What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Trump
“Slow
the testing down,” he said, and it’s happening.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
·
July 20, 2020
We’re now at the stage of the Covid-19
pandemic where Donald Trump and his allies are trying to suppress information
about the coronavirus’s spread — because, of course, they are. True to form,
however, they’re far behind the curve. From a political point of view (which is
all they care about), their disinformation efforts are too little, too late.
Where we are: In just a few days
millions of Americans are going to see a drastic fall in their incomes, as enhanced unemployment
benefits expire. This calls for urgent action; but avoiding economic calamity
was always going to be hard, because Republicans in general have balked at
providing the aid workers idled by the pandemic need.
But now it turns out that there’s
another obstacle to action: An intra-G.O.P. dispute over funding for testing and tracing of infected individuals. Even
Senate Republicans support increased testing, which is desperately needed given
our current situation: Surging cases have created a testing backlog, and test
results are taking so long to come back that they’re
effectively useless.
But
Trump officials are opposed to any new money for testing. They’re barely even
trying to offer excuses for their opposition, since Trump himself explained the
strategy a month ago at his Tulsa rally: When you expand testing, he declared, “you’re
going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down,
please.’”
In other words, what you don’t know
can’t hurt Trump.
Nobody should be surprised that the
Trump team is trying to suppress bad news about the pandemic. This was
completely predictable given the Law of Obama Projection: Every right-wing
conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama was an indication of what Republicans
wanted to do themselves, and would do once they had the power.
Remember, for example, wild claims
about an imminent military takeover of Texas, lent credence by
senior Republicans? Now we have unidentified Department of Homeland Security
agents in unmarked vehicles seizing
people off the streets of Portland, Ore.
Remember claims that the government
was secretly constructing concentration camps?
Thousands of migrants are now immured in detention centers,
often under horrifying conditions.
And the current war on Covid-19 testing
was prefigured by constant claims that the Obama administration was suppressing
bad economic news. “Inflation truthers”
insisted that the feds were hiding the runaway inflation that right-wingers
predicted, but that never arrived. Unemployment truthers —
including, notably, one Donald Trump — declared that official job numbers
showing a steadily improving economy were fake, and that unemployment was
actually much higher than reported.
It
was inevitable, then, that the Trumpists would do what they falsely accused
Obama of doing, and try to hide bad pandemic numbers. Efforts to hold down
testing are only part of the story.
The Trump administration recently
ordered hospitals to stop reporting Covid-19 data to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, sending it to a private contractor instead. As
a result, hospitalization data, a key pandemic indicator, disappeared from
the C.D.C. website before being reinstated after a widespread outcry.
And some Republican-controlled states,
notably Georgia, have for months been massaging coronavirus
data, presenting it in misleading ways that understate the problem.
The puzzle is why the latest attack on
testing came so late. Pro tip: If you’re trying to conceal bad epidemiological
news, you should start the cover-up before everyone realizes that the pandemic
is spiraling out of control.
A fascinating Times post-mortem on Trump’s failed coronavirus response
helps us understand what happened. And I do mean mortem: Americans are dying of Covid-19 at
a rate eight times that in Canada, 10 times that in Europe.
The Times account makes it clear that
the Trump team never seriously considered trying to deal with the pandemic’s
reality. It also makes it clear, however, that officials convinced themselves
back in April that they were getting away with this abdication of
responsibility, that the coronavirus was going away.
And by the time they realized that the
virus wasn’t playing along with their political games, it was too late to hide
the truth.
At
this point it’s not even clear what purpose obstructing testing is supposed to
serve. The attempt to engineer an economic boom before the election has already
failed, as reopened states are reversing course. And Trump has already squandered all
credibility on the coronavirus; even if the numbers on reported cases suddenly
started to look much better, who besides his hard-core supporters would believe
them?
So this doesn’t look like a political
strategy as much as an attempt to soothe the boss’s fragile ego. Trump keeps
insisting, falsely, that the only reason we’re seeing so many cases is too much
testing, so his aides are trying to mollify him by holding testing down.
And if this cripples America’s pandemic
response, making a test-trace-isolate strategy impossible, well, actually
dealing with the virus was never part of the plan.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist
since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New
York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
