Historians consistently rank Abraham Lincoln and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt among the top three presidents for their handling of the
Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II.
By contrast, the string of catastrophes that trailed George W. Bush, from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to his obliviousness to warning
signs in the housing market before the 2008 crash guarantee that he will
have a permanent place in the bottom tier of presidents.
Also certain to be at or near the bottom of that list is
Donald Trump.
Trump has been able to maintain 40% approval ratings by riding
his predecessor’s economic coattails and effectively manipulating the lizard brains of white Republicans, but even before the coronavirus hit, Trump
was considered one of the worst presidents in the two surveys of scholars done
in 2018.
Trump’s attention to the coronavirus crisis since declaring a
national emergency on March 13 has helped mitigate the damage, but his failures
of governance from January 3 (when the administration first became aware of the
virus) until March 13 made the situation exponentially worse than it should
have been. With two thousand Americans dying every day and reported cases in the States increasing by a hundred thousand each week, we are only now beginning to grasp the
depths of human misery unleashed by Trump’s inattention to the coronavirus for those ten long weeks.
This story starts, as many tales of Republican incompetence
do, with sheer ignorance and lack of curiosity. Ronald Reagan was able to ignore the AIDS crisis for years because it was “a gay disease” and didn’t
impact anyone close to him until his old Hollywood acquaintance Rock Hudson
begged for—but did not receive—his help in 1985. Despite having spent months manipulating
post-9/11 public fear with an orchestrated campaign of lies about fictitious
WMDs, George W. Bush still didn’t understand the historical friction between
Sunnis and Shias in Iraq when he invited Iraqi guests of mixed faiths
to a super bowl party two months before the invasion.
History repeated itself with Donald Trump, like Reagan and Bush a P.R.-centric empty suit lacking intellectual curiosity, policy chops, or any interest in the mechanics of governing.
History repeated itself with Donald Trump, like Reagan and Bush a P.R.-centric empty suit lacking intellectual curiosity, policy chops, or any interest in the mechanics of governing.
It was common knowledge before Trump took office that an infectious outbreak of some kind was likely to occur during his presidency; there were concerns that he wasn’t up to the task because of his lack of knowledge of the subject and indifference to getting up to speed with this crucial part of his job.
According to Peter Nicholas of the Atlantic, “When a
senior White House aide would brief President Donald Trump in 2018 about an
Ebola-virus outbreak in central Africa, it was plainly evident that hardships
roiling a far-flung part of the world didn’t command his attention. He was
zoning out. ‘It was like talking to a wall,’ a person familiar with the matter
told me.” (1)
This indifference manifested with Trump’s first budget to Congress.
Though the administration found money for big increases in the already-bloated defense budget and passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut overwhelmingly tilted to the 1% later that year, Trump’s minions cut funding (2) for the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency tasked with protecting public
health in the face of the opiate epidemic, AIDS, flu, and infectious outbreaks.
Within the tax cut bill were steep cuts to the Prevention and Public Health Fund (called “the core of public health programs” by Tom Frieden, who headed the CDC under Barack Obama). (3)
Appointed to head the CDC, in July 2017, was Brenda
Fitzgerald, a right-wing Republican from Georgia who replaced interim director
Anne Schuchat, a highly-experienced, long-time public health advocate (4). Fitzgerald’s time at the CDC was brief: she resigned on January 31, 2018 when it came
out that she had owned stocks in a tobacco company even as she ran an agency
dedicated to anti-smoking campaigns (5). Politico reported that “one day
after Fitzgerald purchased stock in Japan Tobacco, she toured the CDC's Tobacco
Laboratory, which studies tobacco's toxic effects.”
On February 1, 2018, the Washington Post
reported that “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease
outbreak” (6): “The global health section of the CDC was
so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off (7) and the
number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. (8) Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and
its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo. (9) And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump
administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps
by 40 percent (10), the disease-fighting cadres have steadily
eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.” (11)
On April 10, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton, one of the
architects of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, as his National Security
Adviser. Bolton in turn fired Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert (12), whom the
Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense
strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.”
On April 27, 2018, at the Malaria Summit in London, Bill
Gates discussed the federal government’s lack of readiness for the
“significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in
our lifetimes.”
Gates’s message fell on deaf ears inside the Trump
administration.
In the second week of May, 2018, “the
White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era
disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously
committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia,
Sierra Leone, and Guinea. (13) Under fire from both sides of the aisle,
President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a
month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending
(14) and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC,
NSC, DHS, and HHS. (15) And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was
eliminated. (16)
“The White House proposal ‘is threatening to claw back funding
whose precise purpose is to help the United States be able to respond quickly
in the event of a crisis,’ said Carolyn Reynolds, a vice president at PATH, a
global health technology nonprofit.
“Collectively, warns Jeremy Konyndyk, who led foreign disaster
assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama
administration, ‘What this all adds up to is a potentially really concerning
rollback of progress on U.S. health security preparedness.’
“‘It seems to actively unlearn the lessons we learned through
very hard experience over the last 15 years,’ said Konyndyk….‘These moves make
us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable.’”
That same week, on May 9, 2018, “Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the [National Security Council], spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.
‘The threat of pandemic
flu is the number one health security concern,’ she told the audience. ‘Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.’”
On May 10, 2018, Trump’s national security adviser John
Bolton “re-organized” the National Security Council (NSC), or more accurately “fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White
House management infrastructure” which had been set up by the Obama
administration after the Ebola crisis, by collapsing the NSC’s Office of Global
Security (17). In the wake of Bolton’s action, the top official tasked with
coordinating a response to a pandemic, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the
National Security Council, resigned on the same day that a new Ebola outbreak
was reported in the Congo.
The Office of Global Security had been a comprehensive crisis
response team which brought together principals from the National Institutes of
Health, the CDC, the National Security Council, and the Department of Homeland
Security; the Trump administration replaced neither Ziemer nor the command
infrastructure (18).
In September of 2019, a "study by the Council of Economic Advisers ordered by the National Security Council predicted that a pandemic similar to the 1918 Spanish flu or the 2009 swine flu could lead to a half-million deaths and cost the economy as much as $3.8 trillion."
That same month, the Trump administration ended PREDICT, a "pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat." The program "gathered specimens from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals in search of dangerous viruses. They detected about 1,200 viruses that could spread from wild animals to humans, signaling pandemic potential. More than 160 of them were novel coronaviruses, much like SARS-CoV-2." (see #133)
In September of 2019, a "study by the Council of Economic Advisers ordered by the National Security Council predicted that a pandemic similar to the 1918 Spanish flu or the 2009 swine flu could lead to a half-million deaths and cost the economy as much as $3.8 trillion."
That same month, the Trump administration ended PREDICT, a "pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat." The program "gathered specimens from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals in search of dangerous viruses. They detected about 1,200 viruses that could spread from wild animals to humans, signaling pandemic potential. More than 160 of them were novel coronaviruses, much like SARS-CoV-2." (see #133)
In their fiscal year 2020 budget, the Trump administration proposed a 20% cut to the
CDC budget (19). On November 18, 2019, “an independent, bipartisan panel
formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute
in the Trump administration that the ‘United States must either pay now and
gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much
greater price in human and economic costs.’” (20)
Robert Redfield, the head of CDC, was first informed of the coronavirus
on January 3, 2020. Intelligence services began putting information about coronavirus in Trump's Daily Brief.
On January 8, the American public was made aware when
the the Washington Post reported an outbreak of an “‘unidentified and
possibly new viral disease in central China’ that was sending alarms across
Asia in advance of the Lunar New Year travel season.”
Already, “Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand and the
Philippines were contemplating quarantine zones and scanning travelers from
China for ‘signs of fever or other pneumonia-like symptoms that may indicate a
new disease possibly linked to a wild animal market in Wuhan.’”
In response, the CDC issued a public health alert.
In response, the CDC issued a public health alert.
Rather than address the new potential public health crisis,
Trump tried to score cheap partisan points by lying about Barack Obama's Iran peace deal at that day’s press conference (21).
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar wasn't able to get Trump’s ear about the coronavirus until January 18, fifteen days after the administration had been notified (22). According to the Washington Post, Trump was more concerned about short-term political pressure than public health: “When [Azar] reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about [a proposed ban on] vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market.” (23)
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar wasn't able to get Trump’s ear about the coronavirus until January 18, fifteen days after the administration had been notified (22). According to the Washington Post, Trump was more concerned about short-term political pressure than public health: “When [Azar] reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about [a proposed ban on] vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market.” (23)
On January 20, the first coronavirus case in the U.S. was confirmed by the CDC.
On January 22, though the U.S. had yet to do
large-scale testing to determine rates of infection, Trump told an
interviewer on CNBC, “We have it totally under control. It's one person coming
in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” (24)
On January 24, one day after China had shut down Wuhan
and other cities, Trump tweeted that “It will all work out well.” (25)
On January 27, “White House aides huddled with
then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials
to pay more attention to the virus, according to people briefed on the meeting.
Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argued that
the administration needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost the
president his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely to
dominate life in the United States for many months.
“Mulvaney then began convening more regular meetings. In early
briefings, however, officials said Trump was dismissive because he did not
believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.” (26)
On January 28, twenty five days after the administration
had become aware of coronavirus, on the day that China’s president met with the
Director-General of the World Health Organization to map out responses to the
virus, CNN reported that “Trump has not…named a single official within
the White House responsible for coordinating the administration's response. (27) That has some wondering whether enough is being done in advance of a potential
crisis, particularly since the role of the National Security Council under
Trump has shifted away from leading a response to a health crisis to merely
coordinating between agencies.” (see #17)
Trump’s indifference was a direct contrast to Barack Obama,
who had “anointed a former vice presidential staffer,
Ronald Klain, as a sort of ‘epidemic czar’ inside the White House, clearly
stipulated the roles and budgets of various agencies, and placed incident
commanders in charge in each Ebola-hit country and inside the United States.”
On Thursday, January 30, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
declared a global health emergency while praising China’s efforts to contain
the virus.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Laurie Garrett posed an important question: “The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, ‘What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?’”
Writing in Foreign Policy, Laurie Garrett posed an important question: “The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, ‘What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?’”
Her government was asleep at the switch.
Speaking in front of Michigan auto workers the day the WHO
declared a global health emergency, the day the CDC reported the first
person-to-person transmission in the U.S., Trump said, “We think we have it
very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this
moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re
working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to
have a very good ending for it. So that I can assure you.” (30)
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross doubled down on Trump’s denial,
telling Fox Business News that the virus “will help to accelerate the
return of jobs to North America." (31)
Though Ross thought the virus would increase job growth, and
Trump was confident that the U.S. had “very little problem” with the virus, the
Trump Administration delivered one of a string of mixed messages (32) when they
announced the formation of a Coronavirus Task Force on the same day.
In contrast to the efficient and responsive crisis management model
Obama had set up, where Ron Klain coordinated actions among diverse agencies,
Trump’s commission had confusing lines of authority, where “at least three different people—[Health and Human Services head Alex] Azar, Vice President
Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Debbie Birx—can claim
responsibility.” (33) In a crisis where immediate, decisive action was
needed, the administration chose a slow-moving model choked with discussion and
deliberation which focused on closing off borders rather than test kits or medical supplies (34).
Posting in the Atlantic Monthly that day, Klain offered
a prescient prognosis of what was to come:
“The U.S. government has the tools, talent, and team to help fight the
coronavirus abroad and minimize its impact at home. But the combination of
Trump’s paranoia toward experienced government officials (who lack ‘loyalty’ to
him), inattention to detail, opinionated rejection of science and evidence, and
isolationist instincts may prove toxic when it comes to managing a
global-health security challenge. To succeed, Trump will have to trust the kind of government experts he has disdained to date, set aside his own terrible instincts, lead from the White House, and work closely with foreign leaders and global institutions—all things he has failed to do in his first 1,200 days in office.”
The next day, January 31, Health and Human Services
Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency and restricted Americans who had been in China over the past two weeks from re-entering the country.
Speaking to Fox’s Sean Hannity on February 2, two days
after the declaration of a public health emergency, Trump said, “We pretty much
shut it down coming from China.”(35) In fact, as Ron Klain would mention to
Congress a few days later, over 100,000 people* had come to the States from
China in the month before the ban, so “the horse is already out of the barn.” (*the Washington Post put this number even higher, at 300,000)
Trump would go on to brag about the China ban as an example of a gutsy leadership move repeatedly, but he wouldn't restrict travel from Europe, which would provide the bulk of New York's cases, for six more weeks.
Trump would go on to brag about the China ban as an example of a gutsy leadership move repeatedly, but he wouldn't restrict travel from Europe, which would provide the bulk of New York's cases, for six more weeks.
In a February 3 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy
Now (see #27), Laurie Garrett explained that John Bolton’s dissolution of
the pandemic response office (see #17) was done out of spite: “it was a big mistake by the Trump
administration to obliterate the entire infrastructure of pandemic response
that the Obama administration had created. Why did he do it? Well, it certainly
wasn’t about the money, because it wasn’t a heavily-funded program. It was
certainly because it was Obama’s program.” (36)
Pressed by Goodman to provide more detail about the Global Security Office, Garrett
continued:
“It was a special division inside the National Security Council, a special division inside of the Department of Homeland Security…and collaborating centers in HHS, headquarters in Washington, the Office of Global Health Affairs, and the Commerce Department, Treasury Department. But what Obama understood, dealing with Ebola in 2014, is that any American response had to be an all-of-government response, that there were so many agencies overlapping, and they all had a little piece of the puzzle in the case of a pandemic….
"...What the Obama administration realized was that you can’t corral multiple agencies and things from private sector as well as public sector to come to the aid of America, unless you have some one person in charge who’s really the manager of it all. And in his case, it was Ron Klain, who had worked under Vice President Biden. And he was designated, with an office inside the White House, to give orders and coordinate all these various things….Well, that was all eliminated. It’s gone. And now they’re hastily trying to recreate something.”
“It was a special division inside the National Security Council, a special division inside of the Department of Homeland Security…and collaborating centers in HHS, headquarters in Washington, the Office of Global Health Affairs, and the Commerce Department, Treasury Department. But what Obama understood, dealing with Ebola in 2014, is that any American response had to be an all-of-government response, that there were so many agencies overlapping, and they all had a little piece of the puzzle in the case of a pandemic….
"...What the Obama administration realized was that you can’t corral multiple agencies and things from private sector as well as public sector to come to the aid of America, unless you have some one person in charge who’s really the manager of it all. And in his case, it was Ron Klain, who had worked under Vice President Biden. And he was designated, with an office inside the White House, to give orders and coordinate all these various things….Well, that was all eliminated. It’s gone. And now they’re hastily trying to recreate something.”
Garrett touched on the confusing lines of authority on Trump’s
task force (see #33): “…there were many names tossed around about
who he was going to appoint as head of the response. He had previously gone on
the record, President Trump, saying, ‘I have great faith in Secretary Azar, and
my HHS secretary will be in charge.’ And we’re told, from multiple
sources, that right up until they got on stage for that press briefing, Azar
thought he was in charge. And then the president says, ‘And here’s my good
friend Mike Pence, and he’s taking charge.’”
On February 4, the Wall Street Journal posted an
op-ed by Trump’s former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, titled “Stop a U.S.
Coronavirus Outbreak Before It Starts,” in which he stressed the importance of
ramping up testing for the virus so that public health officials would know
where to focus their efforts.
That same day, the administration rolled out new regulatory guidelines.
Any lab that wanted to test needed to meet strict criteria to get an Emergency
Use Authorization (EUA). Though Trump had gutted every environmental regulation
in sight, and scaled back oversight of Wall Street, his FDA over-regulated
this crucial public health function (37), forcing public health labs to re-run their tests, which would delay reporting of the number of confirmed cases (38),
robbing public health officials of vital information about the spread of
infection in their areas. The EUA also slowed down private labs by demanding
that they get CDC approval before using their tests (39).
On February 5, Democratic senators met with administration officials and proposed emergency funding “for essential
preventative measures, including hiring local screening and testing staff,
researching a vaccine and treatments and the stockpiling of needed medical
supplies.”
HHS secretary Azar declined the funding, claiming it wasn’t needed (40).
HHS secretary Azar declined the funding, claiming it wasn’t needed (40).
After the meeting, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted
“Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough.
Notably no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local
health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it
now.”
On February 6, the CDC shipped out 90 test kits. The World Health Organization shipped out 250,000.
On February 6, the CDC shipped out 90 test kits. The World Health Organization shipped out 250,000.
On February 7, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted about “the transportation of nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies...including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials"—to China. (These shipments represented just a fraction of the vital medical supplies, now desperately needed inside our borders, which were exported from the U.S. in January-March due to the Trump administration's failure to plan ahead and ban exports, as Germany, South Korea, and twenty-two others countries did, 41).
On February 9, "a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [CDC head Robert] Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president.”
On February 10, Trump repeated a false talking point multiple times. “Trump said on Fox Business: ‘You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather.’” (42) He told state governors: ‘You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.’ (43) And he told supporters at a campaign rally: ‘Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that’s true.’” (44)
On February 9, "a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [CDC head Robert] Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president.”
On February 10, Trump repeated a false talking point multiple times. “Trump said on Fox Business: ‘You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather.’” (42) He told state governors: ‘You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.’ (43) And he told supporters at a campaign rally: ‘Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that’s true.’” (44)
On February 11, Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell
contradicted Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (see #31) when he said that the
coronavirus would “very likely” impact America’s economy.
On February 12, the New York Times reported that
Trump’s CDC had sent state labs flawed test kits, further slowing down the
testing process (45).
HHS secretary Alex Azar appeared before a Senate committee on February
13 and said, “As of today, I can announce that the CDC has begun working
with health departments in five cities to use its flu surveillance network to
begin testing individuals with flu-like symptoms for the Chinese
coronavirus….This effort will help see whether there is broader spread than we
have been able to detect so far.”
