Trump Does Fear the Coronavirus
One fact
breaks through the misinformation: When the virus came for the president, he
treated it seriously. So should you.
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 7, 2020
Something momentous happened late last
week, a brief pinprick of clarity piercing through the haze: Donald Trump
finally showed Americans the truth about the coronavirus.
Not with his words, of course.
According to researchers at Cornell, Trump has been the single largest driver of misinformation about the pandemic.
Public health experts had hoped that the president’s own infection might prompt
him to become more truthful. Instead, since his release from the hospital on
Monday, Trump has become even bolder in his distortions, declaring that the
virus is nothing to be afraid of. On Tuesday both Facebook and Twitter blocked posts
in which Trump falsely claimed that the seasonal flu is deadlier than the
coronavirus.
But the president’s actions tell a more
honest tale, and suggest a way for the media to convey even to Trump’s
loyalists the threat the virus poses: When he became the patient, Trump took it
seriously. He did not react like a man who’d only gotten the flu. To convey the
true danger, the media should focus on how Trump acts with regard to his own
battle against the virus, rather than amplifying the things he says about how
the rest of us should think of it.
The timeline
unspooled like a medical thriller. The president announced he’d tested
positive just before 1 a.m. on Friday. Only 16 hours later, with
his fever spiking and his blood oxygen levels dropping, Trump was taken by
helicopter to Walter Reed Military Medical Center.
The president’s doctors did not mess
around with any of the miracle cures that Trump had long touted. Instead of
hydroxychloroquine, ultraviolet light therapy or bleach, they turned to
treatments whose efficacy had a basis in science. They put him on an experimental antibody treatment that has been
shown in a clinical trial to
alleviate symptoms in some patients; it is unavailable to most Americans. Over
the weekend, Trump was prescribed two more drugs, including a steroid that is
usually administered to patients with severe cases of Covid-19.
“We’re in a bit of uncharted territory
when it comes to a patient that received the therapies he has so early in the
course,” Dr. Sean Conley, the president’s physician, said on Monday.
Behind Conley stood a phalanx of
doctors attending to Trump. The scene was grave: The president of the United
States had acquired a deadly infection, and an army had assembled to confront
the enemy. Those doctors were responding with everything they had, with shock
and awe, as if it were a full-blown emergency — because, guess what, it was.
I don’t begrudge Trump his world-class
medical care; the leader of the United States deserves it. But if the
president’s Covid-19 deserves to be taken seriously, requiring a team of the
world’s best doctors and a pharmacy full of drugs, how can he tell the rest of
us to treat it as if it’s no big deal?
But there’s more at
stake here than hypocrisy. We in the media often focus on what Trump says about
the virus instead of how he has sought to combat it personally. For instance,
while Trump does not often wear a mask himself, he has been irritated when others who are close to him
don’t, and he has bristled when people get too close to him. (Then again, he
has also asked people to remove their
masks when addressing him; consistency is not his strong suit.)
The media also take for granted that
the public will be able to see through his lies to see these facts. That
Covid-19 is actually pretty dangerous may seem like an obvious point,
considering that more than 210,000 Americans have been killed by the disease,
and hundreds more are dying each
day.
But many Americans do not accept this
danger, mainly because Trump has managed to steamroll obvious reality since the
very beginning of the pandemic. In his wake rumors and conspiracy theories have
sprouted like wildflowers. Now, behind in the polls and with a widening
outbreak on his staff, Trump is embarking on his most damaging disinformation
campaign yet: The virus is nothing, and America is back.
No one should believe this claptrap,
but millions will. The Cornell researchers — a team led by Sarah Evanega,
director of the Cornell Alliance for Science — analyzed 38 million
English-language articles published this year between Jan. 1 and May 26. They
found numerous subjects of misinformation about the virus, from miracle cures
to conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci and 5G cellular
technology’s supposed links to the disease.
The researchers found that while
“grass-roots sources” like anti-vaccination groups did make an impact, “they
contributed far less to the overall volume of misinformation than more powerful
actors, in particular the U.S. president.”
Why is the president such a powerful
source of mendacity? It isn’t simply that he says a lot of things that aren’t
true; it’s that everything the president says is amplified by the media. Some
of these mentions might be as part of an effort to correct the president; the
vast majority are not. The researchers found that “a great deal of
misinformation is going out to the public uncorrected.”
You might argue that the way to
mitigate this problem is for reporters to challenge the president’s falsehoods,
and perhaps to cover him a lot less, too. But I’m not sure either is the
answer. Studies have shown fact-checking to be of mixed effectiveness against
misinformation. And as long as Trump is the president, not covering
him isn’t really an option — especially now, in the midst of a heated campaign
and a pandemic in which he has played a starring role.
To me, the
president’s medical treatment last week makes a point that undoes months of
propaganda: Covid-19 is clearly a very bad disease. It can take you from
to hobnobbing with high-dollar
donors one day to requiring supplemental oxygen the next.
Trump says we shouldn’t let Covid-19
dominate us. That’s easy to say; it’s just as easy to prove untrue. The facts
of Trump’s experience with the virus — how rapidly it spread through those
closest to him, how thoroughly it undermined his campaign messages
and sidelined his campaign travel, and how quickly it sickened him to the point
of requiring intensive medical care — are the greatest weapon against his
misinformation about it. Even the president of the United States has been
dominated by the virus.
