CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--On the eve of Donald J. Trump’s acceptance speech to run for reelection as President of the United States of America, it is fitting that we consider his performance as a whole.
In passing, allow me to borrow from a former college classmate of mine named Jim Smith, who has his own blog and recently considered the environmental catastrophe that the Trump presidency has been.
The environmental crimes are just one element of Trump’s record; they are not so much a failure of leadership as they are evidence of malign intent.
But when it comes to the American response to Covid-19, we have to take a different path. It has become slightly fashionable to refer to the Covid deaths of nearly 180,000 Americans as murder on Trump’s part. Before we consider going that far, let’s review the history of American involvement.
When word came out of China that there was a new kind of viral illness that could potentially be a threat, it occurred in a context where Trump (and others) thought he was cruising to a reelection victory. Yes, he was disliked by a lot of people for being a jerk, but the economic fundamentals were holding steady. The fact that the Obama administration had pulled us out of a major recession (with some help from the outgoing Bush administration) was not given any credit by Trump himself. In fact, if you look at the numbers, the Trump administration merely held onto the continuing growth in employment and slight increase in GDP that Obama had already enjoyed.
But as history shows, decent economic growth during a president’s first term, combined with low unemployment, are indicators of likely reelection. Whether Trump would have been the exception due to him being disliked by a majority of the American people is another question. But in Trump’s mind, it was going to be possible to run a campaign of triumphant economic success. He would also tell a lot of lies about the beautiful wall he was building, but that was secondary to unemployment rates below five percent.
It was in that context that the new disease – at that time still referred to as a neo-corona virus – began to hit the news.
And it’s here that we have to consider Trump’s fundamental approach to politics. He says what he thinks people want to hear, with little or no regard for the truth. Sometimes he just says what he himself wants to hear, starting with his first day in office when his people had to go out, face the assembled press, and claim that he had the largest inaugural crowd in the history of mankind. It was the beginning of the Trump approach, otherwise known as “alternative facts.” George Orwell couldn’t have written a better character than Kellyanne Conway, and the term Orwellian has never fit any American administration better.
Back to the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. Faced with some risk to the United States population, but at the time still very low numbers of cases, Trump did what we have learned to expect from him. He responded as he thought the voters would want to hear. When asked, he downplayed the risk.
This was probably even justified, at least for a few days. But it didn’t take too much longer to understand two things: First, that this newly discovered viral illness killed people and could do so quickly. Second, that it was transmissible by human to human contact.
In other words, there was suddenly a real risk of a wide ranging epidemic. And that is where the critical failure of leadership occurred. Because sometimes leadership means telling people the truth – and this was one of those times. As cases of this new viral illness started to spread beyond the Chinese border, it became time to treat it as a true emergency. The World Health Organization got involved, proclaiming the existence of a pandemic.
The problem with a pandemic, particularly one based on a newly discovered microbe, is that the whole world is susceptible. This means that the world needs to take pretty drastic actions. That’s where quarantines and lockdowns come into play.
And the Trump leadership failure became real and apparent. People don’t like being told that they have to stay home, that they have to wear masks, and that they can’t come to political rallies to cheer for the president.
Instead of telling people the simple truth – that this is a dangerous disease that will kill some Americans before we get it under control – Trump did his usual shtick. He bounced back and forth, sometimes downplaying the severity (it will disappear soon), sometimes complaining that the Democrats were using the pandemic to discredit him (it’s a Democratic hoax). He blamed everyone else (the World Health Organization, China).
But the worst thing he did was to continue with all of these techniques of anger and denial, thus riling up his most fanatic followers. It’s not surprising that we then saw the red hat Trump followers lining the shoreline of Huntington Beach, refusing to either wear masks or to maintain their distance from each other.
He could have led. He could have told people that this is a serious problem and sacrifices will have to be made. Instead, we got the usual Trump behavior. He was all over the place, sometimes trying to take advantage of television attention, other times holding maskless rallies.
If you compare the graphs showing deaths among Italians, French, Germans, and Americans, the results are astonishing. In the European countries – which had leadership from central governments and which enforced lockdowns – the death tolls peaked and then gradually went down to where they are now, which is near-zero. When Italy had a small blip recently, it was only a tiny one, and the national government took measures to bring it under control.
But when you scroll down and look at the death toll graph for the United States, you see something that isn’t present in any of the other countries: We showed the same original growth, peak, and descent, but then our numbers went back up.
Right now, we are in the midst of a second wave of Covid-19 that will eventually result in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. We are seeing about a thousand American dead each day during this second wave.
And this is due to Trump’s failure. It just wasn’t in him to save lives through leadership – not at the cost of votes.
It’s all a little weird, actually. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, President Roosevelt didn’t downplay the hardships that would be ahead. JFK responded to the launch of Sputnik by calling for the moon landing program.
Perhaps we do have a couple of comparable leadership failures. Lyndon Johnson couldn’t bring himself to admit that Viet Nam was never going to be a success, and he kept on pretending, resulting in tens of thousands more dead. George W. Bush went along with the Iraq invasion and occupation, and we all know how that went.
In Covid-19, Trump has his Viet Nam and his Iraq. In terms of deaths, his total surpasses the numbers from both of those wars combined.
And because he didn’t tell the truth to the American people when doing so could have saved fifty thousand lives (so far), it’s all on him.
The Trump failure actually goes beyond failure, because it also involves a coverup. It seems absolutely bizarre just saying this. Coverups are supposed to involve money or crimes. In this case, the Trump administration has been trying to downplay the number of cases. At least that is the implication from when the administration ordered that case numbers go not to the CDC, but to their own organization. They have most famously dragged their feet on creating a fully capable testing program for the whole country. The most recent outrage is an order coming from CDC (that bypassed Fauci) to cut the number of tests being carried out nationwide.
The overall death toll is probably even higher than reported because some deaths can be attributed to something else, where Covid-19 is a comorbidity. But we will probably reach an official total in excess of 200,000 dead before the November elections, and that number is on Trump.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
