A President in the Hospital and a Nation in the Dark
This
whole administration is a superspreader event.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
Oct. 5, 2020
The coronavirus’s rampage through
America threw a spotlight on its failings — on the galling inequality, the
fatal partisanship, the susceptibility to fiction and the way in which rugged
individualism had curdled into plain old selfishness.
The coronavirus’s rampage through the
White House has had the same effect. What we have seen over recent days is
Donald Trump’s presidency in miniature, his worst traits distilled. Two in
particular — mendacity and recklessness — are on especially unsettling display.
When exactly did the president get sick
and precisely how sick did he get?
That’s knowable, but we still don’t really know it. He’s in the hospital. We’re
in the dark.
How many people might
he have exposed to the coronavirus since first experiencing symptoms himself?
We’re still plumbing that mystery. We’re still doing that tally.
What is clear amid all this
defensive murkiness is that Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the virus became
its accomplice, as his disdain for masks and perverse sense of invincibility
translated into a packed calendar of events and blasé behavior by the people
attending them that amounted to epidemiological suicide.
Illness isn’t illuminating him, not to
judge by a stunt he pulled early Sunday evening, when he left Walter Reed
National Military Medical Center briefly to ride past and wave at supporters
outside. Although he wore a mask, “Every single person in the vehicle during
that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be
quarantined for 14 days,” Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending physician at
Walter Reed, wrote on Twitter.
“They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump
to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”
Reviewing the timeline of the
president’s activities leading up to his positive coronavirus test, journalists
have focused, for good reason, on the Rose Garden ceremony on Sept. 26 at which he
introduced his latest Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to the
nation. At least a half-dozen people who have tested positive for the
coronavirus over the past few days were there, in a crowd where neither social
distancing nor face covering was enforced. It may have been a superspreader
event.
But the crazy part is
that Trump’s next five days were a sequence of potential
superspreader events, because his look-Ma-no-mask presidency is its
own potential superspreader event: the rallies, the big convention speech
outside the White House, the sessions of debate prep and the debate itself, at
which the safety protocol decreed that everyone in the audience wear a mask.
Trump’s family members and Trump’s
chief of staff did not and, according to the debate’s moderator, Chris Wallace,
waved away an official from the Cleveland Clinic who offered masks to them.
Wallace recounted that situation on
“Fox News Sunday,” asking a Trump adviser if they think that “rules for
everybody else” don’t apply to them.
Great question. With an obvious answer.
They are trapped by their own denialism, which demands that they model the lack
of concern that they push on voters, and they elevate looking undaunted over
being smart, confidence over prudence, because that’s the administration’s way.
Besides, masks would have incensed
Trump, who, based on his debate performance, needed to be cooled down, not
fired up. As Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman reported in The Times, he created a “top-down culture
of fear” about exhibiting any worry about infection. “If you wanted to make the
boss happy,” Karni and Haberman wrote, “you left the mask at home.”
That’s a metaphor for a whole lot more.
If you want to make the boss happy, you tell him that his inauguration drew
many more people than it did. You tell him bad news is fake. You tell him the
polls are off. You tell him Robert Mueller’s investigation is a hoax. You tell
him that President Obama spied on his campaign.
You become Attorney General Bill Barr,
a one-man factory of exonerations and excuses. You abet his existence in an
alternate reality, where the sun is always shining and will magically zap an
inconvenient virus into oblivion.
President Trump’s aides abetted him all
the way to Walter Reed, supplemental oxygen, steroids and remdesivir. In the
course of making the boss happy, they helped make him sick.
A president’s
diagnosis with a serious illness should be a moment of at least temporary
conciliation, unity and healing, when political adversaries put away their
weapons, journalists muffle their alarms and Americans say a public prayer for
a speedy recovery.
But Trump’s path to this point and his
manner at this point prevent
that. They compel the telling of hard truths, because they’re so reflective of
the mistakes made in battling this pandemic.
“What I hope is that what we have seen
with the president is a cautionary tale for people” and that more of them “wear
a mask to help other people,” one governor said publicly.
That governor was a Republican, Mike DeWine, of Ohio.
I’ve heard nothing yet from Trump or
senior White House officials that suggests that necessary lessons have been
learned — that a commitment to a new conscientiousness has been made. As of
early Sunday evening, they’d offered absolutely no public information or
assurances about contact tracing for all the people who’d attended Trump events
recently or crossed paths with him.
On Saturday evening Trump tweeted out
a four-minute video in
which he had the good grace to thank the medical professionals tending to him
and the many Americans who’d sent kind wishes his way.
Nevertheless, he persisted in his
irresponsibility. Instead of promoting mask wearing and proper social
distancing — a message that would have had tremendous power, given the
circumstances of its delivery — he defended all those crammed events of his, saying
the alternative was sequestering himself upstairs in the White House and
abdicating his duties.
“I had no choice,” he said,
preposterously. There’s a middle ground between hiding out and a schedule that
summons maskless throngs and dispenses with all caution. He just didn’t care to
inhabit it.
And while he found no
time in that video to discuss proper protection against the coronavirus, he did
reassure Americans that medical advances, such as new treatments, would save
the day. “They’re miracles, coming from God,” he said. That statement isn’t an
incentive to behave better. It’s an invitation to nonchalance.
Early Sunday evening, he released another video, just
over a minute long. Again, no mention of masks. No mention of social
distancing. But lavish self-congratulation.
“We have enthusiasm like probably
nobody has ever had — people that love the job we’re doing,” he said of his
administration’s supporters. “We have more enthusiasm than maybe anybody.”
It’s certainly not the fruit of candor
or transparency. He and his administration have demonstrated neither since the
tweet in the wee hours of Friday morning when he told the world that he had the
coronavirus.
Physicians and administration officials
have contradicted one another. They have contradicted themselves. They have
moved and muddled the timeline of his first symptoms and treatments. They have
given us every reason to wonder about a cover-up and made calm impossible and
trust a joke.
“What is the actual state of President
Trump’s health — now and over the past 24 hours?” Jonathan Swan of Axios wrote late Saturday.
“It’s one of the most high-stakes questions in the world, and I cannot answer
it, despite having spent since 5 a.m. on Friday on my phone with sources inside
and close to the White House.”
In fact, Swan added, some of those
sources merely echoed and amplified his wonderment.
“They’re utterly perplexed about what’s
going on,” he wrote. “They, like us, have little confidence in what they are
being told.”
To my ears they’re not just talking
about Trump’s current illness. They’re talking about his administration’s
sickness from the start.
Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995
and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief
and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the
author of three best-selling books. @FrankBruni • Facebook