The statement gave the impression that the Trump
administration was making progress in combating the virus, which was false, as the cities still lacked functional tests and the surveillance systems
weren’t in place. Azar knew this, but was desperate to create positive spin for
the administration (46).
On Valentine’s Day, as deaths from the virus were at
1,000 and climbing, Trump spoke before the National Border Control Council. He
again wheeled out the false assertion that warm weather would douse the virus (47)
and said, “We have a very small number of people in the country, right now,
with it. It’s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully
recovered already. So we’re in very good shape.” (48) Even as his
administration was clearly fumbling the response (see #1-#46), he said, “And 61
percent of the voters approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. And, you
know, we did a very early move on that. We did a — I was criticized by a lot of
people at the beginning because we were the first. We’d never done it before.”
(49)
On February 18, Atlantic contributor Peter
Nicholas offered perceptive summations of the Trump Administration’s failures
of governance so far and the challenges ahead:
“He has hollowed out federal agencies (see #7 and #10) and belittled
expertise (50), prioritizing instead his own intuition and the demands of his
political base. But he’ll need to rely on a bureaucracy he’s maligned to stop
the virus’s spread.”
The article cited the ramifications of Trump’s allergy to bad
news: “‘We have a president who doesn’t
particularly care about competent administration, and who created a culture in
which bad news is shut down,’ (51) says Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of
Hawaii, whose state is home to one of multiple airports screening passengers
for the coronavirus. ‘And when you’re dealing with a potential pandemic, you
need to know all the bad news. If this disease ends up not overwhelming us,
that would be a blessing. But it would not be because the Trump administration
was ready. They were not.’”
Nicholas also addressed Trump’s continual lies and distortions
about the scope of the virus: “Since
Trump’s first upbeat assessment, the number of people sickened by the virus has
spiraled. At the time of the CNBC interview (see #24), 17 people in China had
died from the virus and about 540 were infected. Today, the death toll is about
1,900 and the number of infections tops 73,000. At least 15 cases have been
reported in the U.S., and an additional 14 Americans infected with the
virus arrived yesterday following their evacuation from a cruise ship in
Japan.”
Undeterred by scientific facts, Trump pushed the warm weather myth
again on February 19: “I think
it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer
weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So
let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.” (52)
On February 20, Politico reported on the flawed
test kits the CDC had sent out (see #45) and mentioned that the cost of the
kits was so high ($250/each) that Trump’s Health and Human Services department was
starting to run out of money (53)—which could have been avoided if Azar had
accepted additional congressional funding proposed on February 5 (see #40).
Early on the morning of February 23, Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard, tweeted that “the US remains extremely limited in #COVID19 testing. Only 3 of 100 public health labs have @CDC test kits working (54) and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. (55) How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.” (56)
Early on the morning of February 23, Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard, tweeted that “the US remains extremely limited in #COVID19 testing. Only 3 of 100 public health labs have @CDC test kits working (54) and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. (55) How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.” (56)
On Monday, February 24, trying to make up for previous
short-sighted budget cuts (57), the administration “asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funds to handle coronavirus in the United States. (To
compare to a recent health crisis, the Obama administration requested $6
billion in emergency funding for the 2014 Ebola outbreak and eventually
received $5.4 billion.) Though Democrats in Congress have pushed the
administration to call for emergency coronavirus funding since early
February, Politico states that ‘White House officials have
been hesitant to press Congress for additional funding, with some hoping that
the virus would burn itself out by the summer.’” (58)
The $2.5 billion request was a pittance, approximately 1/600th the size of Trump’s tax cut (59), most of which went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Azar knew the funding was inadequate, but was hamstrung by administration officials who didn't grasp the seriousness of the virus and lacked pull with Trump to override them in favor of the public interest.
Even as the news grew worse, Trump continued to give false
assurances, tweeting “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA….Stock
Market starting to look very good to me!” (60). In fact, Trump had no idea if
things were “under control” because his administration had failed to get functional
test kits out.
That same day, the stock market had its second biggest drop in
its history.
The following day, February 25, the stock market cratered
for the fourth consecutive day, losing 879 points to end at 27,081.
While the Dow Jones tanked, Nancy Messonier, the director for
the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, made the case for community mitigation and told reporters that the virus would cause “severe”
disruptions in American’s lives. Trump complained to Alex Azar that Messonier
was hurting the stock market (61) and ignored Messonier’s recommendations about
the need for social distancing for three more weeks (62).
At a time when bipartisan harmony was more important than
ever, Trump trolled Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on Twitter for
pointing out that $2.5 billion wasn’t remotely adequate to the task: “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer is complaining, for
publicity purposes only, that I should be asking for more money than $2.5
Billion to prepare for Coronavirus. If I asked for more he would say it is too
much. He didn’t like my early travel closings. I was right. He is incompetent!”
(63)
And even as it was reported that “Trump spent the past 2 years
slashing the government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus
outbreak,” Trump tweeted
that “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
(64)
While in India that day, Trump told reporters, “You may ask
about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country. We have
very few people with it, and the people that have it are…getting better.
They’re all getting better….As far as what we’re doing with the new virus, I
think that we’re doing a great job.” (65)
Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow echoed Trump’s lies and
contradicted CDC officials when he told CNBC, “We have contained this, I won’t
say airtight but pretty close to airtight.” (66)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported on the severe
shortage of N95 masks American hospitals were facing due to onerous federal
regulations (67) and a lack of support from the Trump administration (68), and
the administration’s lack of a plan going forward, which was causing confusion
and panic among state and local officials (69).
The next day, February 26, Politico reported
that the “U.S. isn’t ready to detect stealth coronavirus spread” due to poor
coordination among crisis management staff, the administration’s failure to get
functional test kits out in a timely fashion, and needlessly strict test
criteria (see #37): “Just 12 of more
than 100 public health labs in the U.S. are currently able to diagnose the
coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, potentially
slowing the response if the virus starts taking hold here. The faulty test has also
delayed a plan to widely screen people with symptoms of respiratory illness who
have tested negative for influenza to detect whether the coronavirus may be
stealthily spreading.”
Only six states were testing for the virus and the testing was
limited to people who had been to China or were experiencing symptoms, which
was allowing the virus to spread undetected. Harvard epidemiology professor
Mark Lipsitch told Politico, “China tested 320,000 people in Guangdong
over a three-week period. This is the scale we need to be thinking on.”
Meanwhile, Trump continued to compare coronavirus to the flu,
though the virus has approximately 20 times the mortality rate (70), and told
White House reporters, “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people
remains very low….When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve
done." (71) In reality, the States had 60 cases at the time, the number
was increasing, and the real number was far greater but undetected due to the
administration’s failure to get functional test kits out.
The poor communication among officials overseeing the coronavirus
response continued, as “[Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar didn’t know
until late in the afternoon that Vice President Mike Pence would be in control of the process. The
HHS secretary was reportedly ‘blindsided’ by the news.” (72)
In picking Pence to lead the administration's response to coronavirus, Trump referred to his
vice president as an “expert” and someone with “a certain talent for this,” though Pence’s reluctance to support needle exchange and steep cuts to Planned
Parenthood (which provides HIV testing in addition to birth control) as
governor of Indiana had contributed to an HIV outbreak there (73).
With Pence’s ascension, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn was
finally brought into the coronavirus committee. For weeks the FDA’s powers to
work with private companies to increase production of test kits, PPE, and other
necessities had been ignored (74).
As of February 27, 2,800 people had died from the
virus, while 82,000 cases had been reported worldwide. Business Insider
had the following headline: “Trump
defends huge [19%] cuts to the CDC's budget (75) by saying the government can
hire more doctors 'when we need them' during crises.” (76) Trump responded to
criticisms of the budget cuts by saying, "I'm a businessperson. I don't
like having thousands of people around when you don't need them….When we need
them, we can get them back very quickly." (77)
Despite the increasing gloom, Trump continued to play pretend.
He told an audience attending an African American History Month event at the
White House, “It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear.” (78) He tweeted “Only a very small number in U.S., & China
numbers look to be going down. All countries working well together!” (79)
On Friday, February 28, nearly two months after the
administration had first been informed of the coronavirus, NBC reported that
the U.S. had done fewer than 500 tests, even as China had done over 300,000 and
South Korea was doing 10,000 or more/day (80).
ProPublica offered one of many post-mortems to come, highlighting the grave error the administration had made in bypassing World Health Organization test kits which were ready to go (81) in favor of CDC test kits, which weren’t:
“The CDC announced on Feb. 14 that surveillance testing
would begin in five key cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco
and Seattle. That effort has not yet begun. (see #46)
“Until the middle of this week, only the CDC and the six state
labs — in Illinois, Idaho, Tennessee, California, Nevada and Nebraska — were
testing patients for the virus, according to Peter Kyriacopoulos, APHL’s senior
director of public policy. Now, as many more state and local labs are in the
process of setting up the testing kits, this capacity is expected to increase
rapidly.
