Trump reveals why his corrupt ‘October surprise’ scheme will likely fail
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 6, 2020 at 9:37 a.m. CDT
When President Trump released videos showcasing his return to the White House on Monday evening as a glorious personal triumph, he showed us exactly how he hopes to salvage his reelection hopes — but also revealed why his planned “October surprise” will likely fail.
The true goal of Trump’s theatrical treatment of his arrival at home after three days in the hospital with the coronavirus becomes a lot clearer when you view it alongside this New York Times scoop:
Top White House officials are blocking strict new federal guidelines for the emergency release of a coronavirus vaccine, objecting to a provision that would almost certainly guarantee that no vaccine could be authorized before the election on Nov. 3, according to people familiar with the approval process.
Trump portrayed his return as a moment of extraordinary personal valor. One video displayed his arrival by helicopter as akin to that of a conquering hero. The other showed him addressing (prematurely, perhaps) his vanquishing of the virus, declaring: “Don’t be afraid of it.”
But, crucially, Trump also insisted that we will “beat it” because “we have the best medicines,” and “the vaccines are coming momentarily.”
Trump’s endgame is to offset months of towering failures on the coronavirus by showcasing his personal defeat of it as proof that he was right to push the country back to normalcy — while also announcing a vaccine, or at least dangling one as imminent.
But Trump has already blown it on this strategy. He failed to treat this as an occasion to admit error, to show humility, to demonstrate basic humanity toward the more than 200,000 Americans who have been killed by the virus and the many millions who have been negatively impacted.
Instead, Trump reverted to narcissistic form by hyping his own alleged triumph over the virus as having grand, overarching significance.
This helps all but ensure that majorities will see any vaccine announcement as being all about him — as naked subversion of the national interest and more corrupt manipulation of the levers of government toward his own political ends.
Corrupting the process
The Times report tells us what we need to know. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is blocking the release of guidelines — submitted to the White House by the Food and Drug Administration — that would recommend that volunteers in vaccine clinical trials be tracked for a median of two months after they take their last dose before the granting of authorization.
Obviously, this would mean no authorization until after Election Day. Which is why Meadows is blocking this guideline.
Of course, Meadows needs a better rationale than Trump’s election timetable. So he’s internally questioning the need for “two months of follow-up data,” and is suggesting that the FDA guidelines are “overly influenced” by the agency’s “career scientists,” as the Times puts it.
In other words, the rationale is that scientists are being too cautious, as if that’s a bad thing.
Bottomless bad faith
To be clear, one can imagine a world in which such an objection — that scientists are needlessly slowing the process — could be made in good faith. There really is a complicated balance of public health imperatives to strike here, between the urgent need for a vaccine and the need to ensure confidence in its safety.
“On one hand, we all want a vaccine as soon and as safely as possible,” Tom Frieden, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “On the other hand, if there’s even a perception of cutting corners on safety, it could backfire, because a lot of people won’t take it.”
But Frieden noted that in this case, the FDA has good reasons for wanting a period of two months to lapse after the final dose. One is to allow a full vetting of whether people testing it will have an “adverse reaction.”
It would be a bad outcome if those testing it suddenly had such adverse reactions to a vaccine even as a campaign got underway to get the broader public to take it. Frieden noted that it’s important to “avoid a scenario in which a vaccine is approved then found to be unsafe.”
A second reason for the time lag is that it will boost faith in the vaccine, making it more likely that broader swaths of the public take it. “You want to make clear that you’re not cutting any corners,” Frieden told me.
Indeed, this is exactly why the biotech industry is pushing for public release of these guidelines: to reinforce faith in the safety of the eventual vaccine.
A perverse irony
And therein lies a deeply perverse irony: Trump himself has done more than anyone on the planet to undermine public confidence in the safety of a vaccine authorized on his watch, particularly if something is announced before Election Day.
Not only has Trump corrupted the government at all levels by placing it at the disposal of his reelection needs; he has telegraphed for months that he’s hoping for a vaccine announcement as his “October surprise.” And as Jonathan Chait notes, Trump has even charged that “deep state” scientists are deliberately holding up the vaccine to harm his reelection prospects.
When you think about it, that’s the ultimate giveaway. The very need to invent this fantasy rationale to push forward faster — that scientists are dragging the process to hurt him — shows that in this case, the actual balance of public health rationales argues for the more cautious timetable.
As Trump’s handling of his own brush with the virus underscores, it’s always only about him. And that’s how this October surprise will almost certainly be seen by voters.