Back in mid-March, when broad swaths of the country were mere days into an unprecedented lockdown and slightly more than 7,000 Americans had been infected by the novel coronavirus, a Stanford University School of Medicine adviser named Gregory Rigano dropped a bombshell on Fox News.
The frightening new pathogen, he told host Tucker Carlson, could be cured by hydroxychloroquine, a century-old drug used to treat autoimmune diseases.
Trump was fully aware early on that the virus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” and highly contagious, but deliberately decided to downplay it.
The claim was baseless: The French study that had first highlighted the drug’s promise was neither randomized nor controlled. Rigano was soon exposed as a Silicon Valley cryptocurrency investor who’d faked his association with Stanford’s medical school and self-published his study on Google Docs.
But, within days, what should have been a quickly forgotten sideshow was instead legitimated by the most powerful person on Earth, who reportedly never misses an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Hydroxychloroquine, President Donald Trump announced at the coronavirus press briefing held the day after the interview, was a “game changer.”
The day after that, Trump called himself a “big fan” of the drug, despite protests from the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, who emphasized the lack of evidence that the drug was effective for COVID-19 patients.
Fauci’s corrective hardly mattered: Once the President had glommed onto the idea, rightwing news media too began hyping the cure, promoting the pills more than 100 times in three days. Trump’s boosterism caused demand for the drug to skyrocket, preventing lupus patients from accessing their suddenly popular meds.
Nearly two dozen states began stockpiling millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine. One man in Arizona reportedly died after ingesting a toxic form of chloroquine after hearing Trump’s praise; subsequent studies began finding it to be ineffective or even harmful in patients as well.
Nonetheless, Trump doubled down. In April, he hosted recovered patients at the White House and highlighted their “tremendous endorsements” of hydroxychloroquine, suggesting that the ever-growing scientific consensus against taking the drug for COVID-19 was nothing but partisan knee-capping.
A month later, Trump announced at a press conference that he himself was taking the drug prophylactically and insisted it was safe, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration yanked its hastily issued emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine, and the National Institutes of Health ended its clinical trial, both concluding that the drug was risky and ineffective.
Trump’s response was to retweet a pro-hydroxychloroquine and anti-mask video later banned from video-hosting platforms as misinformation. He has continued to champion the thoroughly discredited “cure” at public events.
The hydroxychloroquine debacle was hardly Trump’s most egregious act in the months since the pandemic began, but it perfectly encapsulated the leadership style he’s demonstrated throughout the crisis. His favorite white nationalist TV host, Tucker Carlson, trumped peer-reviewed research and scientific advisers. His own self-assured, impulsive yammering about it dragged along panicked local officials, medical providers, desperate patients, and the public on a chaotic, months-long wild goose chase that never should have happened, even as actual evidence-backed mitigation strategies, like wearing masks in public, went ignored.
And now we know, thanks to a new book by Bob Woodward, that Trump was fully aware early on that the virus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” and highly contagious, but deliberately decided to downplay it.
The United States has experienced the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak, with more than 200,000 dead and seven million confirmed cases as of September 23. Containment efforts are marred by confusion, contradiction, and a rising tide of outright denialism. In the fight against the coronavirus, it’s almost as if Trump is on the side of the virus.
Since Trump’s unlikely electoral win in 2016, political analysts have debated whether he is better understood as an aberration within the Republican Party or as its ultimate logical endpoint. Until COVID-19, the latter case was far more persuasive.
For decades, the party has veered further rightward, becoming the ultimate vehicle for mega-donors’ wish fulfillment. And because rightwing billionaires’ wishes amount to little beyond austerity and oligarchy—unsurprisingly, an agenda for which there’s only a tiny constituency—the GOP has rounded out its coalition by whipping up culture war resentments.
It’s a depressingly successful strategy that has included consolidating evangelicals into a cohesive voting block through issues like abortion, school prayer, and “family values.” Ronald Reagan won two back-to-back landslides that handed him a mega-mandate to decimate the labor movement and lower rich people’s taxes. Since then, the winners of the “Reagan Revolution” have veered into ever more explicitly gruesome territory, stirring up racism, misogyny, and xenophobia within their nearly all-white base.
Is it really any surprise that a party so reliant on propaganda to win votes could be taken over so handily by a billionaire reality TV host?
Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment during his first term was enacting one of the most upwardly distributive tax bills in history. He has enthusiastically led a series of attempts, still ongoing, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He’s stocked federal agencies with rightwing sycophants and installed dozens of conservative judges. His approval rating within his own party hovers around 90 percent, and he enjoys the active support of nearly every Republican elected official.
