Trump and Pence Are Scrambling to Explain Away
Coronavirus Spikes
The vice president
urged governors to chalk up a rise in COVID cases to ramped up testing, as the
president mused about how the numbers would better if testing just stopped.
BY ERIC LUTZ
In
a Monday meeting at the White House, Donald Trump offered
up a bold strategy for eliminating COVID-19—simply don’t test for it. “If we
stop testing right now,” he said, “we’d have very few cases, if any.” It
was a classic Trump solution: appearing to fix the problem, in his mind, has always been precisely the
same as fixing the problem itself. In the early days of the pandemic, he
reportedly worriedthat the increased testing regime his
health officials had been calling for would result in the unappealing discovery
of more cases and hurt his reelection odds. The head-in-the-sand approach
didn’t work so well then; the United States quickly became the epicenter of the
crisis, close to 120,000 Americans have died in a matter of months, and the
economy has been battered. And yet, as cases once again begin to rise in states across the
country, the administration is continuing to downplay the situation—and is now
asking local leaders to do the same.
Speaking to governors, Mike Pence echoed Trump’s
line on testing, falsely claiming later Monday that new spikes in cases in
states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas merely reflect ramped up testing—not
the premature reopenings the administration cheered on. “I would just encourage
you all, as we talk about these things, to make sure and continue to explain to
your citizens the magnitude of increase in testing,” the vice president told governors on the call, according to
the New York Times. “And that in most of
the cases where we are seeing some marginal rise in number, that’s more a
result of the extraordinary work you’re doing.” Insisting that growing rates of
hospitalization are being driven primarily by Americans seeking elective
surgeries and other treatments they’d put off, Pence urged the local leaders to
sound an optimistic note when speaking to their constituents.
“Encourage people,” he said,
“with the news that we are safely reopening the country.”
That characterization is far
from the truth. Back in April, the White House issued a set of guidelines states had to
meet to safely reopen businesses. Trump, however, encouraged states to reopen
whether they’d met his own administration’s benchmarks or not, and a number of
them followed suit — loosening restrictions that they were, in some cases, slow
to impose in the first place. Many of those states are now seeing significant
increases in confirmed cases and hospitalizations, with more than a dozen
states experiencing a rise in infections following last month’s Memorial Day
holiday. Just two states—Illinois and New York—were meeting federal guidelines when they
began easing restrictions; those states are among a handful that have seen decreasing numbers of cases.
The lesson there would seem
to be clear—that a more cautious approach to loosening social distancing
measures is more effective in blunting the spread of the novel coronavirus, in
the absence of a vaccine or proven treatment. “Illinois was the first state in
the nation to meet the federal metrics laid out by the White House for reopening
and right now is showing the largest decline in COVID cases,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s office said a
statement. “The governor will continue to follow the science and data and rely
on the public health experts when it comes to reopening the state.”
But the Trump administration
is continuing to thumb its nose at the dangers of the virus, regarding the
pandemic as if it’s already in the rearview. Dr. Anthony Fauci,
the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told NPR on Tuesday that he hasn’t spoken
to the president in two weeks. Trump has repeatedly suggested that any
increases in cases would be mere “embers” that could be quickly and easily
extinguished without further lockdowns, and next week will attempt to project a
return to normal with an extremely ill-advised campaign rally in Tulsa, where
supporters will have to agree not to sue him or the venue if they
come down with coronavirus after attending the event.
