The laughable obviousness of Trump’s ‘cure’ gambit
By
Oct. 9, 2020 at 3:20 p.m. CDT
As he
prepared to fly to a rally on Oct. 20, 2018, President Trump made a surprising
announcement.
“We’re
looking at putting in a very major tax cut for middle-income people. And if we
do that it will be sometime just prior, I would say, to November,” Trump told reporters, to their
bafflement. “A major tax cut. We are going to be putting in, and are studying
very deeply right down, round-the-clock, a major tax cut for middle-income
people. Not for business at all, for middle-income people.”
This,
he said, would happen “sometime around the first of November, maybe a little
before that.”
From
the moment the words left his mouth, it was obvious that he was simply making
it up. This was about two weeks before a midterm election, when nearly every
single member of the House was on the ballot. They were going to fly back to
Washington to vote in support of a massive bill that no one had seen? It defied
logic, save for the obvious: Trump wanted people to think that Republicans were
on the brink of cutting their taxes, in hopes that they’d vote for Republicans.
People
did vote for Republicans that year — but an awful lot more voted for Democrats,
giving the party a hefty majority in the House.
Trump
is a salesman. And not only is he a salesman, he’s a guy who spent decades
selling real estate in New York City, which, for the uninitiated, is a bit like
spending decades selling used cars in Cleveland. Trump wants to know what he
can do to get you into that Trump Organization property today, and if that
means calling a 400-square-foot windowless apartment with no bathroom a
“traditional Manhattan walk-up,” so be it.
If he
similarly has to promise that a massive tax cut is imminent for you to sign
another two-year lease on the House: promise made.
This
year, Trump’s offered an impressive array of lures to try to close the deal
with voters for his reelection. A payroll tax holiday until
after the election. Money for medications for seniors.
Various bombshell revelations which seem to be taking their time in coming.
He’s
invested most heavily, of course, in a treatment for the novel coronavirus. If
he were able to, say, start distributing a vaccine before Nov. 3, perhaps
voters would forget about their skepticism about how he’d handled the pandemic
to date. Perhaps there would be a burst of optimism that leads to an outpouring
of affection for the incumbent president and another four years in office.
The
Food and Drug Administration, though, has decided that it wants to ensure that such a vaccine is safe
for the public before they allow it to be administered. Trump
tried to speed up the FDA’s process, backing down in the face of criticism.
This, predictably, led to a complaint on Twitter.
There
is no reason that a vaccine necessarily needs to be approved before Election
Day beyond politics, of course. That Trump is indifferent to making clear his
intent would be surprising, if not scandalous, were we not all effectively
immunized against Trump’s behavior.
Without
a vaccine to tout, Trump was clearly in the market for another October
surprise. And with his coronavirus diagnosis last week, he stumbled onto one.
For
months, Trump has been promising the imminent arrival of effective therapeutic
treatments for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. With the regularity
of a landlord insisting that the plumber would be there tomorrow, Trump pledged
that great things were in the works, over and over.
“A lot
of people are looking into other things like, as an example, vaccines and
therapeutics,” he said in May. “You
know, therapeutically, we’re doing some things that are, I think, going to be
released pretty soon that are amazing — and for the cure, ultimately for the
cure. And I think the cure, the therapeutics and the vaccines that are
happening right now, I think you’re going to be very impressed over the next
number of weeks.”
Well,
America, Donald Trump is happy to report that the cure has arrived, 20 weeks
later.
In a
video recorded Wednesday, Trump touted regeneron, a medication he received
while briefly hospitalized last weekend.
“They
call them therapeutic,” he said. “But to me, it
wasn’t therapeutic. It just made me better. Okay? I call that a cure.”
In a
pair of conversations Thursday, he made a similar claim.
“Regeneron
was — I view it as a cure, not just a therapeutic,” he told Fox Business’s
Maria Bartiromo. “I view it as a cure because I took it.”
“What I
took is incredible. To me, I viewed it as a cure,” he told Fox News’s
Sean Hannity. “It’s incredible. And we’re going to get it to everybody, free of
charge. It’s going to hospitals. It’s starting very soon.”
Got it?
There’s a drug that’s not just a treatment but a cure for the
coronavirus. And it’s going to be free and everyone’s going to get it.
And,
heck, maybe a tax cut, too!
Regeneron,
as far as we know, is not a cure. It’s not even clear that the
treatment was actually responsible for any improvement in Trump’s condition.
This is why controlled trials exist: to evaluate objectively whether there’s a
real benefit from a drug. Such trials are currently underway, but not completed, meaning the verdict is still
out.
By now,
Americans should know better than to take Trump’s advocacy of a treatment at
face value. The president insisted that hydroxychloroquine would probably prove
to be an effective treatment for covid-19, apparently making a bet that he
could get credit for its use should he get on the bandwagon for it early
enough. Clinical trials, though, have failed to show a significant benefit from
the drug — and some risk. Convalescent plasma, a therapy Trump embraced in an
effort to show progress right before the Republican convention, hasn’t yet yielded a
consistent, demonstrable positive effect.
Regardless,
not everybody will get regeneron soon. The company that produces it is pushing
the FDA to grant it emergency use authorization so that it can be deployed more
widely to patients. It’s making 50,000 doses available
to that end.
Or,
enough doses to treat slightly more people than were confirmed to have contracted the virus Thursday.
This,
too, should sound familiar: “Everyone will be able to get it” was Trump’s line
about testing for months before widespread testing actually being available. He
said in early March that anyone who wanted a test could get one, a claim that
was so obviously false even at the time that
it barely even makes it into collections of Trump’s most egregious coronavirus
misrepresentations.
Let’s
say for the sake of argument, though, that the government were to work to
produce enough regeneron to treat 760,000 Americans, 1 out of every 10 recorded
cases at this point. The Guardian reports that
treatments like regeneron, known as monoclonal antibody treatments, generally
run in the neighborhood of $96,000. Meaning that Trump may be committing to
about $73 billion in spending — to treat a tenth of existing cases.
He’s
also relying on a treatment derived by tests
conducted on cells derived from human fetal tissue, a practice that his
administration ostensibly opposes. In
the pantheon of questionable claims being made by Trump, here, this barely
cracks the upper tier.
Again,
the strategy isn’t mysterious. Trump wants to tell voters that he delivered a
free, accessible cure to the virus that’s upended the country for the past
seven months. He wants to shift the conversation about the pandemic away from
“how did you let 210,000 people die” and toward “thank you for saving millions
of lives.” The only problem is that even this promise is obviously not going to
come to fruition any time soon, even if regeneron turns out to be the cure that
Trump claims.
Still
time to promise a tax cut, Mr. President.
