Trump’s Deliberate Coronavirus Deception
Bob Woodward’s tapes tell
us something new about how the president lies.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 10, 2020, 12:48 p.m. ET
Recordings,
real or rumored, have been a leitmotif of the [HT1] Trump
era.
There
was the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Donald Trump confessed to his
proclivity for serial sexual assault. The fabled “pee tape,” the existence of
which would have been pornographic proof of Russiagate, haunted the first few
years of the Trump presidency.
James
Comey hoped there were recordings of what he described as Trump’s mafia-like
efforts to suborn him. (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”) Michael Cohen
released a tape in which the president assented to a scheme to
buy the silence of a former Playboy model he allegedly slept with. Omarosa
Manigault Newman had a tape in
which she and two other Black Trump staffers worried about the existence
of another tape, which she claimed had caught Trump using
the vilest of racial slurs. The actor Tom Arnold had a whole cable series about
his search, ultimately fruitless, for incriminating Trump tapes.
Trump
recordings loom so large because they offer the prospect of breaking through
his alternative reality, of nailing down this most slippery and mendacious of
presidents, of showing everyone who he really is.
But even those that materialize are often quickly forgotten, as Trump’s
approval rating stays low but stubbornly stable and one scandal is eclipsed by
another. Our politics suffers no shortage of incontrovertible proof of Trump’s
venality. What it lacks is accountability.
It’s possible, maybe even
likely, that the famed journalist Bob Woodward’s utterly damning tapes of Trump
discussing the coronavirus will fall into this same nothing-matters cycle. But
decent people with public platforms should try to make sure that doesn’t
happen.
It’s not just that these
tapes reveal the president lying about the pandemic that has ravaged America on
his watch. What’s shocking — even after more than three and a half numbing
years — is the deliberate, willful nature of the lies. Unlike most Trump tapes,
Woodward’s actually tell us something new about the president, rather than just
confirming what we think we already know.
Because
Trump is a prodigious consumer of propaganda, as well as a creator of it, it’s
not always clear how aware he is of spreading disinformation. People who’ve
spent time with him often conclude that truth has no meaning for him.
Woodward quoted Dan Coats,
Trump’s former director of national intelligence, saying: “To him, a lie is not
a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the
truth and a lie.” Trump creates for his supporters a carapace of malignant
fantasy, but he often seems to live inside it with them.
Yet in
recordings Woodward has released of Trump talking about the coronavirus —
excerpts from interviews conducted for Woodward’s new book, “Rage” — the
president doesn’t sound ignorant or deluded. Rather, he sounds uncommonly
lucid. On Feb. 7, Trump described the virus as airborne and “more deadly than
even your strenuous flus,” adding, “this is 5 percent versus 1 percent, or less
than 1 percent.” It’s not clear whether Trump thought that Covid-19 had a 5
percent case fatality rate — a number that seemed plausible in February — but
he clearly knew that compared with the flu, it was several times more likely to
kill.
And yet he told the
country just the opposite. “The percentage for the flu is under 1
percent,” Trump said on March 7.
“But this could also be under 1 percent because many of the people that aren’t
that sick don’t report.” Despite knowing that the virus was airborne, he mocked
mask-wearing and held several large indoor rallies. He told Woodward in March
that “plenty of young people” were getting sick, but over the summer would
insist that 99 percent of cases were “totally harmless” and that children are “almost immune.”
We know
now that this wasn’t just Trump being buffoonish and engaging in magical
thinking. It was conscious deception. Publicly, Trump kept insisting that
the virus would disappear.
Privately, he told Woodward: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like
playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Of
course, Trump usually loves creating panic — about immigrants, about antifa, about
low-income people invading the suburbs. But there is one place he wants to
maintain tranquility — in the financial markets. “Just stay calm, it will go
away,” he said on March 10.
“We want to protect our shipping industry, our cruise industry, cruise ships,
we want to protect our airline industry.” He added, “A lot of good things are
going to happen. The consumer is ready.”
And so
Trump lied to the country about the calamity that would soon overtake it. His
administration didn’t ramp up a national testing or contact-tracing program. He
and his supporters pressured states to open up prematurely. A July Pew poll found
that only 46 percent of Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican
Party considered the coronavirus a major threat to public health, compared with
85 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Trump could have made
Republicans take the virus seriously. He chose not to.
Not
long after attending the president’s June rally in Tulsa, Okla., the former
Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died of Covid-19. In August,
whoever is maintaining Cain’s Twitter account tweeted, “It looks
like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to
be.” It was Trump who made such a cultish commitment to denying the lethality
of Covid-19 into a sign of loyalty. And all the time, he knew better.
Trump
supporters may not care that their president has knowingly endangered them,
withholding potentially lifesaving information that he readily confided to an
elite Washington journalist. But that doesn’t change the importance of what
Woodward has captured on tape. It’s now clear that just because Trump is lying
to us, that doesn’t mean he’s lying to himself.
Trump’s
lies sabotaged efforts to contain the coronavirus, almost certainly leading to
many more deaths than it would have caused under a minimally competent and
non-sociopathic leader. On Sept. 9, there were 1,176 coronavirus deaths in the
United States. In Canada, there were two.
When someone’s actions
lead to the death of another, we evaluate that person’s intent and state of
mind in order to assign the right measure of blame. When a president’s actions
lead to the deaths of thousands, we should do the same.