As his political supporters see it, Trump’s kooky tweets are a small price to pay for the fulfillment of Republican goals. But, as it turns out, having credible, coherent public-health messaging and deference to experts is no small part of guiding a country through a pandemic.
With no vaccine or cure, curbing infection rates depends largely on behavioral change—something that can only be implemented on a national level through education, communication, and coordination. It’s not clear that Trump is even capable of these things, let alone interested in them.
As Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate, tells The Progressive, those needs are in tension with Trump’s “narcissistic, pathological need to be right” against whatever truths might be presented by such independent sources as scientists and the media. “And so he seeks to actively undermine them, because they threaten his own need to will his dictum to be true.”
This makes Trump uniquely unqualified to lead the nation out of a pandemic. He lives in an alternative universe, wherein the solution to the pandemic is not science but adherence to whatever Trump thinks is best. Whereas President George W. Bush, during his second term, reportedly read a book about pandemics and directed his security team to prepare for one, Trump has repeatedly clashed with his own health experts, including Dr. Fauci.
As El-Sayed observes, Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has “served six administrations now, and this is the first time a President has ever tacitly declared war on him.”
Besides touting hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, Trump has declared that the United States had the pandemic “under control,” that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” and that the spread of the virus was “receding”—all claims that Fauci has had to point out were false.
Fauci has gamely tried to put a positive spin on Trump’s fabrications, at one point saying the President was “trying to keep the spirits up of people.”
Trump is not the first U.S. President to fail to respond effectively to a pandemic. As AIDS ravaged gay and intravenous-drug-using communities in the 1980s, it was years before President Reagan even uttered the term publicly. But as Yale School of Medicine professor Gregg Gonsalves recalls from his days as an AIDS activist, that was still preferable to what’s happening now.
“It’s not even on par with the AIDS epidemic,” Gonsalves says in a phone interview. “Reagan didn’t give a shit about AIDS. He didn’t really think about it much. I don’t think Bush really did either. They basically let others do their job. There was sort of benign neglect. Now, I don’t know if there’s neglect here. There’s active destructive behavior going on.”
It’s nearly impossible to itemize all of that behavior in one article, but it was detectable pretty much from the get-go.
Trump led by casting criticism of his response to the virus as a Democratic hoax, lied about the scale of the emergency, falsely claimed people could get tested whenever they pleased months before testing kits were even remotely accessible, insisted on calling it the “China virus,” bragged about shaking hands, began touting reopening once the stock market took a hit, slammed CDC school reopening guidelines, encouraged protests and lawsuits against states that didn’t speedily reopen, refused to wear a mask in public, held large rallies later tied to infections, and repeatedly praised his own handling of the crisis.
Just as disturbing as Trump’s failed leadership has been other people’s acquiescence to it. Authoritarian strongmen like Trump insist on their own reality. And they can get away with that only if others let them.
“It’s not just the man,” Gonsalves says. “It’s the people who are surrounding him, who think like him. It’s his family members—the inner circle that remains, because all the people who have disagreed with him have left and he’s surrounded by yes-men and yes-women. I don’t think he has a cogent understanding of what’s going on. He’s limited in his analytical skills. And he’s just getting his information from watching Fox News, not from cracking open The New England Journal of Medicine.”
In the absence of coherent federal leadership, states and institutions have been largely on their own—with reopening and mask usage tied closely to partisan leanings. But with no national bailout, they have only so much leeway. States whose economies depend heavily on tourism, like Maine, have been pressured to loosen quarantine rules for newcomers; others are so cash-strapped from lost tax revenue that they can’t sustain residents and businesses throughout a responsible lockdown.
Schools and universities have acted individually, with several shutting down quickly after outbreaks rapidly followed the return to classrooms. Cases have continued to rise across parts of the country. For his part, Trump has appeared to lose interest in the crisis, focusing instead on his re-election bid.
In August, the Republican National Convention endeavored to frame Trump as a triumphant wartime President, one who had nobly helmed the nation through a crisis that was all but over. The Democratic National Convention, held the previous week, included ubiquitous mask-wearing; that of the Party of Trump did not.
Now that we’ve lived through the start of the worst pandemic for a century, and stood by watching the Trump regime exacerbate it, the arguments made by the insurgent left seem more convincing than ever. COVID-19 has ravaged the very same communities that have been most deeply impacted by racism and neoliberalism: Black people, Latinx people, poor people, and the chronically ill. Ours is a deeply unequal country, devoid of a safety net, robust public investments, or functional institutions capable of guaranteeing dignified lives for its people, especially when things start to fall apart.
Trump’s opponent in the November 3 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, seems to be hiding quietly, letting Trump wreck his own chances and waiting for exasperated voters to vote blue. Biden’s ahead in the polls, so it may well work.
Then again, it may not. Either way, the coronavirus has won.