“There are other ways to expand the country’s testing
capacity. Beyond the CDC and state labs, hospitals are also able to develop
their own tests for diseases like COVID-19 and internally validate their
effectiveness, with some oversight from the federal Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services. But because the CDC declared the virus a public health
emergency, it triggered a set of federal rules that raises the bar for all
tests, including those devised by local hospitals.
“So now, hospitals must validate their tests with the FDA —
even if they copied the CDC protocol exactly. Hospital lab directors say the
FDA validation process is onerous and is wasting precious time when they could
be testing in their local communities.” (82)
As Margaret Hamburg (Obama’s FDA commissioner from 2009-2015)
would later tell Olga Khazan of the Atlantic, “the [FDA] could have proactively reached out to different national and international labs to see whether their tests could be approved for use in the U.S.,” but there’s no evidence that they did (83), and in fact the FDA “told one Seattle infectious-disease
expert, Helen Chu, to stop testing for the coronavirus
entirely….Chu was not alone. Dozens of labs in the U.S. were eager to make
tests and willing to test patients, but they were hamstrung by regulations for
most of February, even as the virus crept silently across the nation.”
Uncertainty over the virus contributed to the markets having
their worst week since the crash of 2008.
Later that night, even as other countries had started social
distancing in response to the virus, Trump put thousands of his supporters at
risk of exposure with a political rally in North Charleston, South Carolina. It was one of eight campaign events Trump would have after being notified of coronavirus.
Asked about administration efforts to combat coronavirus before the rally, Trump told Sinclair Broadcasting, “I think it’s really going well. We did something very fortunate: we closed up to certain areas of the world very, very early — far earlier than we were supposed to. I took a lot of heat for doing it. It turned out to be the right move, and we only have 15 people and they are getting better, and hopefully they’re all better. There’s one who is quite sick, but maybe he’s gonna be fine….We’re prepared for the worst, but we think we’re going to be very fortunate." (84) During the rally, Trump accused Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus and said concern over the issue was a “hoax.” (85)
Asked about administration efforts to combat coronavirus before the rally, Trump told Sinclair Broadcasting, “I think it’s really going well. We did something very fortunate: we closed up to certain areas of the world very, very early — far earlier than we were supposed to. I took a lot of heat for doing it. It turned out to be the right move, and we only have 15 people and they are getting better, and hopefully they’re all better. There’s one who is quite sick, but maybe he’s gonna be fine….We’re prepared for the worst, but we think we’re going to be very fortunate." (84) During the rally, Trump accused Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus and said concern over the issue was a “hoax.” (85)
Trump’s chief of staff Nick Mulvaney used the same talking
point that night, telling reporters at the Conservative Political Action
conference, "The reason you're seeing so much attention to it [the
coronavirus] today is [Democrats] think this is going to be what brings down
the president….That's what this is all about….I got a note today from a
reporter saying, 'What are you going to do today to calm the markets?' I'm
like, really, what I might do to calm the markets is tell people to turn their
televisions off for 24 hours." (86)
The next day, Saturday February 29, the first American death at the hand of the coronavirus “hoax” was reported.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” the next day, March 1,
Alex Azar claimed that, “‘In terms of testing kits, we've already tested over
3,600 people for the virus. We now have the capability in the field to test
75,000 people, and within the next week or two we'll have a radical expansion
even beyond that." Like most of the Trump administration’s public
messaging, this was false (87). At the time, less than 1,000 tests had been completed.
By comparison, South Korea, a country 1/6th the size of the U.S., which had
discovered the virus within its borders on the same day—January 20—had done over 80,000 tests.
As of Monday March 2, U.S. coronavirus deaths were up
to six; globally over 90,000 cases had been reported.
Dr. Matt McCarthy, a physician at New York-Presbyterian, told
CNBC that he still didn’t have any test kits (88): “‘This is not good. We know that there are 88
cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by the middle of the
week. There’s going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue.’
McCarthy added, ‘They’re testing 10,000 a day in some countries, and we can’t get this off the ground….I’m a practitioner on the firing line, and I don’t have
the tools to properly care for patients today.’”
At a campaign rally the same day in Charleston, North
Carolina, Trump said, “We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great
companies and they’re going to have vaccines, I think relatively soon. And
they’re going to have something that makes you better and that’s going to
actually take place, we think, even sooner.” This was patently false (89), as Dr. Anthony
Fauci, the chief medical expert on the coronavirus task force, had told Trump earlier that day.
Fauci estimated that it would take a year-and-a-half for a vaccine to emerge.
After solid gains on Monday, the Dow lost 800 points on Tuesday, March 3, bringing it down to 25,917 at day’s close. Speaking to reporters, Trump continued to minimize the virus, claiming, “There’s only one hot spot, and that’s also pretty much in a very — in a home, as you know, in a nursing home.” In fact, the nursing home in Washington state wasn’t the only cluster of known coronavirus activity, as California and Oregon had both reported areas of community contagion (90).
After solid gains on Monday, the Dow lost 800 points on Tuesday, March 3, bringing it down to 25,917 at day’s close. Speaking to reporters, Trump continued to minimize the virus, claiming, “There’s only one hot spot, and that’s also pretty much in a very — in a home, as you know, in a nursing home.” In fact, the nursing home in Washington state wasn’t the only cluster of known coronavirus activity, as California and Oregon had both reported areas of community contagion (90).
On Wednesday, March 4, the death toll in the U.S.
reached ten and New York reported an infected community.
Speaking to airline executives at the White House, Trump
continued to downplay the extent of the crisis, saying, “Some people will have
this at a very light level and won’t even go to a doctor or hospital, and
they’ll get better. There are many people like that.” (91) He also blamed the
Obama administration for the lag in testing, claiming an Obama regulation had
slowed the administration down, which was false (92).
Trump’s lies and blame shifting continued in an interview with
Sean Hannity which appeared later that day. Trump falsely claimed that the
Obama administration “didn’t do anything about” swine flu and that based purely
on his intuition, science-based coronavirus fatality rates were flawed—"I
think the 3.4 percent is really a false number — and this is just my hunch —
but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because
a lot of people will have this and it's very mild, they'll get better very
rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor. You never
hear about those people." (93)
On Friday, March 6, reported cases in the U.S. passed
300 and deaths were up to 17, including the first on the East Coast.
The Atlantic ran a post-mortem about the administration’s failure to get functional test kits out called “The
Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing.”
Two months after the Trump administration had first been notified of the coronavirus and one month after a task force had been formed (see #34), only 1,895 tests could be verified, a fraction of the 10,000-20,000 tests South Korea was performing daily.
Two months after the Trump administration had first been notified of the coronavirus and one month after a task force had been formed (see #34), only 1,895 tests could be verified, a fraction of the 10,000-20,000 tests South Korea was performing daily.
According to the authors, "The figures we gathered
suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it
causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that
of other developed countries….The net effect of these choices is that the
country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. (94) This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long
been a global leader in public-health transparency."
Earlier in the day, Trump had appeared at a signing ceremony
for the Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, which would
dedicate $8.3 billion to fighting the coronavirus. The funding was more than three times what the administration had requested (see #57) and yet still a pittance relative to the
scope of the virus, roughly 1/180th of the amount Trump spent on his tax cut, the bulk of which went to the upper 1% (95).
Many public health officials felt the appropriations came a
month too late (96), shortchanging localities of crucial resources for testing
and personal protective equipment. (see #40)
At the signing, Trump offered false assurances and minimized
the scope of the public health disaster that he was spending $8.3 billion on,
saying, “And in terms of deaths, I don’t know what the count is today. Is it eleven? Eleven people? And in terms of cases, it’s very, very few.” (97)
After the signing, Trump visited CDC headquarters in Atlanta,
where he continued to lie about test kits:
“Anybody that needs a test can have a test. They are all set. They have
them out there. In addition to that they are making millions more as we speak
but as of right now and yesterday anybody that needs a test that is the
important thing and the test are all perfect like the letter was perfect.” (98)
Asked about the passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship
docked in San Francisco who were forced to stay on the ship for the time being,
Trump expressed concern that allowing them onshore, where they would be added
to the number of confirmed cases, would make him look bad: “I would rather — because I like the numbers
being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one
ship. That wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship,
either. OK? It wasn’t their fault either. And they’re mostly Americans, so I
can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.” (99)
Trump also said “I hear the numbers are getting much better in
Italy,” though the country was entering a lockdown and would experience two
hundred more deaths over the weekend to come.
On Saturday, March 7, Politico led with “Trump's mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis,” an in-depth feature by Dan
Diamond exploring the impact of the Trump administration’s internal dysfunctions
on their crisis management response.
Diamond’s exposé revealed
that Mike Pence and other administration officials had wanted to evacuate the
Grand Princess cruise ship (see #99) in order to keep the passengers who didn’t
have coronavirus from getting it from those who did, but that Trump had
overruled his advisors because he didn’t want the number of reported cases to
increase.
