Trump Infects America
By Olivia Nuzzi
“At the
best of times, Trumpworld operates with all the strategic direction of a
chicken with its head cut off,” a senior Republican official told me. “Right
now, they’re operating like a chicken with its head cut off, lit on fire, and
thrown off a cliff.”
The world
has heard little from Donald Trump since he announced, just before 1 a.m. on
Friday, that he has been diagnosed with COVID-19. Usually it’s the tweets that
cause concern, but today it’s been the lack of them.
According
to a senior White House official, Trump has been “active” today, even as his
doctors are “encouraging him to rest.” Famously, Trump does not enjoy physical
movement, and the official told me that “active” in this case means he has been
talking to members of his staff and members of Congress by phone. “His symptoms
are mild,” the official said. Late Friday afternoon, the president’s physician
described him as “fatigued but in good spirits” after receiving “a single
eight-gram dose of Regeneron’s polyclonal antibody cocktail. He completed the
infusion without incident.” He added that the president was also taking “zinc,
vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, and daily aspirin.” Friday evening he flew to
Walter Reed medical center “out of an abundance of caution” where he’ll be
“working from the presidential offices…for the next few days,” press
secretary Kayleigh McEnany said. This has been the story from the White House
today: to downplay the president’s diagnosis just as he has downplayed the
country’s diagnosis for the past nine months.
It goes
without saying that this was avoidable. While it’s true that even the most
cautious person could be unlucky and could contract the virus despite going to
great lengths to avoid it, President Trump was, proudly, very much not that.
He has
never taken this pandemic seriously, not even as his advisers warned him that
he should, not even as bodies piled up in hospitals in his hometown, as the
death ticker recorded hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of
thousands of dead Americans.
The world
listened as the president cast doubt on the very notion that the virus was
something to fear, as he undermined his own public-health officials, as he
contradicted their advice with what his gut instinct told him about the science
he did not understand, free-associating about sunlight and disinfectants and
hydroxychloroquine. We observed the president violating the medical
recommendations that his administration had offered the public. He rarely wore
a face mask; he traveled needlessly, including to parts of the country where
the virus was spiking; he met at close range with large groups of people, few
of them wearing protective gear, either.
The most
powerful man in the world is, under ordinary circumstances, also the most
protected. He is guarded with snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs. Anyplace he goes,
any room he’ll set foot in, is swept by security. Any person he’s expected to
meet is scanned for weapons. His food is tested for contamination. He is so
well cared for by doctors that they might as well be monitoring his heart’s
every beat. That he is now infected by COVID-19 is a testament not to the
strength of the virus, not to the failures of his White House staff, but to his
carelessness. How can you protect someone who refuses to be protected?
He risked
not only his own health but the health of others around him. This was true
before his diagnosis. In June, he insisted on holding an indoor rally in Tulsa,
which led to swelling numbers of infections in the city. At least one guest at
that event, Herman Cain, would later die from the virus after spending time on
a ventilator in Georgia. Trump escaped without harm, but he couldn’t help but
push his luck. After his closest adviser, Hope Hicks, showed signs that she had
COVID-19, forcing her to isolate on the flight back from a MAGA rally, the president
and other members of his staff made the decision to travel to Bedminster, New
Jersey, anyway, where he hosted a fundraiser and met with his supporters. When
Hicks tested positive, she worried about others around her who might be
infected, too, but the White House sought to keep that information from the
public. Without Jennifer Jacobs, a dogged Bloomberg reporter who broke the
story about Hicks’s illness, the world might still be in the dark about the
sickness sweeping through the West Wing and the highest levels of our
government. And then there are the indirect effects of the president’s actions,
the ripples through society that threaten to touch each one of us. A Trump
campaign volunteer who refuses to wear a face mask on principle and who believes
the media has overblown the threat of the virus told me the president’s
diagnosis didn’t make her nervous at all. “I don’t deny the virus is out
there,” she said. “I’m just crossing my fingers and going for the herd
immunity.”
We do not
yet know the extent of the damage in Washington. Much of this is not a function
of the strange way the virus spreads from person to person, but of the
unethical way the president governs without transparency. For instance, it’s
not possible to compile a complete list of people the president has come into
contact with over the last two weeks because the Trump administration refuses
to release visitor logs for the White House. Multiple attendees at the Rose
Garden event for Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett (who
herself recovered from the virus this summer), have already announced that
they’ve since gotten sick. Multiple reporters in the White House press pool
have tested positive for the virus today, according to the White House
Correspondents’ Association. We do not yet know how many White House officials
will contract it, whether the virus will rip through Capitol Hill, or how far
this threatens the presidential line of succession.
The
Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, both
announced that they had tested negative for the virus today. But viewers who
suffered through Tuesday’s presidential debate in Cleveland will recall
watching as the president shouted at Biden across the stage, in an enclosed
space, for 90 minutes. Although the Cleveland Clinic mandated that all guests
within the perimeter of the debate wear face coverings, the president’s family
members ignored that warning and declined to accept the masks offered to them
by organizers. For months, the Biden campaign has been preoccupied with
protecting him from exposure to the virus, worried not only for his health, but
about the optics if he were to get sick, which would confirm the attacks Trump
has hurled at him for being old and weak. His “basement campaign” has been a
source of mockery from his opponents, who never acknowledge why he’s stuck at
home like much of the rest of the country. But with a general election under
way, the Biden campaign could not protect its candidate from exposure to the
president. Not completely. We cannot yet be sure that Biden is safe or that the
people around him are safe. At this point, we can’t really be sure of anything.
And so
the discourse descends into chaos, with QAnon and deep-state kooks on one side
and even the most intelligent and reasonable people trafficking in conspiracy
theories on the other. Can you blame anyone? This is the result of five years
of lies and distortions and alternative facts. With 32 days left before
Election Day, whatever confidence remained in our system has been further
undermined by this colossal display of idiocy. The Republic collapses not with
a bang but with a million stupid decisions by the most powerful people.
“Same as
it always is,” said the senior Republican official. “One could argue that’s
nothing new. Just the degree of severity.”
