Here’s
What Donald Trump’s America Was Actually Like Four Years Ago
The former president’s allies want
voters to recall their lives four years back, but March 2020 was a harrowing
period most people would rather forget. In this 2024 election cycle, it’s
crucial to remember.
MARCH
14, 2024
As Donald Trump tries
to convince voters to send him back to the White House, his allies are dusting
off Ronald Reagan’s playbook. “People look around and they say,
‘Am I better off now than I was four years ago?’ The answer to that is
no,” Lara Trump said on Sean Hannity’s show
Tuesday night. “You can compare very easily how much better your life was with
Donald Trump in office and how much worse you are now that Joe Biden is
in office.”
It’s a catchy line,
one Elise Stefanik also dusted off earlier this month. But does
Trump really want Americans to remember this time four years
ago, when he botched the federal response to the COVID pandemic and put lives
at risk? Just scan the headlines from early March 2020. Politico wrote how “Trump’s mismanagement helped
fuel coronavirus crisis.” The Washington Post found that Trump’s administration
“frittered away” “precious weeks” while the virus was spreading. The New
York Times reported that Trump dealt with the crisis
“by repeating a string of falsehoods.”
Much of this happened in
public view. Remember when Trump predicted COVID would just “disappear”?
Remember when he showed up to the CDC headquarters wearing
a campaign hat? Remember when he claimed that Google was building a website to
help people find COVID tests, and Google didn’t know what he was talking about?
Actually, I didn’t. I had
forgotten almost everything I’m about to recount in this story. I have a
feeling many others have forgotten too. Maybe it’s a human tendency to block
out past trauma, or perhaps it’s more that so much has happened since. In today’s
supercharged news cycle, an event can feel dated four days later, never mind
four years later. Plus, many people are “tuning out” of politics in 2024, clearly
rejecting the rematch of a current and former
president.
But campaign coverage
should grapple with how an aspiring president would handle a global crisis. For
that reason, it’s worth revisiting how the Republican contender mishandled one
while president.
To the extent that anyone
observes an “anniversary” of the pandemic, it is this week, the second week of March, when the World Health
Organization declared a pandemic; American corporations began a slow-motion
shutdown; the NBA suspended its season; and the Trump administration
(belatedly) declared a nationwide emergency. But the preceding weeks were
critical.
In January and February
2020, Trump repeatedly claimed that the coronavirus
was under control and downplayed the dangers. He effusively praised China’s
handling of the outbreak and said, on January 30, that “we think it’s going to
have a very good ending for us.”
He maintained a cheery
attitude for several weeks. On February 25 he said, “They’re getting it more
and more under control. So I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.”
Two days later, he was even blunter: “It’s going to disappear.”
Of course, the problem
wasn’t disappearing. The virus was spreading around the world. By the end of
February, coronavirus cases were rapidly rising in the US, but a dearth of
testing kits meant the total couldn’t be measured. Trump was obsessed with keeping
the reported number of official cases as low as possible—concentrating more on
the reports than the real number of sick and scared Americans.
Trump administration aides
like Larry Kudlow made similarly damaging comments. “We have
contained this,” Kudlow claimed on February 25. That same day, press
secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “We will not see diseases like the
coronavirus come here.”
It was as if Kudlow and
McEnany were following the bosses’ orders. “I wanted to always play it down,”
Trump told author Bob Woodward in
a March 19 interview that was published later. Trump said he didn’t want to
cause “panic.”
But if that’s true, why
did he go so far in the opposite direction? The freshly impeached president
(remember the abuse-of-power saga?) told rally-goers on
February 28 that “the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” likened the
Democrats’ conduct to “the impeachment hoax,” and said “this is their new
hoax.”
Trump made so many
dismissive comments that The Washington Post produced a video of “40 times Trump said the
coronavirus would go away.”
We know, thanks to none
other than Tucker Carlson, that trusted allies tried to warn
Trump of the threat in early March. Carlson told Vanity Fair in a 2020
interview that he traveled to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, March 7 for an
intervention of sorts. “I said exactly what I’ve said on TV, which is this
could be really bad,” Carlson recalled. (I later learned that he was encouraged
by an unnamed White House aide to talk some sense into Trump.) Carlson, it
turned out, was exposed to COVID during the visit; while he didn’t fall ill,
several others who were at the president’s compound that day did contract
COVID.
The previous day was when
Trump donned a “Keep America Great” hat at the CDC. While there, he
second-guessed the medical professionals in the room, he randomly asked about
Fox’s ratings, and he insulted the Democratic governor of Washington State. He
claimed that “anybody who wants a test, can get a test,” which was patently
false. “As a reporter, in general I’m not supposed to say something like this,
but: The president’s statements to the press were terrifying,” Adam
Rogers wrote for Wired. He said Trump’s presser was
“full of Dear Leader-ish compliments, non-sequitorial defenses of unrelated
matters, attacks on an American governor, and—most importantly—misinformation
about the virus and the US response.”
The misinformation
continued to flow the following week when Trump delivered an Oval Office
address. If his intent was to calm the nation’s fears, he achieved the
opposite: He announced a ban on travel from Europe, causing chaos at airports
and hurried clarifications from cabinet officials. On Friday, March 13, he
shook hands with guests at a COVID briefing, in direct contradiction to health
officials’ guidance, prompting one attendee to dodge Trump’s hand and offer
an elbow bump instead. Geraldo
Rivera even tried to get through to Trump via the TV set, stating on
Fox one night, “Mr. President, for the good of the nation, stop shaking hands.”
Criticism of Trump’s
stupefying behavior and stream-of-consciousness briefings wasn’t limited to
self-professed liberals like Geraldo. Philip Klein, then the
executive editor of the right-leaning Washington Examiner, now
the top editor of National Review Online, said at the time
that Trump “has not shown an ability to break out of his typical antics, and
treat the moment with the seriousness with which it deserves.”
The COVID crisis was something of a
repeat of how Trump reacted to Hurricane Maria—by downplaying the death toll,
rejecting the math, and accusing Democrats of colluding to make him look bad.
He said he was the best thing to ever happen to Puerto Rico. Remember? Then
came COVID, and he tried the same tricks: Wild boosterism, bogus claims, and
bewildering photo ops. He misinformed the public about a life-and-death issue.
The missteps and
misstatements continued through March, April, and beyond. On March 24, less
than two weeks after the shutdowns commenced, he said he wanted the country
“opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” which was on April 12. He was
gravely concerned about the economy—but public health officials believed he
should have been more concerned about the health and well-being of the public.
He certainly wasn’t putting peoples’ health first when he suggested that ingesting disinfectants
could help cure coronavirus. Public health agencies warned people not to take
Trump’s advice. “Don’t make a bad situation worse,” Washington State’s
emergency management agency tweeted in response.
And that’s the point,
right? In an emergency, leaders can either help or hurt. They can rise to the
occasion or fail to lead at all. Trump’s record speaks for itself. But Politico
deputy managing editor for politics Sam Stein recently observed that, according to polling data,
“many voters give Trump a pass for the Covid year of his presidency. Or, at
least, don’t really hold him responsible for it.”
I get it. I don’t want to
revisit the COVID year of Trump’s presidency either. But it’s crucial to
remember.