The article stated that “As the outbreak has grown, Trump has
become attached to the daily count of coronavirus cases and how the United
States compares to other nations, reiterating that he wants the U.S. numbers
kept as low as possible. Health officials have found explicit ways to oblige
him by highlighting the most optimistic outcomes in briefings (100), and their
agencies have tamped down on promised transparency. The CDC has stopped detailing
how many people in the country have been tested for the virus (101), and
its online dashboard is
running well behind the number of U.S. cases tracked by Johns Hopkins and
even lags the European Union’s own estimate of
U.S. cases.”
The article confirmed that onerous regulations (see #37) and
Trump’s lack of policy engagement (see #1) were key elements in the test delays
and that “Trump’s aides discouraged [HHS Secretary Alex] Azar from briefing the
president about the coronavirus threat back in January” (see #22) because Trump
“rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning
those who deliver bad news.” (see #51)
“…The pressure to earn Trump’s approval can be a distraction
at best and an obsession at worst: Azar, having just survived a bruising clash
with a deputy [Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services] and sensing that his job was on the line [see #59], spent part of January
making appearances on conservative TV outlets and taking other steps to shore
up his anti-abortion bona fides and win approval from the president, even as
the global coronavirus outbreak grew stronger.
“Around the same time, Azar had concluded that the new
coronavirus posed a public health risk and tried to share an urgent message
with the president: The potential outbreak could leave tens of thousands of
Americans sickened and many dead.
“The jockeying for Trump’s favor was part of the cause of
Azar’s destructive feud with Verma, as the two tried to box each other out of
events touting Trump initiatives. Now, officials including Azar, Verma and
other senior leaders are forced to spend time shoring up their positions with
the president and his deputies at a moment when they should be focused on a
shared goal: stopping a potential pandemic. (102)
"'The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight,
and he wants the news to be good,' said one adviser to a senior health official
involved in the coronavirus response. 'This is the world he’s made.'” (103)
The closing paragraph read “‘If this sort of dysfunction
exists as part of the everyday operations—then, yes, during a true crisis the
problems are magnified and exacerbated,’ said a former Trump HHS official. ‘And
with extremely detrimental consequences.’”
The following day, March 8, as international cases had
passed 100,000 and the importance of social distancing was becoming increasingly obvious, HUD secretary Ben Carson was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos
about the advisability of Trump holding rallies where thousands of people were
crammed together. Carson, a neurosurgeon who knew better, chose Trump’s favored talking point over public safety:
“…going to a rally, if you’re a healthy individual and you’re taking the
precautions that have been placed out there, there's no reason that you
shouldn't go. However, if you belong to one of those categories of high risk,
obviously, you need to think twice about that.” (104)
As of Monday, March 9, the tally in the U.S. was over 700 cases reported and 26 deaths. The Dow lost 2,000 points that day, the biggest one-day loss in history.
As of Monday, March 9, the tally in the U.S. was over 700 cases reported and 26 deaths. The Dow lost 2,000 points that day, the biggest one-day loss in history.
Former Republican senator and governor Judd Gregg offered a sober appraisal of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus:
“The budget he recently submitted to Congress savaged the
BioShield account (105). This is the program that was set up after the SARS
epidemic and anthrax events well over a decade ago to allow the federal
government to fund research on pharmaceutical responses to biological attacks
or a pandemic outbreak.
“The program was needed because this type of research is
extremely expensive and has little commercial upside. The drugs developed are
unique and narrowly targeted.
“Thus, in order to get this research up and running, Congress
and the prior administrations created the program. In this instance, Congress
actually anticipated a serious issue and began addressing it effectively.
“But the president and his people got it wrong. In their usual
naive and uninformed style, they have tried to eviscerate the program.
“This action came in the face of significant warnings from the
intelligence community that a biological attack is one of the primary threats
we face from terrorists. And now we know a pandemic is also a primary threat.”
Gregg’s key takeaway:
“The president and his people also have an abysmal track record when it
comes to preparing for pandemics.”
While the virus spread undetected, testing continued to move
at a glacial pace, and the Dow was in freefall, Trump kept busy attacking imagined
foes on Twitter.
One tweet read “This is your daily reminder that it took
Barack Obama until October of 2009 to declare Swine Flu a National Health
Emergency. It began in April of ’09 but Obama waited until 20,000 people in the
US had been hospitalized & 1,000+ had died. Where was the media hysteria
then?” In actuality, Obama had declared a public health emergency two days
after the first swine flu death (106).
A second tweet read “The Fake News Media and their partner, the
Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used
to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts
would warrant. Surgeon General, ‘The risk is low to the average American.’”
(107)
Trump also tweeted his mistaken talking point about
coronavirus being akin to the flu, not for the first time: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the
common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut
down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed
cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” (108)
By Tuesday, March 10, over 113,000 coronavirus cases
had been reported globally and more than 4,000 people had died.
At a hearing about Trump’s 2021 budget proposal, Russ Vought,
the administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB),
defended a 15% proposed cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (109)
and a steep cut to the annual contribution to the Infectious Diseases Rapid
Response Reserve Fund (110).
In partnership with Brianna Ehley, David Lim of Politico
had a big scoop called “U.S. coronavirus testing threatened by shortage of
critical lab materials.” The piece detailed how a shortage of lab materials (111)
was exacerbating America’s already-slow pace of testing, thereby jeopardizing
public safety (112) by keeping public health officials from having accurate
data about the number of cases and the areas with high concentration.
The article pointed out that seven weeks after the first case
was discovered in the U.S., just over 5,000 people had been tested, though “HHS
Secretary Alex Azar had told lawmakers [one week earlier] that U.S. labs’
capacity could grow to 10,000-20,000 people per day by the end of the week.” (113)
All evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump continued to blame
his predecessor and pitch the case that his administration was doing a good job
of crisis management. During a briefing at the capital, Trump said, “As you
know, it’s about 600 cases, it’s about 26 deaths, within our country. And had
we not acted quickly, that number would have been substantially more.” (114) He
added that “…I think the U.S. has done a very good job on testing. We had to
change things that were done that were nobody’s fault, perhaps, they wanted to
do something a different way, but it was a much slower process from a previous
administration and we did change them.” (115)
The next day, Wednesday, March 11, the U.S. had over 1,000 reported cases and 32 deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the
coronavirus a pandemic. The Dow lost over 1,000 points for the second time in
three days, ending at 23,553. The National Basketball Association suspended its
season.
CNN posted an investigative piece entitled “Confusion over the
availability and criteria for coronavirus testing is leaving sick people
wondering if they're infected.”
The article noted that though Mike Pence had recently said on CNN’s “New Day” that anyone with a doctor’s order could get a test, this was not the case in practice, as the U.S. was woefully unprepared to provide tests on this scale (116).
The article noted that though Mike Pence had recently said on CNN’s “New Day” that anyone with a doctor’s order could get a test, this was not the case in practice, as the U.S. was woefully unprepared to provide tests on this scale (116).
People were also not getting tests due to strict CDC
criteria: “In order to be prioritized
for testing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that one
must have a fever, cough or difficulty breathing as well as have been in close
contact with a person known to have coronavirus. Or, they had to ‘have a
history of travel from affected geographic areas within 14 days of their
symptom onset.’”
As the article noted, “only 11,079 specimens [have] been
tested in the U.S., paling in comparison to the more than 230,000 people tested
in South Korea, which has about one sixth the US population.”
Dr. Rod Hochman, the CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health, told
Politico, "Testing is so critically important because it helps us
as clinicians figure out the extent of the spread. It has implications for how
we care for patients and where we put them….It's unraveling the detective story
of how the virus spreads but we are trying to do it now with no data."
On Rachel Maddow’s show that evening, Ron Klain, who had been
Obama’s Ebola czar (see #33 and #35), pointed out that one of the Trump
administration’s biggest mistakes was to privatize testing. As related by
journalist Thom Hartmann, “Instead of taking the World Health Organization
(WHO) test kits which are cheap and widely available all over the planet, and
having them distributed across the country back in December, or January, or
February when we knew this disease was spreading in the United States, Klain
said that Trump has outsourced the testing to two big American companies, Quest
and Labcorp.” (see #81)
Trump’s public appearances on Wednesday didn’t inspire
confidence. During a press conference with Ireland’s prime minister, Trump again
minimized the threat by saying, “It goes away….It’s going away. We want it to
go away with very, very few deaths.” (117)
Though the virus was supposedly going away, Wednesday’s
1,000-point drop in the Dow convinced Trump to address the nation in a prime-time
speech that was roundly panned. Again he minimized the threat (claiming
coronavirus had a “very, very low risk” for most Americans, 118), cast blame
on China and Europe for having the disease before the U.S. (119), gave
confusing information while ad-libbing that contradicted administration policy (120),
and again lied about the slow pace of testing when he said, “Testing and
testing capabilities are expanding rapidly, day by day. We are moving very
quickly.” (121) The address was meant to reassure the American public and
stabilize the markets, but Trump’s ill-prepared speech sent stock futures tumbling in real time.
