Trump’s Coronavirus Response Was Beyond Incompetent
He
wasn’t oblivious to the danger. He just didn’t care.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 10, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ET
Most cases in which cars kill
pedestrians surely reflect negligence: drivers who were too busy talking on
their cellphones or thinking about their golf games to notice the senior
citizen crossing the street in front of them. A handful are acts of murder,
like when a man killed a woman by plowing his car into
counterprotesters at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va.
But sometimes drivers end up killing
other people because they were engaging in clearly dangerous behavior, like
driving well above the speed limit and running multiple red lights. The
resulting deaths aren’t considered murder. But they might be considered
manslaughter, which is when you didn’t specifically intend to kill someone but
your irresponsible actions killed them all the same.
Until this week I thought that Donald
Trump’s disastrous mishandling of Covid-19 was basically negligence, even if
that negligence was willful — that is, that he failed to understand the gravity
of the threat because he didn’t want to hear about it and refused to take
actions that could have saved thousands of American lives because actually doing
effective policy isn’t his kind of thing.
But I was wrong.
According to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” Trump wasn’t oblivious; he knew
by early February that Covid-19 was both deadly and airborne. And this isn’t a case of
conflicting recollections: Woodward has Trump on tape. Yet Trump continued to
hold large indoor rallies, disparage precautionary measures and pressure states
to reopen business despite the risk of infection.
And he’s still doing the same things,
even now.
In other words, a large fraction of the
more than 200,000 Americans who will surely die of Covid-19 by Election Day
will have been victims of something much worse than mere negligence.
Let’s be clear: A private citizen who
did what we now know Trump did would definitely be in big legal trouble. For
example, think of the lawsuits likely brought against a corporate C.E.O. who
knew that his company’s workplace was dangerous, but lied about it, refused to
take any precautions and threatened workers with dismissal if they failed to
come in.
Now, Trump won’t face comparable
accountability, partly because of the office he holds, partly because the party
he leads is totally supine and won’t hold him accountable for anything. But
let’s hold off on the savviness for a moment, OK? The enormity of Trump’s
malfeasance should be the main story here, not speculation about whether he’ll
face any consequences.
Are there any excuses
for Trump’s actions? One argument you sometimes hear is that once you adjust
for population you find that some European countries have
lost around as many people to Covid-19 as Trump’s America — although our recent
rate of new deaths is
much higher, so we’ll soon be pulling away from the pack.
But when an ordinary citizen’s actions
lead to someone else’s death, both circumstances and motivation matter.
Of the other high-death countries,
Italy was the first Western nation to have a large outbreak, suffering many
deaths before even the experts fully grasped what needed to be done.
Sweden and Britain suffered badly because they initially
relied on the doctrine of “herd immunity” to resolve the pandemic. This was
terrible policy, which Britain eventually abandoned. Sweden never officially
changed its policy, although in practice it has ended up practicing a lot of
social distancing.
But there’s a big difference between
mistakes, however deadly, and deliberate deception. Only in America did the
head of state know that he was reassuring people about a disease he knew was
both deadly and easily spread.
Trump justified his concealment of
Covid-19’s dangers as a desire to avoid “panic.” That’s pretty rich coming from
the guy who began his presidency with warnings about “American carnage” and
who’s currently trying to terrify suburbanites with visions of rampaging Antifa
hordes. But what exactly were the dangers of panic that worried him?
After all, telling the truth about the
coronavirus wouldn’t have been like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The
only things the truth might have scared people into doing would have been
staying home where possible, avoiding crowds, washing their hands and so on.
And these were all things people should have been doing — in fact, once
people started “panicking” in places like New York, infection rates came way
down.
Of course, we all
have a pretty good idea what Trump was actually talking about: All though this
crisis credible sources have reported that he wanted to
downplay the crisis out of fear that bad news might hurt his beloved stock
market. That is, he felt that he needed to sacrifice thousands of American
lives to prop up the Dow.
As it happens, he was wrong: Stocks
have stayed high despite an ever-rising death toll. But the fact that he was
wrong about the trade-off doesn’t alter the fact that his willingness to make
that trade-off was utterly immoral.
The bottom line is that it’s wrong to
say that Trump mishandled Covid-19, that his response was incompetent. No, it
wasn’t; it was immoral, bordering on criminal.