A fictional film about a US president mismanaging the response to a dangerous pandemic would never depict its lead character anywhere near as selfish and bumbling as Donald Trump in the age of Covid-19. He’d be too cartoonish and inept to be believable.
And yet, here we are. At a press conference on Sunday – the same day that state governors declared closures of bars and restaurants and when the Covid-19 death count shot up in Italy – the American president spent more time gushing over the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut, heaping praise on big corporate retailers for keeping Americans well-supplied, and praising Friday’s rise in the stock market (“almost 2,000 points!”) than, say, addressing the health concerns of the public.
Trump’s response goes beyond incompetence – it’s a political abomination. However uncoordinated his administration’s moves have been, Trump has made it clear he sees this pandemic chiefly as a threat to the market and wealthy people’s personal interests (and relatedly, his own political future) – not to the people whose lives it will threaten or claim.
“What’s happened with the Fed is phenomenal news,” Trump gushed at the press conference, “what’s happening with all of these incredible companies is phenomenal news!” “Relax,” he later continued, “we’re doing great, it all will pass.” These words hardly matched the reality on the ground, as Covid-19 was shutting down whole nations across Europe, and American hospitals were cancelling elective surgeries to prepare for a potential surge of the critically ill.
Trump and his allies’ impulse to protect the powerful led the administration to undercut the nation’s public health infrastructure long before the rise of coronavirus – a fact that helps contextualize his response today. For instance, he signed an executive order in January 2017 that froze hiring of federal workers, leading to almost 700 vacancies at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC); some such positions were at a key department that “regulates some of the world’s most dangerous bacteria and viruses and manages the nation’s stockpile of emergency medical countermeasures”, the Washington Post reported.
That same year, Trump and congressional Republicans nearly succeeded in passing a bill that would have gutted Medicaid – and that also would have eliminated the Prevention and Public Health Fund, the source of 12% of the CDC’s budget. Such cuts had one big beneficiary: corporations and the very wealthy, who would have seen big tax cuts had the repeal legislation passed. Later, in 2018, it disbanded the White House’s pandemic office charged with responding to outbreaks like Covid-19 – putting no leadership structure in its place.
Since the pandemic began, the administration has hardly reprioritized. As Politico’s Dan Diamond reported, Trump opposed evacuating a cruise ship that was stuck off the coast of California, even though it seemed like the right thing to do, noting that: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” As Diamond suggested in an interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, “[t]he lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.”
In that same vein, the president has baselessly boosted the stock market while providing deceptive public health reassurances. “The Coronavirus,” he tweeted on 24 February, “is very much under control in the USA … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Trump built on this idea last Friday. At a press conference where he finally declared Covid-19 a national emergency, Trump bizarrely passed the microphone to one corporate CEO after another – “celebrities in their own right”, he gushed, “… the biggest business people, the greatest retailers anywhere in the world”. After the conference, he sent a note to his supporters, obtained and reported by CNN, that trumpeted: “From opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!” It included a graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average with his signature – as much a statement of his political priorities as historians are likely to uncover.
Sooner or later, however, Trump will realize that he cannot bullshit his way past biology. Viruses are immune to propaganda; Covid-19 will advance regardless of Trump’s avarice. From his push to grind up Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich in 2017, to his bungling stock-market-obsessed response to Covid-19 in 2020, Trump and company have elevated self-interest above life.