Republican journalist and former W. Bush speechwriter David
Frum summed up the historical moment with uncanny precision:
“More people will get sick because of his presidency than if
somebody else were in charge. More people will suffer the financial hardship of
sickness because of his presidency than if somebody else were in charge. The
medical crisis will arrive faster and last longer than if somebody else were in
charge. So, too, the economic crisis. More people will lose their jobs than if
somebody else were in charge. More businesses will be pushed into bankruptcy
than if somebody else were in charge. More savers will lose more savings than
if somebody else were in charge. The damage to America’s global leadership will
be greater than if somebody else were in charge.” (#122-128)
On Thursday, March 12, the day after Trump’s prime time
address meant to reassure the nation and calm the stock market, the Dow Jones
lost almost 1,000 points, ending at 21,200.
The magnitude of the Trump administration’s failure to get
test kits out was so obvious that even Republicans were starting to grumble, as detailed in “Testing lag ignites political uproar as Trump insists process is
'very smooth.'”
Cutting against Trump’s consistently self-serving narrative,
Anthony Fauci, Trump’s key coronavirus advisor, said, “The system is not geared
toward what we need right now, what you are asking for….It is a failing. Let’s admit it.”
The piece pointed out that more than two months after the
administration first became aware of the virus, “only about 11,000 people have
been tested, according to figures shared with members of Congress on Thursday.
According to statistics compiled by the American Enterprise Institute,
nationwide capacity to process the test kits being distributed has so far
ramped up only to about 20,000 people per day - meaning it could be weeks
before any tested patient gets results.
“Lawmakers of both parties reached for the same touchstone -
South Korea, which has managed to treat hundreds of thousands of its people,
allowing it to avoid the rapid spread seen in China, Italy and other countries….‘South
Korea is able to process tests in an hour, and in the U.S. it takes more than
two days - that's not adequate,’ said Ben Sasse, a Republican senator from
Nebraska.” The article pointed out that South Korea tests in a single day the
number of people the U.S. has tested in over two months, with drive-up exams
which aren’t possible in the U.S. due to strict testing guidelines (129).
Burdensome and deadly regulations were further discussed at ProPublica,
which revealed that an FDA directive “requires that the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, a sister agency, re-test every positive coronavirus
test run by a public health lab to confirm its accuracy.
“The result, experts say, is wasting limited resources at a time when thousands of Americans are waiting in line to get tested for COVID-19.” (130)
Duplicate tests were just one element of a failed operation. The Trump administration’s key mistakes were summarized by Politico reporter
Dan Diamond (see #99-#103) in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross:
“The Trump administration and health officials knew back in
January that this coronavirus was going to be a major threat. They knew that
tests needed to be distributed across the country to understand where there
might be outbreaks. But across the month of February, as my colleague David Lim
at Politico first reported, the tests that they sent out to labs across the
country simply did not work. They were coming back with errors.
“The CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, recognized that and
promised that new tests would be distributed soon. But one day turned into two
days turned into three days turned into several weeks, and in the meantime, we
know now coronavirus was silently spreading in different communities, like
Seattle. By the time that the Trump administration made a decision to allow new
tests to be developed by hospitals by clinical laboratories, it was a step that
was seen as multiple weeks late.” (131)
“…I don't use this word lightly, Terry, but I'd say that this
testing failure and the broader response to the coronavirus has been a
catastrophe.
“…the Trump administration failed to plan for this moment.
There were leadership failures, like failing to think through the implications
of not having a testing strategy in place. (132) There were leadership failures
in allowing feuds to fester for months and months that - in the middle of a
crisis, those cracks have widened and caused delays in making simple decisions.
“He cut funding for a program that predicted when viruses
could jump from animals to humans basically around the same time that this new
coronavirus appears to have jumped from animals to humans in China.” (133)
Amid the disaster unfolding all around and because of him,
Trump continued to lie to the American public. Asked about the lack of testing
at a White House briefing, Trump said, "over the next few days, they're
going to have four million tests out” (134) and “Frankly, the testing has been
going very smooth….If you go to the right agency, if you go to the right area,
you get the test." (135)
He even found a way to brag about the administration’s
response:
“It’s going to go away….The United States, because of what I
did and what the administration did with China, we have 32 deaths at this
point…when you look at the kind of numbers that you’re seeing coming out of
other countries, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it.” (136)
The administration did one thing right on March 12: its Health and Human Services Department placed its first order for N95 masks. Unfortunately, the order came far too late and wouldn't be filled until the end of April, long after the pandemic had started to ravage America's emergency rooms.
The administration did one thing right on March 12: its Health and Human Services Department placed its first order for N95 masks. Unfortunately, the order came far too late and wouldn't be filled until the end of April, long after the pandemic had started to ravage America's emergency rooms.
Friday the 13th was again all about the
test kits. Where were they?
Raw Story reported that the Trump Administration’s Health and Human Services agency had finally named a testing czar—ten weeks after being notified of the virus (137).
Caitlin Owens of Axios pointed out that “less than a dozen academic labs” were doing tests because of strict administration guidelines. Medical directors discussed how their requests to test had been
delayed or denied until it was too late (138).
The Atlantic reported
that less than 14,000 tests had been done in the ten weeks since the administration had first been notified of the virus, though Mike Pence had
promised the week prior that 1.5 million tests would be available by this time
(139).
The article’s key takeaway?
“Getting out lots of tests for a new disease is a major
logistical and scientific challenge, but it can be pulled off with the help of
highly efficient, effective government leadership. In this case, such
leadership didn’t appear to exist.”
Speaking to one of the prime causes of that failure in leadership, Beth Cameron, who ran Obama’s pandemic office in the National
Security Council, explained the disastrous operational vacuum caused by John Bolton’s closing of the Global Security Office (see #17): “In a health security crisis, speed is essential.
When this new coronavirus emerged, there was no clear White House-led structure
to oversee our response, and we lost valuable time…
“…The job of a White House pandemics office would have been to
get ahead: to accelerate the response, empower experts, anticipate failures,
and act quickly and transparently to solve problems.
“Our team reported to a senior-level response coordinator on
the National Security Council staff who could rally the government at the
highest levels, as well as to the national security adviser and the homeland
security adviser. This high-level domestic and global reporting structure
wasn’t an accident. It was a recognition that epidemics know no borders and
that a serious, fast response is crucial.
“A directorate within the White House would have been
responsible for coordinating the efforts of multiple federal agencies to make
sure the government was backstopping testing capacity, devising approaches to
manufacture and avoid shortages of personal protective equipment, strengthening
U.S. lab capacity to process covid-19 tests, and expanding the health-care
workforce.
“The office would galvanize resources to coordinate a robust and seamless domestic
and global response. It would identify needs among state and local officials,
and advise and facilitate regular, focused communication from federal health
and scientific experts to provide states and the public with fact-based tools
to minimize the virus’s spread. The White House is uniquely positioned to take
into account broader U.S. and global security considerations associated with
health emergencies, including their impact on deployed citizens, troops and
regional economies, as well as peace and stability. A White House office would
have been able to elevate urgent issues fast, so they didn’t linger or devolve
to inaction, as with coronavirus testing in the United States.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security director, piggybacked
on these criticisms with a look at the culture of mis-governance Trump bred and embodied, and Trump’s fixation on his 2020 campaign to the exclusion of all else:
“As the first COVID-19 cases began to spread with alarming
speed and lethality in China, President Trump evidently did not choose to make
the issue a priority. Based on his public comments and Twitter feed, the
incoming information that consumed his attention was more likely to come from
cable television or political gossip than deep inside his intelligence
briefings. (140) Presumably, he also had a certain view of what he’d be doing
in early 2020—chiefly, preparing the ground for his reelection campaign—and
veering off course to prepare for a pandemic would have undermined those plans.
A simple presidential communication of
interest in a subject can set the government in motion, but in this case, that
signal apparently never came.” (141)
“…Instead of seeing U.S. government expertise as a resource,
Trump has routinely derided career experts as “deep state” operatives,
insufficiently loyal to him and his agenda. (142) Well into the COVID-19
outbreak, he said things such as ‘A lot of people think that it goes away in
April with the heat,’ or ‘This is a flu.’ I doubt that any government expert
would suggest that Trump say those things. The statements, instead, suggest a president
either making things up or cherry-picking things he’s heard from non-experts to
offer false reassurance to the public.
“…By constantly trying to get himself through the news cycle,
Trump has done irreparable damage to the long-term objective of ensuring that
he’s a credible voice on the COVID-19 crisis.” (143)
That night, spooked by another 1,000-point loss in the Dow, Trump
finally declared a national emergency.
At a press conference announcing the news, Trump failed to model coronavirus safety protocols, shaking hands and standing cheek-by-jowl with other administration officials (144). Trump also made a false claim about Google constructing a testing center (145) and reality aside, claimed that “…the administration expects 1.4 million tests in the next week and 5 million within the month.” (ten days later, less than 300,000 tests would be completed; one month later, less than three million would be completed, 146)
At a press conference announcing the news, Trump failed to model coronavirus safety protocols, shaking hands and standing cheek-by-jowl with other administration officials (144). Trump also made a false claim about Google constructing a testing center (145) and reality aside, claimed that “…the administration expects 1.4 million tests in the next week and 5 million within the month.” (ten days later, less than 300,000 tests would be completed; one month later, less than three million would be completed, 146)
Asked if he took responsibility for the lag in testing, Trump
said, "I don't take responsibility at all because we were given a set of circumstances,
and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time
that wasn't meant for this kind of an event with the kind of numbers that we're
talking about." (147)
Asked by PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor how he could say he had
no responsibility for the testing failures despite his appointee’s elimination
of the Global Security Office (see #17), Trump again ducked responsibility, saying
“That’s a nasty question…When you say me, I didn’t do it. We have a group of
people [in the administration].” (148)
That night, after stocks rebounded on news of the declaration,
Trump “sent a note to supporters that included a chart showing the Dow Jones
Industrial Average dramatically rising roughly at the time he began a news conference declaring a national
emergency over coronavirus. The President signed the chart.”
On the chart were the words “'The President would like to share
the attached image with you, and passes along the following message: From
opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!'” (149)
Trump’s triumphalism
would prove premature, as the Dow would drop 4,000 points the following week,
to 19,173, nearly 700 points lower than it was on the day Barack Obama left
office and bequeathed Trump with a vibrant economy.
Peter Wehner, a conservative Republican who had served under
multiple Republican administrations, summed up Trump’s mistakes in an Atlantic post: “…the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially
the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too
few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These
mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial
weeks, they created a false sense of security. (150) What we now know is that
the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it
and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts
could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we
frittered away that opportunity.”
On Saturday, March 14, in “From complacency to emergency: How
Trump changed course on coronavirus,” Gary Orr and Nancy Cook of Politico
reported on Donald Trump’s 180-degree turn.
Just three days before he declared a national emergency, Trump had said the coronavirus “will go away” (151) and that his administration’s “response was ‘really working out.’” (152) In fact, Trump’s indifference to the crisis had forced city and state leaders to step up before a coordinated federal response had taken shape.
Just three days before he declared a national emergency, Trump had said the coronavirus “will go away” (151) and that his administration’s “response was ‘really working out.’” (152) In fact, Trump’s indifference to the crisis had forced city and state leaders to step up before a coordinated federal response had taken shape.
Though he was purportedly now focused on helping the American
people get through an economic crisis, Trump continued to advocate a payroll tax
which would give more money in real dollars to the wealthy and upper-middle
class, doing little for the people who need the money most (153).
The following Monday, March 16, the Washington Post
led with, “How U.S. coronavirus testing stalled: Flawed tests, red tape and
resistance to using the millions of tests produced by the WHO.”
The key stat-line in the piece was that “From mid-January
until Feb. 28, fewer than 4,000 tests from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention were used out of more than 160,000 produced.” (154)
The CDC had come up with a test quickly, by January 17, but “From
there…U.S. efforts fell quickly behind, especially when compared with the
efforts of the [World Health Organization], which has distributed more than 1
million tests to countries around the world based in part on the method
developed by the German researchers….As early as Feb. 6, four weeks after the
genome of the virus was published, the WHO had shipped 250,000 diagnostic tests
to 70 laboratories around the world.
“By comparison, the CDC at that time was shipping about
160,000 tests to labs across the nation — but then the manufacturing troubles
were discovered, and most would be deemed unusable because they produced
confusing results. Over the next three weeks, only about 200 of those tests sent
to labs would be used.”
“…U.S. efforts to distribute a working test stalled until Feb.
28, when federal officials revised the CDC test and began
loosening up FDA rules that had
limited who could develop coronavirus diagnostic tests.”
Due to the flawed test kits and CDC regulations, as of February
21, “Health officials across the country began pleading for a test that worked,
or at least the authorization to use another test.”
Interviewed for the article was Alex Greninger of the
University of Washington. “His lab had developed its own test and began seeking
approval to use it on patients on Feb. 18. But that test, along with others
that had been developed in various academic centers and hospitals, could not be
used on patients until the FDA relaxed its testing rules.
“[Greninger] noted that many of the state public health labs
had also figured out how to use the CDC test properly — by tossing one of its
components — but were not allowed to actually do so until the FDA approved the
workaround that same day.
“We had all these state public health labs that had a
perfectly good [test] on their hands, and they knew it, they were upset,”
Greninger said.
“…As late as Feb. 27, only 203 specimen tests had been run out
of state labs; another 3,125 had been run out of the CDC.”
Even as earlier stumbling blocks to mass testing had been
overcome, new hurdles that had been overlooked by the administration (155) were
appearing, as reported by David Lim at Politico:
“A potential shortage
of cotton swabs and other basic supplies needed for coronavirus testing is
emerging as a new threat to the Trump administration’s plans to roll out
high-volume testing to 2,000 sites across the country by the end of the week.
“…The materials in question include swabs that medical workers
use to collect samples of patients’ phlegm and saliva for testing, and
disposable plastic tips for the pipettes that lab technicians use to transfer
liquids. Testing labs say they’re also concerned about the availability of
personal protective equipment for their staff.”
Asked at a press conference that day how he’d rate his
response to the crisis, Trump said, “I’d rate it a ten.” (156)
The following day, Tuesday, March 17, the Washington
Post published an article about another disastrous facet of the pandemic
which the administration had failed to prepare for (157): “Covid-19 hits doctors, nurses and EMTs,
threatening health system.”
In addition to the concern about hospital overcrowding and a lack of beds, the virus was now threatening the health and lives of the clinicians tasked with administering to the sick, putting yet another strain on
the system:
“Dozens of health-care workers have fallen ill with covid-19,
and more are quarantined after exposure to the virus, an expected but worrisome
development as the U.S. health system girds for an anticipated surge in
infections.
“From hotspots such as the Kirkland, Wash., nursing home where
nearly four dozen staffers tested positive for the coronavirus, to outbreaks in
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California and elsewhere, the virus is picking off
doctors, nurses and others needed in the rapidly expanding crisis.
“They have been put at risk in the United States not only by
the nature of their jobs, but by shortages of protective equipment such as N95 face
masks and government bungling of the testing program, which was delayed for
weeks while the virus spread around the country undetected.
“Because testing has lagged, health-care workers often have no
way to know whether people walking through the door with respiratory symptoms
are suffering from the flu or covid-19, providers said. Even when precautions
are taken, the virus has found its way into health-care facilities.”
As clinicians in the trenches struggled with shortages of
protective gear, swabs, and their own illnesses thanks to Trump’s indifference
to the virus for ten weeks, Trump said at a press conference, “This is a
pandemic…I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” (158) One
week earlier he had said that the coronavirus “will go away.”
Though the president had changed his tune, many of his
followers still thought the virus was a hoax (see #85). After two months in
which Trump had minimized and dismissed the seriousness of the virus with a
steady stream of propaganda, polling showed that 79% of Democrats understood that
“the worst is yet to come,” while only 40% of Republicans grasped the obvious (159).
Despite Trump’s numerous failures to protect the public from the virus, 81% of Republicans approved of Trump’s management of the crisis.
On Wednesday, March 18, New York magazine’s
Jonathan Chait discussed imminent, devastating human consequences which could
have been significantly reduced with proper planning in “The Hospital Deluge Is
Coming. Washington Has Done Almost Nothing to Prepare.” His opening paragraph summarized
why America found itself in such a disastrous situation:
“The most efficient first step would have been to prevent the coronavirus pandemic from spreading in
the first place. As many reports have widely documented, that first step never
took place because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed to
deploy an effective coronavirus test. ‘This is such a rapidly moving infection
that losing a few days is bad, and losing a couple of weeks is terrible,’
Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, tells Bloomberg News. ‘Losing 2 months is close to
disastrous, and that’s what we did.’
“The loss of those two months deprived the government of any
chance to prevent the pandemic from sweeping across the entire country.
Officials have been forced into reaction mode (160), deploying blunt measures
of closing public spaces to try to slow down the spread. Even so, it is highly
likely that, within a few weeks, the number of infected patients will exceed
the capacity of the hospital system to treat them.
“Washington has had weeks and weeks to prepare for this surge.
The three most obvious and foreseeable shortages are hospital beds (161),
respirator masks to protect medical staff (162), and ventilators (the machines
that are needed to pump air into the lungs of patients with the most serious
coronavirus symptoms). (163)
“You would think the government would have spent the last two
months scrambling to produce more of all three. There is no evidence this has
happened, and a great deal of evidence it has not.”
The answer to the supply shortage was clear: Trump needed to invoke the Defense Production
Act, which would marshal the resources of the federal government to
mass-produce the medical supplies needed by American hospitals.
Fifty-seven House Democrats had sent an open letter to Trump on March 13, asking
him to trigger the act. Though the situation was clearly about to become
desperate, Trump told a reporter, “Well, we’re able to do that if we have to.
