Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus,
and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them
In
just the past few days, President
Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of
course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for
America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to
hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has announced
that he planted a tree on the White House lawn in honor of Earth Day. He has
offered his opinion on matters small and large, bragged about himself as “the
king of ventilators,” and spent much time lamenting the pandemic-inflicted
passing of what he invariably (and inaccurately) calls “the greatest economy in
the history of the world.”
Despite
the flood of words, though, what has struck me the most this week is what Trump
does not talk about: the mounting toll of those who have died
in this crisis. So voluble that he regularly talks well past dinnertime at his
nightly briefings, the President somehow never seems to find time to pay
tribute to those who have been lost, aside from reading an occasional scripted
line or two at the start of his lengthy press conferences, or a brief mention
of a friend in New York who died of the disease soon after calling him at the
White House. “He said, ‘I tested positive.’ Four days later he was dead,” the
President recounted. “So this is a tough deal.” It was not exactly the
prayerful, if often politically expedient, mournfulness Americans generally
expect of their elected leaders. Trump, for the most part, dispenses even with
the ritualistic clichés that other politicians, regardless of party or creed,
have always offered in times of crisis.
But
the numbers are the numbers, and, notwithstanding Trump’s relentless happy
talk, the coronavirus epidemic has, as of this week, already produced some
fifty thousand American dead. This is not, needless to say, a best-case
scenario, or anything close to it. Just a few weeks ago, a survey of scientific
experts predicted forty-seven thousand U.S. dead by the beginning of May,
according to the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Instead, forty-seven thousand deaths
were recorded by this Wednesday, April 22nd, well before the experts had
anticipated. On April 8th, a leading model at the University of Washington had
revised its projections downward to forecast a total of sixty thousand American
deaths by the beginning of August. But the nation now looks to hit that number
by May 1st, meaning that, just a few days from now, more Americans will have
died from covid-19 than the
entire toll from the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Trump talks of reopening the
country, and of the “tremendous strides against this invisible enemy.”
You
would think that no amount of Trumpian misdirection could disguise the awful
fact that America has more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any country in the
world, and that many of them might have been prevented by earlier, more
decisive government action when the President was denying that the coronavirus
even presented a threat to the United States. But Trump is trying his hardest
to ignore the covid-19
deaths. To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so
largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as
an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without
him.
Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre
public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even
millions of U.S. deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the
absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of
the crisis. The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be
abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is
all about him. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a
million, a million and a half, two million people dead,” he said on Monday.
“You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than
all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The fifty
thousand is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying
that out by twenty or more? It’s not acceptable.” Trump did not pause to offer
any sort of regret or sorrow, and instead claimed that the entire death toll in
the United States would end up around fifty or sixty thousand as a result of
his heroic moves. Of course, this was not true; that is, essentially, how many
have already passed away.
Honoring
the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political
speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single
battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became
casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill
Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in
which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and
sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the
“mourner-in-chief,” at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech
is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept
from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in
Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in
Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing “Amazing Grace” as he mourned at a
funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a
church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at
speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration
amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President
just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically
clichéd kind?
Trump’s
departure from normal behavior is often most painfully evident during his
nightly briefings, when his persistent disregard for the dead stands in stark
contrast to the manner of others in his Administration. Dr. Deborah Birx, the
State Department official who has been named White House coördinator for the
pandemic response, often mentions the human toll of the disease and thanks the
medical caregivers risking their lives. On Wednesday, Vice-President Mike Pence
began his brief remarks with a nod to the “loss of more than forty-seven
thousand of our countrymen.” It was just the sort of thing you would expect
Pence to say, and yet notable for how different it sounded compared with the
President. Trump began that very same briefing by saying, “Our aggressive
strategy to battle the virus is working.” It is, he said, “very exciting, even
today, watching and seeing what’s happening.” What was happening, though, was
another day on which more than two thousand Americans died of the coronavirus,
a fact that Trump did not mention. We know what a normal President would do and
say at such a time. He would comfort the afflicted, weep tears of sadness,
whether real or not; he would rally the country, or at least seek to. It is
hard to write about the absence of something but especially necessary in this
case, with a President like Trump, who has relentlessly used his public
platform to discourage the contemplation of how deadly the disease has proved.
His fear of the political consequences to himself that such contemplation might
engender is painfully transparent.
On Thursday, I left my
house for the first time since my once-a-week, socially distanced trip to the
grocery store a couple days earlier, and drove through the empty streets of
Washington, D.C., passing the shuttered headquarters of massive federal
agencies and the silent white bulk of Trump’s executive mansion. Everywhere I
looked, there were flags flying at the top of their flagpoles, and few if any
people. Determined as he is to avoid any kind of reckoning, Trump has not even
ordered American flags lowered in tribute to the dead, although individual
governors have decided to. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy did so in early
April, as did Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York. “We recognize those who have
been lost to this terrible illness and all those affected by it. Many families
cannot hold funerals for their loved ones at this time. By doing this, we
remind them that their losses are not forgotten,” Murphy said in a statement
announcing the move. Trump, who has in the past personally asked for the flags
to be lowered after a shooting or a politician’s death, can’t even bring
himself to do this much for victims of the coronavirus.
During
my drive home, I turned right on Constitution Avenue, normally crowded with
cars headed out to Virginia, and parked for a couple minutes near the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial. The national parks are closed, too, and no one was there to
look at the more than fifty-eight thousand names of the American war dead
inscribed on Maya Lin’s V-shaped black granite monument to them. Will the
victims of this deadly spring one day have their names recorded on some grand
Washington pile? I doubt it. Trump calls himself a wartime President, in his
battle against the virus, but, like all politicians, he is more eager to speak
of victory over the enemy than of the costs of winning. The Vietnam memorial
was not built until 1982, seven years after the last U.S. troops left Saigon.
The dead from this war may have to wait even longer.
