A White House Infected With Propaganda
Trump
risks lives to sustain his coronavirus lies.
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 5, 2020
There is a line from Hannah Arendt’s
1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that I’ve thought about constantly
during the last four years. “Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert,
in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will
abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda,” Arendt wrote.
A regime dedicated to creating its own
reality doesn’t just use language to lie. To truly animate lies, those in power
must behave as if they’re true, no matter who gets hurt.
For the past seven months, Donald
Trump’s big lie has been that the coronavirus isn’t as dangerous as scientists
say, and that his administration has the virus under control. To sustain this
lie, Trump’s circle has had to reject the mitigation and containment strategies
that many other countries have used to get a handle on the pandemic, because
those strategies are tangible reminders of the threat the virus poses.
The face mask is the
ultimate symbol of the frightening abnormality of this moment, and so the Trump
administration treated masking as a sign of disloyalty. It’s not just that
Trump himself frequently declined to wear masks. He mocked Joe Biden for
wearing them, and discouraged their use in his presence.
“Everyone knew that Mr. Trump viewed
masks as a sign of weakness,” Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman of The New York
Times reported this weekend, citing White House officials. They quoted
Olivia Troye, formerly one of Mike Pence’s top aides on the coronavirus task
force: “You were looked down upon when you would walk by with a mask.”
So it’s not
surprising that the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, the very
face of administration propaganda, didn’t wear a mask when briefing reporters
on Sunday, even though she’d been exposed to the virus. On Monday news broke
that she’d tested positive, making it clear that she’d put those reporters in
danger.
Or, I should say, further danger: Three
journalists covering the administration had already tested positive on Friday,
underlining what a perilously infectious environment this White House has
become. Two of McEnany’s deputies in the press shop also tested positive —
that’s in addition, as of this writing, to Trump, his wife, his campaign
manager, his personal assistant, his informal advisers Kellyanne Conway and
Chris Christie, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and three
senators.
In June, when the
coronavirus tore through senior political and military ranks in Iran, it was
seen as a sign that the country’s sclerotic leadership might be teetering.
“They have not been completely straightforward with their people,” Gen. Frank
McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, was quoted saying at a think tank event.
“And as a result of that, the distrust you begin to see within Iran of their
leadership is perhaps magnified.” Iran’s government, he said, was “struggling.”
Now ours is too. The problem is not
that a sickened Trump can’t perform the duties of the president. After his
diagnosis, a strange political fiction took hold that American national
security would be threatened if Trump were incapacitated, as if Trump
ordinarily does work that protects the nation’s interests.
In truth, while it’s scary that Trump
is making decisions while on a steroid with documented psychological side effects,
when it comes to the stability of our government, it’s hard to see how it
matters whether the president watches Fox News and tweets from the White House
or from a suite at Walter Reed.
What’s alarming, rather, is that each
new diagnosis in the White House demonstrates how thoroughly this
administration has been infected by its own disinformation. The refusal to take
basic precautions against the pandemic is the starkest evidence yet of how our
government has morphed into a personality cult. The out-of-control spread of
the coronavirus in the White House is a microcosm of its out-of-control spread
in the country, where on Friday new cases hit the highest point since
mid-August.
What matters now is whether the
Covid-19 cluster at the pinnacle of Republican politics acts how the Chernobyl
disaster did in the Soviet Union, further exposing a regime rotten with
mendacity. That’s far from guaranteed.
In the hospital, Trump and his enablers
worked to minimize the perception that he was really sick. His doctor misled the public about the president’s condition.
Trump staged photo shoots of faux work sessions and risked the health of Secret
Service agents to drive by a gathering of fans.
If a critical mass of people continue
to trust Trump, the way he’s spinning his ordeal might lead them to take the
coronavirus even less seriously. Announcing his discharge on Monday, Trump
tweeted that he felt better than he had in 20 years, saying: “Don’t be
afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
But Americans should fear Covid. And
if coronavirus dominates our lives, it’s because an administration charged with
protecting us is so subservient to the president’s lies that it can’t even
protect itself.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion
columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion
and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn
