What
a Positive Test Won’t Change About Trump and the Pandemic
October 2, 2020
During the Presidential
debate on Tuesday night, two days before Donald
Trump and the First Lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for the coronavirus, Chris
Wallace, the beleaguered moderator, asked the candidates how the pandemic had
changed the way that each campaigned. He noted that Trump, unlike Joe
Biden, his opponent, was holding big outdoor rallies—why? “Because
people want to hear what I have to say,” Trump said, as if there were no other
consideration. He claimed that as many as forty thousand people were waiting
for him at airports—a wild exaggeration, though several thousand have regularly
gathered for the mostly maskless hangar rallies—and that the only reason that
Biden wasn’t holding rallies, too, was that “nobody will show up.”
“Are
you not worried about the disease issues, sir?” Wallace asked.
“So
far, we have had no problem whatsoever,” Trump said. “We’ve had no negative, no
negative effect.” Hope Hicks, one of his senior campaign advisers and a former
aide, whose symptoms and positive test triggered the President’s test, had
travelled with him to a number of rallies. Perhaps if Trump had known about her
diagnosis, and his own exposure, when Wallace asked the question his answer
would have been different. But what does it say about the sense that only his
own health, and not that of the people in the crowds, would register with him
as a “negative”? That people travelling with him as he hopped, in the past
week, from Florida to Minnesota—who would have followed him to a planned rally
this weekend in Wisconsin, where cases are rising at alarming rates—might test
positive is not an unexpected fluke. (Indeed, a number of Secret Service agents
already have; Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee,
who often attends such events, announced on Friday that she had tested positive
two days earlier.) There is a pandemic in this country, one that the President
has failed to control. There are more than forty thousand new cases of covid-19 each day, and the average
number of deaths per day is still above seven hundred.
Trump’s
negligence about the coronavirus is of a piece with who he is. By the end of
Tuesday night’s debate, it was easy to wonder just how many forms of violence
Trump might be willing to inflict on the country, from heedlessly telling
quasi-militarized white supremacists to “stand back and stand by” to urging
supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.” When Wallace asked
if he was telling people to take to the streets, he didn’t deny it. He was
ready to expose Americans to another source of physical harm: the unmanaged
pandemic. “You got to open these states up. It’s not fair!” Trump said—meaning,
presumably, that not doing so was inconsiderate of his electoral prospects and
his vanity. The reality that, with children returning to school and cold
weather on its way, the next weeks will require vigilance and delicate
coördination to head off a truly devastating winter, seems lost on him.
Instead, he complained that Democratic governors were deliberately waiting
until the week after the election to reopen, for no reason other than that “they
think they’re hurting us.”
On
Friday morning, Biden 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.” That message, with its
kindness, is a reminder of how the pandemic has made the contrast between Trump
and Biden particularly clear. It has thrown into relief some of the most basic
things about each of them as people and as politicians—how much each of them
cares, their honesty, and their willingness to work, among other things. Both
decency and competency are required. When Trump, in explaining during the
debate why he had backed shutdowns earlier in the year but would not do so
again, said, “We’ve found that elderly people with heart problems and diabetes
and different problems are very, very vulnerable” and that “younger people
aren’t,” he made it sound not as if the vulnerable and elderly had to be
protected but as if they could be written off. Remarkably, he did not seem to
place himself in either category, even though he is seventy-four and
overweight. That might serve as a broader reminder to Americans about our
curious national narcissism, which can dull not only empathy but
self-preservation. Of course, Trump’s statement about the basic medical facts
was wrong, too; younger people can die or experience debilitating cases
of covid-19. (And, as a
groundbreaking, large-scale study from India confirmed this week,
even young children can play a significant role in spreading the virus; earlier
studies had reached similar conclusions.)
Biden,
during the debate, looked directly at the camera and asked people watching, “How
many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table
because someone died of covid?
How many of you are in a situation where you lost your mom or dad, and you
couldn’t even speak to them, you had a nurse holding the phone up so you could,
in fact, say goodbye?” Early on, in the opening exchange about the Supreme
Court, he connected the pandemic to the Trump Administration’s backing of a
case, soon to be heard by a Court that will probably include Amy Coney Barrett,
that was brought to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. “The deal is that this
is going to wipe out preëxisting conditions,” Biden said. And that matters to a
new cohort of Americans. “Over seven million people have contracted covid,” he said, and added, “What does
it mean for them going forward, if you strike down the Affordable Care Act?”
It’s a question that should resonate in both red and blue states—and even among
some staffers in the White House.
When
Wallace asked each man to speak for two minutes about why he would do a better
job than his opponent in managing the pandemic, Biden said something that even
many of the President’s supporters must suspect is the case: “The President has
no plan.” Indeed, until now, Trump’s only pandemic plan, such as it is, has
been to talk his way around the crisis long enough to get reëlected—furiously
concocting excuses, making up numbers, pushing conspiracy theories involving
China or Democratic governors, overpromising on a vaccine, disparaging anyone
who disagrees, and, when all else fails, boasting that two hundred thousand
dead is still less than the two million dead that some models had suggested
could be the death toll in the United States, if no measures at all had been
taken. He also mocked masks.
It’s
not news that Trump has told corrosive lies about covid-19; according to a new Cornell study, Trump is the
single greatest source of false information about the pandemic. The tally
includes both conspiracy theories and quackery, such as Trump’s suggestion that
the White House coronavirus task force explore the internal consumption by
people of household cleaners, such as bleach. (“That was said sarcastically,”
Trump claimed in the debate; a review of the video indicates otherwise.)
Clearly, this is not what White House doctors will recommend: Trump will no
doubt have the best care in the world. The best scenario for the country would
be that a healthy Trump is voted out of office by an equally healthy margin—to have
the Trump era end because Americans reject Trumpism, and not because the virus
gets more of a say than they do. It may be too optimistic to suppose that,
meanwhile, his coronavirus experience could make Trump an even marginally more
prudent President. But it could prove to be an education, if not a revelation,
both for him and for his supporters.