Trump’s Deliberate Coronavirus Deception
Bob
Woodward’s tapes tell us something new about how the president lies.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 10, 2020
Recordings, real or rumored, have been
a leitmotif of the Trump era.
There was the “Access Hollywood” tape,
in which Donald Trump confessed to his proclivity for serial sexual assault.
The fabled “pee tape,” the existence of which would have been pornographic
proof of Russiagate, haunted the first few years of the Trump presidency.
James Comey hoped there were recordings
of what he described as Trump’s mafia-like efforts to suborn him. (“Lordy, I
hope there are tapes.”) Michael Cohen released a tape in which the
president assented to a scheme to
buy the silence of a former Playboy model he allegedly slept with. Omarosa
Manigault Newman had a tape in
which she and two other Black Trump staffers worried about the existence
of another tape, which she
claimed had caught Trump using the vilest of racial slurs. The actor Tom Arnold
had a whole cable series about his search, ultimately fruitless, for
incriminating Trump tapes.
Trump recordings loom so large because
they offer the prospect of breaking through Trump’s alternative reality, of
nailing down this most slippery and mendacious of presidents, of showing
everyone who he really is. But even
those that materialize are often quickly forgotten, as Trump’s approval rating
stays low but stubbornly stable and one scandal is eclipsed by another. Our
politics suffers no shortage of incontrovertible proof of Trump’s venality.
What it lacks is accountability.
It’s possible, maybe even likely, that the famed journalist Bob Woodward’s utterly damning tapes of Trump discussing the coronavirus will fall into this same nothing-matters cycle. But decent people with public platforms should try to make sure that doesn’t happen.
It’s not just that
these tapes reveal the president lying about the pandemic that has ravaged
America on his watch. What’s shocking — even after more than three and a half
numbing years — is the deliberate, willful nature of the lies. Unlike most
Trump tapes, Woodward’s actually tell us something new about the president,
rather than just confirming what we think we already know.
Because Trump is a prodigious consumer
of propaganda, as well as a creator of it, it’s not always clear how aware he
is of spreading disinformation. People who’ve spent time with him often
conclude that truth has no meaning for him. Woodward quoted Dan Coats,
Trump’s former director of national intelligence, saying: “To him, a lie is not
a lie.
It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t
know the difference between the truth and a lie.” Trump creates for his
supporters a carapace of malignant fantasy, but he often seems to live inside
it with them.
Yet in recordings Woodward has released
of Trump talking about the coronavirus — excerpts from interviews conducted for
Woodward’s new book, “Rage” — the president doesn’t sound ignorant or deluded.
Rather, he sounds uncommonly lucid. On Feb. 7, Trump described the virus as
airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” adding, “this is 5
percent versus 1 percent, or less than 1 percent.” It’s not clear whether Trump
thought that Covid-19 had a 5 percent case fatality rate — a number that seemed
plausible in February — but he clearly knew that compared with the flu, it was
several times as likely to kill.
And yet he told the
country just the opposite. “The percentage for the flu is under 1
percent,” Trump said on March 7.
“But this could also be under 1 percent because many of the people that aren’t
that sick don’t report.” Despite knowing that the virus was airborne, he mocked
mask-wearing and held several large indoor rallies. He told Woodward in March
that “plenty of young people” were getting sick, but over the summer would
insist that 99 percent of cases were “totally harmless” and that children are “almost immune.”
We know now that this wasn’t just Trump
being buffoonish and engaging in magical thinking. It was conscious deception.
Publicly, Trump kept insisting that the virus would disappear.
Privately, he told Woodward: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like
playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Of course, Trump usually loves creating
panic — about immigrants, about antifa, about low-income people invading the
suburbs. But there is one place he wants to maintain tranquillity — in the
financial markets. “Just stay calm, it will go away,” he said on March 10.
“We want to protect our shipping industry, our cruise industry, cruise ships,
we want to protect our airline industry.” He added, “A lot of good things are
going to happen. The consumer is ready.”
And so Trump lied to the country about
the calamity that would soon overtake it. His administration didn’t ramp up a
national testing or contact-tracing program. He and his supporters pressured
states to open up prematurely. A July Pew poll found
that only 46 percent of Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican
Party considered the coronavirus a major threat to public health, compared with
85 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Trump could have made
Republicans take the virus seriously. He chose not to.
Not long after attending the
president’s June rally in Tulsa, Okla., the former Republican presidential
candidate Herman Cain died of Covid-19. In August, whoever is maintaining
Cain’s Twitter account tweeted, “It looks
like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to
be.” It was Trump who made such a cultish commitment to denying the lethality
of Covid-19 into a sign of loyalty. And all the time, he knew better.
Trump supporters may not care that
their president has knowingly endangered them, withholding potentially
lifesaving information that he readily confided to an elite Washington
journalist. But that doesn’t change the importance of what Woodward has
captured on tape. It’s now clear that just because Trump is lying to us, that
doesn’t mean he’s lying to himself.
Trump’s lies sabotaged efforts to
contain the coronavirus, almost certainly leading to many more deaths than it
would have caused under a minimally competent and non-sociopathic leader. On
Sept. 9, there were 1,176 coronavirus deaths in the United States. In Canada,
there were two.
When someone’s
actions lead to the death of another, we evaluate that person’s intent and
state of mind in order to assign the right measure of blame. When a president’s
actions lead to the deaths of thousands, we should do the same.