Trump
Is a Super-Spreader of Disinformation
The
president is the single biggest reason why many Americans distrust science, the
electoral system, and one another.
OCTOBER 3, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
A
super-spreader—a term we didn’t much use nine months ago—is a person with a
contagious disease who gives it to a lot of other people. In the coronavirus
pandemic, super-spreaders have played an outsize role. Scientists have identified
super-spreaders who have infected dozens of people with the virus, while others
with the illness haven’t infected anyone at all. Super-spreaders may explain
why the coronavirus seems to take over so quickly in some places, but not in
others.
We don’t
know yet whether President Donald Trump was a super-spreader of the coronavirus
or the victim of one, perhaps at the Rose Garden event for the Supreme Court
nominee Amy Coney Barrett, where few wore masks and many shook hands; perhaps
while he was preparing to debate. But Trump has been a super-spreader in a
different sense for many, many years—a super-spreader of disinformation. As a
businessman, he was a congenital liar who phoned in fake stories about himself to New
York tabloids, who lied about his net worth, who exaggerated the height of Trump Tower. As a
candidate, he lied about Barack Obama’s birth certificate; he declared falsely
that Ted Cruz’s father had helped assassinate John F. Kennedy; he invented a story
about “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrating on 9/11. As president, he has
lied about so many things that even the nation’s most assiduous fact-checkers
have had trouble keeping up.
When the
pandemic began, I did hope that the virus would provide a dose of hard reality
to American public discourse, one strong enough to break through the fog of
disinformation that Trump has created around himself and his administration.
The virus, after all, doesn’t care whether you distrust Anthony Fauci, or
whether you think the whole thing is a hoax. I hoped that a real illness would
persuade Americans to seek real information from reliable sources, though I
also feared that it might not. On March 2—I was then in northern Italy, where
the European pandemic began—I wrote that “epidemics, like disasters, have a way
of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.” Specifically,
I feared we would learn that Americans trusted neither their public-health
system nor their political system, more broadly defined.
My fears
were well founded. While the leaders of democracies as varied as Germany,
Slovakia, Taiwan, and South Korea fought the virus with the best science and
the best public-health information they could muster—always acknowledging that
this was a new virus and that the science was constantly evolving—the American
president kept lying, kept dissembling, kept dodging reality. At the very
beginning, Trump didn’t tell Americans what he knew about COVID-19: “I wanted
to play it down,” he told Bob Woodward. He lied about what was
in his briefings, lied about what he had been told by the Chinese government, lied about his efforts
to block travel from China, kept lying all
through the spring and the summer. As recently as Tuesday’s debate, he was
lying about a vaccine, falsely declaring that the U.S.
military would soon be delivering hundreds of thousands of doses.
So
profound and fundamental is the president’s dishonesty that my gut reaction to
the news of Trump’s illness was … doubt. He has lied about so
much—why not this too? I am not proud of this reaction, because it shows how
much I have changed: Once, I would have been inclined to believe news about the
president’s health when published by the White House. Now—especially in light
of the president’s mysterious past visits to the hospital and
his use of dubious doctors—I instinctively distrusted it. Even now, I don’t
know whether Trump’s doctors have moved him to Walter Reed National Military
Medical Center out of “an abundance of caution” or whether it means that he is
much sicker than they want us to know.
Will the president’s
illness change the way he speaks about this disease? Will it therefore change
the way Americans cope with it too? To judge from the experience of other
countries, not necessarily. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro got the virus.
But he had a relatively mild version, was sick for only a few weeks, and has
since used his experience to double down on his
claims that COVID-19 is exaggerated and that social distancing is useless.
Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian analyst, told me that Bolsonaro’s recovery has
even raised his status, allowing him to portray himself as “superhuman,” a
“real man” who cannot be felled by a virus. Maybe Trump’s illness will inspire
him to double down on his previous lies, and maybe it will raise his status
too.
British
Prime Minister Boris Johnson also got the coronavirus, but the story played out
differently. Johnson was hospitalized. Afterward, he did seem to take the
pandemic more seriously than before. He gave an emotional address, thanking the
doctors and nurses who had cared for him. He adopted a more somber tone. At
least temporarily, he too seemed to win some sympathy, and people were more willing
to listen to his government’s rules about lockdown and quarantine. Maybe
Trump’s illness will persuade him to treat the disease more seriously, and
maybe it will persuade people to view him more sympathetically too.
I don’t
know what direction Trump’s illness will take, I don’t know whether it will
persuade him to take the disease more or less seriously, and I don’t know how
it will affect his political fortunes. But in one sense, it is too late to
matter, because Trump’s super-spreading of disinformation has already changed
America. Just a few days ago, Cornell University published a study showing that 38 percent of media
stories containing misinformation about the virus refer to the president: Trump
is literally, not metaphorically, the single most important reason so many
Americans distrust information they receive about the disease. He is literally,
not metaphorically, the reason so many Americans distrust our electoral system
too. He is literally, not metaphorically, the reason so many Americans distrust
one another.
The
president and everyone around him will spin and manipulate his illness too;
indeed, they are already doing it. During a strangely evasive press conference
today, the head of Trump’s medical team, Sean Conley, declared that the
president was in “exceptionally good spirits” but also implied that Trump might
have been diagnosed and received treatment before the public was informed, that
he might have been put on oxygen, even that he might have attended public
events knowing he was ill. Minutes later, an “anonymous administration source,”
who might have been the White House chief of staff, informed pool reporters that the “president’s vitals
over the last 24 hours were very concerning” and that “the next 48 hours will
be critical,” a message far more serious than the one delivered in public.
Another anonymous official then sought to clarify the timeline, contradicting
Conley and other doctors.
And we
are all … unsurprised. This kind of obfuscation, this level of confusion, is
exactly what we have come to expect from our national leader. Trump has
destroyed our trust with wanton abandon—trust in our political system, trust in
our institutions, trust in science, trust in America itself—simply because it
benefits him, personally, to do so. Whatever happens to Trump over the next few
weeks, that is the legacy that will outlast his presidency. It has already
distorted and changed and altered the country just as profoundly as the
coronavirus itself.
ANNE APPLEBAUM is
a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow of the Agora Institute
at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of
Authoritarianism.
