Trump’s pre-spin seems to blame military, police
interactions for coronavirus diagnosis
By
Oct. 2, 2020 at 8:37 a.m. CDT
A
couple of weeks ago, President Trump was fending off a brutal, anonymously
sourced story in the Atlantic about comments he had allegedly made disparaging military veterans and
the nation’s war dead. The comments sounded like things Trump had said
publicly before, particularly about the late senator John McCain,
yet he denied he would ever be so insensitive.
But in
the hours after we learned that counselor to the president Hope Hicks had
tested positive for the novel coronavirus and
before we learned Trump himself had it, he offered some strange comments that
seemed to lay the groundwork for how he could explain his impending diagnosis:
It might have come from the military or law enforcement.
“You
know, it’s very hard, when you’re with soldiers, when you’re with airmen, when
you’re with Marines, and I’m with — and the police officers,” Trump said. “I’m
with them so much. And when they come over here, it’s very hard to say, stay
back, stay back. It’s a tough kind of a situation.”
Trump
then turned to his own test and to Hicks. “So, I just went for a test, and
we’ll see what happens. I mean, who knows? But you know her very well. She’s
fantastic. And she’s done a great job.”
And
then he again returned to the alleged potential spreaders.
“But
it’s very, very hard when you are with people from the military or … law
enforcement, and they come over to you, and they want to hug you, and they want
to kiss you, because we really have done a good job for them,” Trump said. “And
you get close, and things happen.”
The
confluence of circumstances Thursday night led to plenty of speculation. The
White House has access to rapid-response tests, so how could Trump not know at
that point whether he had tested positive? Hicks reportedly fell ill Wednesday
and was quarantined on Air Force One. But by Thursday night, Trump still didn’t
have a final word? (Trump’s White House has rarely been forthcoming with his
health information.)
It was
also an odd way to explain Hicks’s positive test. However much military members
and law enforcement appreciate what the Trump White House has done for them,
are they really going up to Trump’s low-profile senior counselor, who rarely
speaks publicly, to hug her and try to kiss her?
It’s clear
Trump was setting the stage for how he would explain either Hicks’s positive
test or his own. His and the White House’s cavalier posture toward mask-wearing
and continuing to hold large public rallies and events was suddenly looking
more foolhardy than ever, and Trump sought to pre-blame it on something else —
something that, conveniently, reflected a deep affection for Donald Trump.
His
explanation also tracks with his often questionable stories about just how much
affection supporters show him in private. Just this week, he cited a
construction worker who he said was crying in gratitude when they met. He has
told very similar stories about a coal miner, a steelworker, a farmer and a man
who looked like a football player, as CNN’s Daniel Dale noted Wednesday, often with
plenty of “sirs” interspersed. There is no doubt supporters will be in awe and
perhaps become emotional when meeting a president, but Trump’s history of fabulism looms
over his descriptions.
Whether
there’s some truth to it, here was the president effectively blaming military
members and law enforcement for not being more careful when meeting their
country’s leaders; there’s no other way to read it. It also didn’t allow for
the idea that there should have been precautions to prevent these alleged
scenes, which the Secret Service is more than capable of providing.
But
Trump has never been interested in all of that, and he clearly set the tone for
the coronavirus being allowed to spread — whether it’s in how the White House
or his campaign has handled precautions such as masks and social distancing, or
in how he has downplayed the severity of the virus, which has led his
supporters to eschew such basic precautions, much like Trump has.
This is
unquestionably a sad moment in U.S. history; any president coming down with a
serious illness can be destabilizing, not just for the country but for the
world. But Trump’s effort to pre-spin this one is a thoroughly odd one, and
it’s one that glosses over so much of what probably contributed to an outcome
that health officials and his critics have long warned about — and has now
happened.