Rump’s
Attempt to Obscure the Reality of the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Getting Comical
By John Cassidy
August 5, 2020
It
should never be forgotten how much of Donald
Trump’s career has been based on his ability to obscure and defy
reality. In the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, he built a
gaming-and-real-estate empire on a mountain of debt, which eventually forced
some of his businesses into bankruptcy. By persuading his bank creditors to let
him retain some of his prized assets, rather than liquidate them, he converted
disaster into opportunity. And, by booking a huge tax loss, which he carried
over in subsequent years, he seems to have eliminated most, if not all, of
his federal-tax obligations for
at least a decade.
Despite scraping through his financial busts with some of his
businesses intact, Trump would have all but disappeared from the national scene
were it not for a starring role on reality television—a medium that has very
little to do with actual reality. After “The Apprentice” became a hit, Trump erased the
failures from his résumé and ran for President on the image of a successful
businessman—even as it emerged that one of his surviving ventures, Trump
University, was a scam.
In 2016, Trump defied yet another reality. His opponent, Hillary
Clinton, defeated him in the popular vote by almost three million ballots. But
the antiquated Electoral College ushered Trump into the White House, where he
continued the assault on fact-based reality that he had launched during his
election campaign, repeatedly labelling the media as “fake news” and the “enemy
of the people.” Three and a half years later, he is still at it.
It is a remarkable record of manipulation and effrontery,
but the coronavirus doesn’t listen to Trump’s
bluster or read his tweets. On June 3rd, according to a running tally maintained
by the Times, the seven-day average for confirmed new cases
of covid-19 was 21,958. On
Monday, August 3rd, the seven-day average was 60,202. That’s an increase of
about a hundred and seventy-five per cent in two months. Since early July, as
the virus has spread across the country, the number of deaths from covid-19 has more than doubled. Even
after a welcome decline during the past few days, the weekly average is still
more than a thousand a day.
Confronted with these developments, Trump has become even more
brazen in promoting an alternative reality. On Monday, he lashed out at Deborah
Birx, the response coördinator of the White House’s coronavirus task
force, tweeting, “So Crazy Nancy
Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she
was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China
Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy,
Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!”
The President was referring to an interview that Birx gave to
CNN’s Dana Bash over the weekend, and if you watch it, you’ll see
that she didn’t “hit” Trump or his Administration at all. To the contrary, Birx
defended the White House task force, saying that it had shifted course more
than a month ago: after it became clear that the pandemic had entered a new
phase, the task force adopted a more granular approach, providing individual
municipalities and counties with the support and guidance they needed to
address the rising number of cases, she said. She also pointed out that, in
some places where they have been introduced, mitigation efforts seem to be
having a positive impact. In hard-hit Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and in a
half-dozen other states, new-case numbers have declined somewhat in the past
two weeks, the Times’ interactive guide shows. (Case numbers are
still rising in fifteen states and Puerto Rico.)
What was Birx’s offense? She openly acknowledged that the virus is
spreading, and she warned people in Trump-supporting areas of the dangers that
this presents. “I want to be very clear,” she said. “What we are seeing today
is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into
the rural as [well as] urban areas. And, to everybody who lives in a rural
area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.” Birx went on to say
that people living in rural areas need to socially distance and wear
masks—including at home, if they have potentially vulnerable family members. In
other words, Birx used her media platform to try to save lives. Asked about his
tweet attacking her, at a press conference on Monday afternoon, Trump said that Birx was “a
person I have a lot of respect for.” But he refused to say whether he agreed
with her characterization of the pandemic.
Could there be a clearer demonstration that Trump expects his
health advisers to defer to his preferred version of reality, even if adopting
such a strategy puts more American lives at risk? Having failed to adhere to
this communications policy, Anthony Fauci, the best-known member of the White
House task force, hasn’t been invited to appear alongside Trump for weeks. Birx
is still more visible. But Trump, having restarted his regular coronavirus
briefings, is again the Administration’s primary spokesperson on the pandemic.
The consequences are, by turns, absurd and alarming.
Last week, when he granted a taped interview to Axios’s Jonathan Swan, he came
prepared with charts, which, he claimed, showed that the United States was
doing better than other countries “in numerous categories.” Swan, a plainspoken
Australian, seemed puzzled. “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,”
he said after Trump handed him one of the charts. “I’m talking about death as a
proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than
South Korea, Germany, et cetera.” Trump seemed flummoxed. “You can’t do that,”
he said. “Why can’t I do that?” Swan replied. “You have to go by the cases,”
Trump said.
That was a comedy routine. After HBO aired the interview, on
Monday night, it was compared online to “Spinal Tap” and “Curb Your
Enthusiasm.” The interview also contained darker moments, though, especially
when Swan pressed Trump on why he kept insisting that the virus was under
control, thereby giving a sense of false security to his supporters. “They
don’t listen to me or the media or Fauci,” Swan said. “They think we’re fake
news. They want to get their advice from you. And so, when they hear you say,
‘Everything’s under control. Don’t worry about wearing masks’—I mean, many of
them are older people, Mr. President.”
Trump’s face was blank. “Under the circumstances, right now, I
think it’s under control,” he said tightly. Swan repeated that every day a
thousand people were dying. “They are dying, that’s true,” Trump went on. “And
it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s
under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that
beset us.”
Nobody could deny Trump his final point. But a
battleground-state survey from CBS News,
which was released over the weekend, showed that sixty per cent of North
Carolinians think that the Trump Administration could be doing more to contain
the pandemic, and that fifty-eight per cent think it is merely letting the
virus run its course. In Georgia, another red state, the survey findings were
practically identical. For decades, Trump has made his way by concealing the
true nature of things. Some realities are too big and pressing for even him to
obscure.