In his latest book, The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright has given us a riveting, meticulously researched account of one of the most consequential years in U.S. history. Wright examines the events of 2020 through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of malfeasance by multiple governments around the world, most notably our own.
As he did with his seminal work, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker, sets out to explain a defining moment in U.S. history. The Plague Year is in part a story of science—the frantic, and in many ways heroic, search for effective treatments and a vaccine. It is also the story of frontline health care workers in New York City and other places, cheered by their neighbors at the end of every shift.
The Plague Year is inevitably an indictment of former President Donald Trump and an administration that, as other elected officials around the country would discover, had no real plan for confronting the virus.
From the book: “People cracked open their windows or stood on their balconies and sang ‘New York, New York.’ Health care workers felt gratified, but many didn’t feel like heroes. . . . Some workers were dealing every day with the feeling that too many people had died on their watch. They headed home full of self-reproach. But the people who were cheering knew that. They knew a moral cost was exacted, along with the physical and emotional toll. The people in the blue cotton scrubs were carrying the city’s guilt along with its grief. That’s part of what made them heroic.”
This, says Wright, was one dimension of the story of COVID-19—people pulling together, doing their best under dire and deadly circumstances. But there was a counter-narrative as well. The Plague Year is inevitably an indictment of former President Donald Trump and an administration that, as other elected officials around the country would discover, had no real plan for confronting the virus. Wright recounts in painful detail the conference call on March 16, when Trump informed the nation’s governors that they were on their own.
“We’re backing you in terms of . . . getting what you need,” the President said. “Also, though, respirators, ventilators, all the equipment—try getting it yourselves. We will be backing you but try getting it yourselves.”
The governors, as Wright relates, were astonished:
“Most governors had assumed that, just as in the event of a natural disaster—a hurricane or a forest fire—the federal government would rush to help. Federal agencies would be enlisted. FEMA would swing into action. The doors of the national stockpile would be thrown open and emergency equipment would be quickly dispersed.”
When this did not happen, Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington State, said the President’s direction was “equivalent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on December 8, 1941, saying ‘Good luck, Connecticut, you go build the battleships.’ ” Meanwhile, Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, told the President, “You’re actively setting us up!”
The Trump Administration’s “no plan plan,” Wright says, left the nation swimming in a sea of uncertainty, as the virus raged and the death toll soared toward half a million and counting. Not surprisingly, the nation grew angrier and more divided—even more violent, as we saw when a ragtag band of militia members in Michigan plotted to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
“Snatch and grab, man,” declared Adam Fox, self-appointed leader of the plot. “Just grab the bitch.”
All of it was, Wright maintains, part of the collateral damage from a plague that revealed the dark underside of the American soul—a dimension Donald Trump understood far better than the rest of us. “Trump knew,” declares Wright, despite all our pretenses to the contrary, “we are essentially a vulgar nation.”
But not entirely. Wright ends his story with an image of redemption, the scene at dusk on January 19, 2021, when President-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, his soon-to-be Vice President, led a ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial—a silent remembrance for the people who had died.
From the book: “Four hundred lamps lined the reflecting pool, each representing one thousand Americans who had already perished in the plague. More would come; 23,000 had died the previous week, and 1.5 million new cases had been reported. It would not end soon. But as the lamps came on in the gathering darkness, the nation began to remember.”
In the end, after reading Wright’s account, we are left to hope that the memory might include some of the best of who we are, as well as—perhaps more inevitably—a deeper understanding of the worst.