring Americans that

I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control. I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that’s a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard.

On February 26, he urged people to wash their hands (fair enough) but then suggested that the new virus was “the same as the flu”—exactly the opposite of what he told Woodward.

On February 27, he predicted that COVID would “disappear . . . it’s like a miracle. . . . And from our shores, we, you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”Join

On February 28, Trump said the Democrats were politicizing the coronavirus, calling it their “new hoax.”

Trump’s principal actions as chief executive in the early days of the pandemic were to enact travel bans from China and later Europe. These he described as the “most aggressive acts in history to prevent the spread in the United States.” He did nothing to initiate a testing program, though he did assert falsely that anyone who wanted a test could get one. The virus, he claimed, was not as serious as the flu, and alarm was due to the press being in “hysteria mode.”

In March, Trump urged that the Grand Princess cruise ship, with sick passengers aboard, not be permitted to dock in San Francisco because he didn’t want to increase the number of cases counted in the United States. “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Also in March 2020, citing a small French study, Trump declared that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, taken together with an antibiotic, could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” and should “be put in use immediately.” Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, attempted to insert caution, saying reports were “anecdotal,” but Trump persisted, adding that “we have millions of units ordered.”

On April 3, Trump mentioned that the CDC was now recommending that people wear masks, but said that he would not wear one.

By July, with the number of cases rising sharply, Trump suggested that the tests were picking up trivial cases: “Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day. They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test.” He added that many are “going to get better very quickly.” By that point, 3.7 million Americans had been infected and more than 140,000 had died.

Also in July, Trump elevated Dr. Stella Immanuel on Twitter. Dr. Immanuel touted hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID and denied that masks were effective. She also believed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

In a September 2020 campaign stop, Trump said that COVID affects “virtually nobody,” mainly just “elderly people, elderly people with heart problems, and other problems, if they have other problems, that’s what it really affects, that’s it.”

Also in September, Trump seized on a piece of disinformation circulating on right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit to the effect that only 6 percent of deaths from COVID could actually be attributed to the virus. Trump told Fox News that “I saw a statistic come out the other day, talking about only 6 percent of the people actually died from COVID, which is very interesting—that they died from other reasons.”

Trump modeled contempt for masking, mocking reporters and others for wearing them. He held huge rallies and White House indoor parties that became superspreader events. When he himself became infected with COVID, he failed to disclose it to associates like Chris Christie (who wound up in intensive care) and arguably attempted to infect Joe Biden at the first presidential debate.

Trump denied the problem, failed to coordinate a federal response other than banning travel, embraced quack cures, and modeled antisocial behavior. After first praising Xi Jinping to the skies for his “strong” control of the virus, he switched to name calling—the “Kung Flu,” the “China virus”—to incite xenophobic responses. He really did only one big thing right—backing Operation Warp Speed, which hastened the development of the vaccine.

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THE PARTY THAT USED TO BE KNOWN as the GOP has now been thoroughly recast as MAGA (they really should change the formal name), and Trump’s acolytes are demonstrating the same contempt for facts and decency that he embodies. Instead of evaluating the nation’s COVID response, Republicans in the House held a hearing this week to continue their project of demonizing Fauci. It isn’t enough to say that he might have erred by changing the masking recommendations. No, they’ve gone full nutcase: Fauci conspired with the CIA to shape perceptions. Fauci is the source of the virus. He profited while people died. He covered up the lab leak theory. (It is true that many unjustifiably heaped scorn on the lab leak theory, but Fauci wasn’t one of them.) Or, in the words of Marjorie Taylor Greene, “COVID was manufactured in a lab funded by Fauci.”

These are unserious people in thrall to a sociopathic clown. Trump’s greatest test came in the final year of his presidency when the nation faced a true emergency and he failed spectacularly. The U.S. death rate from COVID far exceeded that of peer nations. That was not due to excessive lockdowns or masking. It was due to incompetence in the White House. Time for a great remembering.