Trump’s COVID Response: A Preview of Disasters to Come
Trump’s COVID Response: A Preview of Disasters to Come
Based on his past record, Trump should not be anywhere near American government during the next national emergency.
TRUMP WAS ALREADY PRESIDENT for four years, and we survived. We could do it again—what’s the worst that could happen? So goes the argument from many reluctant Trump supporters and anti-anti-Trumpers who are skeptical that Trump’s deranged rhetoric and nonsensical proposals portend a dark future if he wins re-election. Let’s leave aside, for now, the fact that a second Trump administration would likely have no “adults in the room” (many of the ones who served between 2017 and 2021 are now openly denouncing Trump). Let’s also leave aside the fact that “the worst that could happen” could be the use of mob violence to subvert or dismantle the constitutional system, like what we saw on January 6th, but more organized and with more support from the federal government. The fact is, even if there are adults in the room, even if the guardrails hold, having Trump as president would still be dangerous. Consider the COVID-19 pandemic: It was obviously not a crisis of Trump’s making, but his almost complete failure of leadership made it much worse than it needed to be. It’s worth revisiting this record, because if he is re-elected, he, like every president, would eventually face another crisis.
The high death COVID death toll in the United States—much higher than in other countries comparable in wealth and development—cannot be blamed entirely on Trump. The causes include factors for which he was not responsible such as high levels of obesity, a known COVID risk factor. And it’s also true that the rapid development of the COVID vaccine under the Trump administration was a genuine success—one that, ironically, Trump has felt compelled to downplay because it annoys the vaccine skeptics that have become a key part of his base.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Trump’s response to COVID was a hot mess from the start in which Trump appeared to look tough while frequently minimizing the disease. His occasional deference to experts alternated with petulant resistance to supposedly tyrannical mitigation policies and unhinged promotion of quack therapies.
THE IRRESPONSIBLE POLICIES ARGUABLY started even before the pandemic, when the Trump administration dissolved the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council, which was created under Barack Obama for the specific purpose of managing the response to global health emergencies. Many of its functions and personnel were shifted to other parts of the government. But central coordination from a dedicated office might have lent some coherence to the government’s early efforts—though, obviously, no one can know for sure.
Both Trump and his supporters have often cited the China “travel ban,” effective as of February 2, 2020, as evidence of his strong action against the pandemic. (The MAGA camp has also falsely claimed that the Democratic leadership and the “mainstream media” attacked the ban as racist.) In reality, public health experts say that the ban was belated—45 countries restricted travel from China before the United States did—and largely ineffective. It barred Chinese nationals and other foreign nationals who had been to China in the last 14 days from entering the United States, but U.S. citizens and permanent residents traveling from China were still admitted, often with minimal screening. In many cases, such travelers were simply advised to quarantine at home for 14 days, with no follow-up checks. In the first two months after the “ban” went into effect, 40,000 people entered the country on direct flights from China—thousands of them flying in from Wuhan.
Over the following month, Trump bragged about how he impressed doctors and scientists at the Centers for Disease Control with his grasp of the issues (“a natural ability,” he speculated) and resisted bringing infected cruise ship passengers ashore for quarantine because 21 new cases would make U.S. COVID statistics look worse. He threatened to fire a high-level CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, who enraged him by publicly warning in late February that community spread of the virus was very likely and “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” He derided criticism of his handling of the coronavirus as the Democrats’ “new hoax” (undoubtedly giving ammunition to right-wing conspiracy theories that the disease itself was a hoax). He claimed that his administration was doing “an incredible job” and that, in any case, the virus might simply “go away”: “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” As late as March 10, Trump repeated his “Just stay calm, it will go away” mantra at a White House press briefing and contrasted the 26 deaths from COVID at that point to 8,000 from the flu, while asserting that “we’re taking this unbelievably seriously.” And while the general consensus is that most viral strains in the United States came from Europe, not Asia, he waited until March 11 to limit travel from European countries.
When Trump did announce a 30-day ban on travel from Europe, he bungled his way into another fiasco. After the dramatic declaration that the United States was “suspending all travel from Europe” as of March 13, he mentioned only in passing, and after several other points, that there would be “exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings.” Many panicked American travelers missed that part and scrambled to get home to avoid being stranded. Calls to airlines surged; arrivals from countries subject to the ban rose by about 50 percent in the two days after Trump’s address. Airports were overwhelmed; packed waiting rooms and long lines became pathogenic petri dishes. At COVID screening checkpoints, passengers with a fever and other symptoms were often ushered through with nothing more than a guidance to self-isolate for two weeks.
On March 13, Trump issued several COVID emergency declarations; three days later, under pressure from his medical advisors to do more, he finally acknowledged the urgency of the situation and announced federal stay-at-home and social distancing guidelines—initially set to last 15 days, then extended for 30 more. In April, however, the question of when and how the states should phase out the restrictions devolved into classic Trumpian chaos.
