The
Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House
The best security system and the most solicitous medical officers
in the world could not protect Donald Trump from a danger that he insisted on
belittling and ignoring.
October 3, 2020
From the start of his Presidency, Donald Trump has threatened the
health and the security of the United States. It has now been made clear that
Trump’s incompetence, cynicism, and recklessness have threatened his own
welfare. Even the best security system and the most solicitous medical officers
in the world could not protect him from a danger that he insisted on belittling
and ignoring. On Friday, at 12:54 a.m., Trump announced by Twitter that he and the
First Lady had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. By the end of the
evening, “out of an abundance of caution,” the President had gone to Walter
Reed hospital to spend “the next few days. ” The Trumps join the more than
seven million other Americans who have contracted the virus. More than two hundred
thousand have died from covid-19, the disease it causes. Most of them were
older than sixty-five. Trump is seventy-four.
The contrast between Trump’s airy dismissals of
the pandemic’s severity and the profound pain and anxiety endured by so many
Americans has helped define the era in which we live. Hours before he announced
the diagnosis, Trump claimed, in a speech recorded for the annual Al Smith
Dinner for Catholic charities, that “the end of the pandemic is in sight, and
next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.”
Any ailing individual ought to be able to depend
on the best wishes of others—and on affordable, decent health care. Trump can
depend on both, even if millions of Americans cannot. We can only hope that he
and his wife get through the virus in a couple of weeks with minimal suffering,
and, with prime medical attention and a modicum of luck, there’s reason to
think that they will. But, as President and as a candidate for reëlection,
Trump should not count on the silencing of American citizens—on a deference
that he has never shown to the people whom he swore to protect and has not. Because
of his ineptitude and his deceit, because he has encouraged a culture of
heedlessness about the wearing of masks and a lethal disrespect for scientific
fact, he bears a grave responsibility for what has happened in this country. It
will never be known precisely how many preventable deaths can be ascribed to
his irresponsibility, but modest estimates run into the tens of thousands. Yet
Trump’s insistence that Americans pay the virus little mind never ends. Just
before the death toll reached two hundred thousand, last month, he declared at
a rally in Ohio that the virus “affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing
thing.”
In terms of scale, the West Wing is less like
the Kremlin or the Élysée Palace than like the cramped executive offices of a
medium-sized insurance company. The hallways are tight. The chairs in the
Cabinet Room sit close to one another. The Oval Office itself, where Presidents
routinely hold working sessions with many aides, is smaller than you might
expect. And yet numerous reports in the press have described how, owing to the
President’s attitude, employees, reporters, and visitors to the West Wing are
disdained or mocked if they wear a mask.
The Centers for Disease Control and other
public-health institutions have long said that wearing masks is essential to
minimizing the spread of the coronavirus. Trump has been of another opinion, a
delusional one. In April, as he would so many times, he waved the counsel away,
saying, “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” He went on, “I don’t know,
somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute desk, the
great Resolute desk. I think wearing a face mask as I greet Presidents, Prime
Ministers, dictators, kings, queens—I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for
myself.”
That this perilous variety of magical thinking
has encouraged all manner of self-destructive behavior across the country—in
crowded bars and on beaches, at motorcycle rallies, at Trump rallies––heightens
not only the chances of lethal outbreaks in countless cities and towns but also
the divisions among our citizens. Trump regularly mocks his opponent, Joe
Biden, for taking care to wear a mask at public events. “Every time you see
him, he’s got a mask,” he said during Tuesday night’s Presidential debate in
Cleveland. “He could be speaking two hundred feet away, and he shows up with
the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” (On Friday morning, the Democratic
standard-bearer tweeted, “Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and
First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery. We will continue to pray for the
health and safety of the president and his family.”)
It is difficult to overstate the psychological
overload that the drama of the Trump Presidency presents to anyone who has been
following the narrative. Take a week in the life: One day we learn that Trump,
who is alleged to be the wealthiest President in U.S. history, paid just seven
hundred and fifty dollars in federal income tax during his first year in
office. Then comes a debate performance in which he tries to baselessly
undermine mail-in voting and asks the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, to
“stand back and stand by”—presumably, to be mobilized should he lose. He made
it plain, as he has in his public speeches, that he is not so much running for
reëlection as running against the election itself, hoping to invalidate its
results preëmptively with threats and conspiracy theories. Then, at an ugly,
mask-free rally in Minnesota on Wednesday, Trump riled the crowd, declaring
that a Biden Presidency would “inundate your state with a historic flood of
refugees.” Misinformation and violence, too, are contagions, and Trump, who
sees only political advantage in fomenting schism and mistrust, has long been a
superspreader.
There is no way of knowing how the President’s illness will shape the coming weeks. The polls suggest a motivation for the desperation of his rhetoric and his tactics: the last time there was a polling deficit like the one we’re now seeing at this point in a national election was in 1996, when Bob Dole trailed Bill Clinton all the way to Election Day. The President is obsessed with menaces—posed by shadowy members of a “deep state,” by “the radical left,” by foreigners of all sorts. But the gravest menace to public health and public order has come from within the White House. So long as
Trump holds office, no manner of quarantine will
suffice to contain it. ♦