Trump’s Epic Lies Become
His Campaign Coronavirus Story Line
Sember 10, 2020
“Your state should be open! Your state should be open!” Trump told a crowd in North Carolina.
It would not seem possible that Donald
Trump could sell himself as the hero of the coronavirus
crisis, but, as he demonstrated on Tuesday evening, at the
Winston-Salem airport, in North Carolina, he is not one to let either shame or
the truth get in the way of a boast. The tally of Americans who have died
of covid-19, according to
Johns Hopkins University, is now more than a hundred and ninety thousand—a
figure that is almost certainly too low, given testing shortages—but the number
that Trump was interested in was the crowd size. “I was told fifteen thousand
people!” he said. An airport official told the Winston-Salem Journal that
he guessed there were seven to nine thousand people there. Some of the people
in the stand behind the President were wearing masks, printed with “maga” or “trump,” but, judging from videos of the milling crowd and
from press reports, few other attendees were. The President certainly was not.
He told the crowd that he normally held rallies in indoor venues, “But because
of, uh, China, the arenas aren’t working out too well, right? You can’t really
do that anymore for a while.”
When Trump said “China,”
he wasn’t just using a shorthand version of “China virus,” his xenophobic label
for sars-CoV-2. He was
referring to what might be called the Trump 2020 coronavirus story line, which
is as epic as it is fictitious. The synopsis, a version of which he offered at
the rally in North Carolina, goes like this:
Act I: Paradise Betrayed
“We built the greatest
economy in the history of the world, we were forced to close it because of the
China plague that came in,” Trump said. Leave it to Trump to dream up a myth of
lost greatness about not only America but also about his Presidency. His plan
seems to be to use his great failing as an all-purpose excuse—the coronavirus
did it, not me. A Trump drama, though, demands more than an unthinking virus—it
requires a villain. And so, later in the speech, returning to the subject of
China, he said, “We just have the plague. We’ve had other plagues sent by them.
I wonder if they did it on purpose. What do you think, huh?” The crowd cheered
its affirmation. Perhaps it makes sense to Trump’s supporters that the Chinese
government would unleash a pandemic on its own population in a bank-shot
attempt to bring him down. It does not, however, make any logical sense.
Act II: Trump Versus the
Virus
“People don’t realize we
saved millions of lives,” Trump told the crowd. The President who, in the
spring, during the depths of the pandemic, told governors to scrounge up the
supplies they needed on their own, claimed to have masterminded “the largest
national mobilization since World War II.” In fact, to this day, there is no
effective national testing strategy, and even less of one for contact tracing.
And the state, local, and public-health officials who were frantically trying
to save lives had to push back against his dismissiveness, quackery, and
conspiracy-mongering—even though, according to a Washington Post report
on “Rage,” a new book by Bob
Woodward, Trump was quite aware of how dangerous the virus was. (“I wanted to
always play it down,” he said.) He simply chose to lie to the public, further
undermining trust.
In North Carolina, Trump
added, “We have achieved some of the great numbers, the case-fatality rates—we
have the lowest of any major country in the world. People don’t know that
because the fake news doesn’t want to write about it.” The United States does
not have the lowest case-fatality rate of
any major country, unless Japan and India aren’t major countries. And, by
another measure—deaths per hundred thousand—the U.S. is doing very badly, and
its relative position keeps getting worse. That’s because many countries in
Europe that were badly hit now have the virus largely under control, and we do
not. It’s true that there are scenarios in which far more Americans could have
perished, for example if no distancing measures had been taken at all, or if
Trump held indoor rallies at the rate he did before the pandemic. But too many
did die, and too many are dying now.
Act III: Enter the
Democrats as Saboteurs
“Your state should be
open! Your state should be open!” Trump told the crowd in North Carolina. He
urged his supporters to vote against Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, with whom
he clashed over his desire to hold a non-socially-distanced Republican National
Convention, in Charlotte—Cooper had too many rules—and who is up for
reëlection. Many things in North Carolina are, in fact, open, including gyms
and restaurants, albeit with limits on capacity, and other restrictions. For
example, outdoor mass gatherings are supposed to be limited to fifty people, a
cap that Trump dismissed by saying that he’d just call his rallies “peaceful
protests.” (He also ignored the statewide mask mandate.)
But there are closures:
the University of North Carolina, for example, switched to remote classes in
early August after a hundred and seventy-seven students and staff tested
positive for the virus. (Last week, cases at U.N.C. were more than a thousand. College towns across the
country have become regional hotspots.) It should be clear by now that opening
prematurely or without restrictions, contact tracing, and widespread access to
testing in place, as many states did in the early summer, is counterproductive:
doing so just leads to more outbreaks and more closures, perpetuating the
pandemic cycle. But Trump seems willing to risk further infections, and deaths.
He emphasized to the crowd that most young people would be just fine. He
admired their immune systems. He said, vaguely, that there are ways to protect
the vulnerable while everyone else goes back to work, as if the vulnerable—a
very large category in covid-19
terms, including people with a wide range of preëxisting conditions as well as
those who are obese—could be pushed aside indefinitely.
Trump also promised the
crowd that, thanks to him, a safe, effective vaccine will be available by the
end of the year, and maybe even “much sooner than that.” He wondered if any
other Administration in American history would have been capable of this feat.
Anthony Fauci, pharmaceutical companies, and any number of public-health
experts have warned of the need for caution, and the fact that the actual
distribution of a vaccine will take far longer; given that many people are
already suspicious about vaccines, releasing a dangerous one prematurely,
according to a timeline set by Trump’s need to make big promises at rallies,
would be a disaster. But, as Trump told it in North Carolina, anyone who
worried that pledges like his might lead to a politicized approval process was
part of a “Biden-Harris effort to spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.”
After decrying the
effect of closures on people in Michigan (“They want to have football!”),
another state with a Democratic governor, Trump said, “They’re doing it for
political reasons. They think by hurting the economy, by keeping all these
store owners and all these people that work in shops, stores, buildings,
offices—they think by hurting them they’re hurting our economy.” (He couldn’t
help but add, “Our economy is doing phenomenally well.”) Also, Trump told the
crowd, “They want to indoctrinate your children and implement their ruinous
shutdown of the United States economy again.”
Who are “they”? In a particularly crude passage
of his speech, Trump described “Biden people.”
“If they win, the mobs win. You see these guys, they go around saying, ‘Yeah, I
want your meal, gimme that food, gimme that’—a woman, sitting there, she wants
to eat,” he said, pantomiming a person bent timorously over a plate, lifting a
fork. “And they come and grab her food, they grab her drink, nobody’s ever seen
stuff like this. This is all that ideology!” Behind him, the people in Trump
gear shook their heads in horror. Pulling the threads of the plot together, he
added, “It’s clear why both China and the flag-burning rioters want Biden to
win. They know his policies will be the downfall of America. And they know my
policies will lift America to new heights of national greatness like we’ve
never seen before. That’s what’s happening.”
That’s not what’s
happening. Trump has long required that his supporters cease to care about the
truth—that they suspend disbelief when they listen to him. Now, though, he is
asking that they not care about American lives, particularly those of the most
vulnerable. “I got to tell you, I was sailing to an easy election. This was
going to be so easy . . . and now we have to work against a guy
that doesn’t know where he is!” Trump said. The election is going to be a lot
of work, and it never was going to be easy. Defeating Trump will be worth it.
Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer
at The New Yorker since 2014. She has been at the magazine since 1995, and, as
a senior editor for many years, focussed on national security, international
reporting, and features.