On April 13, after governors from both coasts announced regional plans for reopening, Trump stated at a press briefing that he had “total authority” over the issue—which was incorrect. Then, three days later, apparently after pushback from aides, he seemed to reverse himself, releasing a national guidance for gradual reopening but also stressing that the federal government would defer to the states since “we love them all but they are very, very different.”
The love didn’t last long. The very next day, on April 17, Trump went on his now-infamous Twitter spree calling for the “liberation” of three states—all with Democratic governors—that maintained restrictive policies: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” The invocation of the Second Amendment might have been a reference to the gun safety bills the Virginia governor had recently signed, though some radicals took it as a call to bring weapons to anti-lockdown protests. Some argued at the time that Trump’s tweets were incitement to insurrection against state authorities. Either way, they were grossly reckless.
Come to think of it, “grossly reckless” describes a lot of Trump’s COVID pronouncements from the start of the pandemic. At first he minimized the virus; then he started pushing discredited therapies such as hydroxychloroquine (which the Food and Drug Administration briefly approved for emergency use before reversing the decision based on new data) and far more bizarre quackery such as ultraviolet light and disinfectant injections.
No less irresponsibly, he continued to downplay the pandemic’s toll. On Fox News in July 2020, Trump asserted that “we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world” (Chris Wallace laudably pointed out that the United States had world’s seventh-highest mortality rate from the disease) and dismissed most COVID cases as “the sniffles.” In media appearances and at campaign rallies, he peddled right-wing narratives claiming that only elderly people with other health problems were really at risk, or that the vast majority of deaths officially classified as COVID fatalities were actually from other causes.
Obviously, the Trump administration deserves credit for the swift development of the COVID vaccine—perhaps its singular accomplishment over four years. But even there, the distribution of vaccines and the effort to encourage uptake was a failure by the administration’s own metrics. And, as Philip Bump has pointed out, Trump’s post-presidency advocacy of the vaccine “was halting and constrained, recognizing that there was more political value in standing against the ‘so-called experts’ than in trying to persuade people to protect themselves against the virus.” The vaccination gap between “red” and “blue” communities and even between individuals based on party registration is a well-known fact.
NOT ONLY DID TRUMP FAIL to strengthen the country’s morale in a national crisis; he actively undermined it. His outrageous, buffoonish, often contradictory rhetoric both contributed to a general sense of chaos and uncertainty and emboldened distrust and rejection of public health measures and “establishment” medicine.
Some mainstream commentators today argue that COVID-related public health measures were largely misguided and imposed a severe economic cost while offering dubious benefits. But while the critique of some strategies, such as the delay in reopening schools in many states, is broadly shared today, the usefulness of social distancing mandates including lockdowns has not been debunked. Sweden, sometimes touted as an anti-lockdown success story, had drastically higher death rates than its locked-down Nordic neighbors until vaccination came along. What’s more, maverick scientists who opposed lockdowns in 2020–2021 and pushed for mostly unrealistic strategies to protect the most vulnerable while letting the virus rip through the rest of the population, such as Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University Medical School, have some credibility problems considering their history of minimizing the pandemic’s toll. In other words, COVID revisionism doesn’t get Trump off the hook—especially since the distrust and paranoia toward “establishment” medicine that he has fanned includes vaccination.
Trump’s COVID report card matters not only for an accurate assessment of his presidency, but also because of what it says about the prospects of a second Trump term. Every president eventually faces a crisis of some kind or another. The next crisis might be war, or a financial crisis, or a thousand other things that no one imagines—but what if it’s another novel pathogen?Who would Trump have with him during a public health crisis in his second term?
Out: Dr. Anthony Fauci; in: anti-vaccine crank, conspiracy zealot, and newly minted Trump supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump told an ecstatic crowd at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. “I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines.” The post of CDC director now requires Senate confirmation, and a kook like RFK Jr. probably wouldn’t be able to clear even a Republican-controlled Senate. But he still could do tremendous damage in a “health czar” role with no actual powers, simply by giving validation to the next ivermectin and by boosting anti-vax nonsense.
Out: Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who led the crash program to develop a COVID vaccine, Operation Warp Speed. In: Some Trump lackey like Kash Patel whose allegiance wouldn’t be to the country or the Constitution but to Trump’s whim.
Out: Dr. Deborah Birx, a giant of the public health field who failed to stand up to Trump and refute his nonsense about a magically self-curing virus and bleach injections but at least provided some pressure on the side of science. In: Dr. Scott Atlas, whose approach to public health was, in essence, laissez faire.
It’s easy to look back at the Trump years and declare, “We survived!”—unless you’re one of the thousands of Americans whose death from COVID might have been avoided if not for Trump’s mismanagement, demagoguery, selfishness, penchant for conspiracy theories, and incompetence. There’s no guarantee that any of us, in the next crisis, will be lucky again.