Right now, we haven’t had to, but it’s certainly ready. If I want it, we can do
it very quickly. We’ve studied it very closely over two weeks ago, actually.
We’ll make that decision pretty quickly if we need it. We hope we don’t need
it. It’s a big step.” (164)
The scale of the administration’s negligence to help prepare
states and localities was laid out with grim statistics:
“Oregon sent a letter to Vice President Mike
Pence on March 3 asking for 400,000 N95 masks. For days, it got no response,
and only by March 14 received its first shipment, of 36,800 masks. But there
was a problem. Most of the equipment they got was well past the expiration date
and so ‘wouldn’t be suitable for surgical settings,’ the state said. (165)
“New York City also put in a request for more than 2 million
masks and only received 76,000; all were expired, said Deanne Criswell, New
York City’s emergency management commissioner.” (166)
Over at Axios, Bob Herman focused on just one
aspect of the coming shortage in “No part of the U.S. has enough hospital beds
for a coronavirus crisis.”
Herman reported that, “Every corner of the U.S. is at risk for
a severe shortage of hospital beds as the coronavirus outbreak worsens…
“…Why it matters: Total nationwide capacity for health
care supplies doesn't always matter, because hospitals in one area can help out
neighboring systems when they're overwhelmed by a crisis. But these projections
indicate that won't be an option with the coronavirus — everybody will be
hurting at the same time. (167)
“By the numbers: Harvard's projections show if 50% of all
currently occupied hospital beds were emptied and sizable percentages of
Americans were infected, the country would need at least three times more beds
to care for everyone.
“Those models line up with James Lawler, an infectious
disease doctor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who forecasted in a
recent presentation to hospital insiders that the U.S. may eventually have as
many as 96 million cases, resulting in
4.8 million hospitalizations. He told Axios he stands by those
projections.
“The U.S. has 924,000 total hospital beds, or less than three
beds for every 1,000 people. Roughly 5% of those beds are in standard intensive
care units, where the sickest coronavirus patients would need to go.”
Due to the expected shortage
in hospital beds, medical facilities were delaying heart surgeries,
“slow-growing or early-stage cancers,” and cancer screenings such as mammograms
and colonoscopies
(168).
On Thursday March 19, as the full scale of the disaster
was coming into clearer focus, the New York Times documented the Trump administration’s failures to act on information that was readily available in
“Coronavirus Outbreak: A Cascade of Warnings, Heard but Unheeded.”
The piece revealed that Trump’s Health and Human Services
department had run a series of simulations (called “Crimson Contagion”) about
responding to a hypothetical respiratory virus from China from January to
August of 2019. The simulations “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared
and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle
with a virus for which no treatment existed.”
Further, “The draft report, marked ‘not to be disclosed,’ laid
out in stark detail repeated cases of ‘confusion’ in the exercise. Federal
agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals
struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available.
Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.
“Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to
address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the
country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three
times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations,
had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely
shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.”
“…Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the
government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: ‘Nobody knew there would be a
pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like
this before.’
“The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates
that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic
and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling
belatedly to address.
“But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in
the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear
never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive
branch or from Congress."
Just as Republicans did when George W. Bush failed New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina and contributed to the deaths of 1,800 Americans
through sheer incompetence, Trump passed the buck to state governments. At a press conference that day, Trump said, “Governors are supposed
to be doing a lot of this work…the federal government is not supposed to be out
there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. We’re not a shipping
clerk.” (170)
As New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait pointed out, “It
is absolutely astonishing that Trump believes state and local governments
should have primary responsibility for handling a national pandemic. Those
governments lack the bargaining power and national scale to take control of
industrial processes that lie outside their borders.”
At the same press conference, a Washington Post
photographer noticed that Trump had made one change to the notes he was using
while speaking to the press—crossing out the word “coronavirus” and writing the
words “Chinese virus” above it, a dog whistle to his racist supporters (171).
As of Friday, March 20, eleven weeks after
administration officials were first notified of the coronavirus, states and localities were still waiting for tests so that they could know where outbreaks were concentrated. (172)
According to reporters Dan Goldberg, Brianna Ehley, and David
Lim of Politico:
“…governors and public health officials say they are still
being forced to dramatically ration the tests, while labs are confronting
daunting backlogs that delay the results….governors have been on the phone with
Vice President Mike Pence and other federal officials, begging for additional
supplies, testing kits, swabs, reagents and protective equipment.
“The shortage of tests means that in many states people who
believe they might have contracted the virus can’t know for sure and are told
to stay home for weeks. (173) It means health care workers don’t know whether
they've contracted the illness even as they treat infected patients and tend to
members of high-risk groups, such as the elderly, who might be in the hospital
for other reasons. (174) And it means public health officials are left guessing
where they should direct resources because they can’t be certain whether there
are clusters of cases.
“….That’s left states to impose strict criteria on who can be
tested, frustrating people across the country who are showing symptoms, worried
but were told to wait and see if their cases worsen. In several states,
only those who are hospitalized or at high risk, including those with
underlying conditions, can be tested.” (175)
Karen Weise and Mike Baker of the New York Times gave a
preview of the severe rationing American hospitals would soon face:
“Medical leaders in
Washington state, which has the highest number of U.S. coronavirus deaths, have
quietly begun preparing a bleak triage strategy to determine which patients may
have to be denied complete medical care in the event that the health system
becomes overwhelmed by the coronavirus in the coming weeks.
“Fearing a critical shortage of supplies, including the
ventilators needed to help the most seriously ill patients breathe, state
officials and hospital leaders held a conference call Wednesday night to
discuss the plans, according to several people involved in the talks. The
triage document, still under consideration, will assess factors such as age,
health and likelihood of survival in determining who will get access to full
care and who will merely be provided comfort care, with the expectation that
they will die.”
Not only were hospitals likely to have shortages in beds, but
clinicians would be hampered from doing their jobs because of the Trump
administration’s failure to help states get adequate surgical masks and other
personal protective equipment.
Trump had committed to using the Defense Production Act to
address this issue two days earlier, but had changed his mind later that night,
tweeting that he would only invoke the Act “in a worst-case scenario in the
future.” (176)
Ali reported that “Almost every health-care professional I
interviewed criticized the government’s lack of preparedness. ‘The biggest
mistake we’ve made is that we awakened to this problem too late,’ said [a] New
York emergency-room doctor. ‘We had three months of warning from China and then
Europe, and we didn’t take it seriously.’”
Another New York physician told Ali, “We have known for six
weeks, and there was literally zero response and preparedness….The entire health-care
system is a massive failure on a federal level.’”
Clinicians “also voiced frustration toward the CDC and its
changing guidelines on personal protective equipment. A few weeks ago the CDC
said physicians needed N95 masks. Later, it said surgical masks would suffice.
This week, it said bandanas and scarves can be used as a last resort. The
physicians said they believe these shifting guidelines are driven by equipment
shortages, and not the actual safety of health-care workers.” (177)
With cities and some states shutting down, reported cases
increasing by the day, widespread testing still not happening, hospitals
overburdened and expecting worse, adequate PPE nowhere in sight, and a record
number of Americans about to file for unemployment in no small part due to
administration inaction from January 3 until March 13 (178), Peter Alexander of NBC asked Trump at that day’s
daily coronavirus briefing, "What do you say to Americans who are watching
you right now who are scared?"
Trump’s response to this reasonable question was, “I
say that you're a terrible reporter, that's what I say. I think it's a very
nasty question, and I think it's a very bad signal that you're putting out to
the American people." (179)
Saturday, March 21 featured
an autopsy of executive branch failures from Politico’s resident expert
on the Trump administration’s response, Dan Diamond (see #100 and #131).
Diamond pointed out that while Trump’s sudden shift to
publicly acknowledging the coronavirus with regular briefings and promises of
federal assistance was assuaging gullible and uninformed Americans, behind the scenes the failures were evident:
“…no one in the White House had devised a national strategy
for obtaining and distributing the necessary supplies in the likely months-long
fight against the pandemic that lies ahead, said three people with knowledge of
the planning efforts. Those supply-planning efforts are only now underway.”
As a result of 10 weeks of inaction from the administration,
Seattle and New York City “have effectively abandoned efforts to conduct broad
testing on residents, instead urging them to stay home given the shortages — an
acknowledgment that efforts to contain coronavirus have failed and they need to
prioritize limited supplies (180). Local officials also are making unusual
crowdsourcing appeals. (181)
“‘We need companies to be creative to supply the crucial gear
our healthcare workers need. NY will pay a premium and offer funding,’ New York
Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted on Friday. ‘If you have any of these unused supplies,
please email COVID19supplies@esd.ny.gov.’
Not only was the Trump administration not using the Defense
Production Act, they were actively competing with states for equipment (182), robbing
states of supplies in order to build up national reserves.
Supply-chain shortages would not only negatively impact
coronavirus victims, people who couldn’t get surgeries due to the flood of
coronavirus victims into hospitals (183), and the clinicians who serve them,
but women having babies (184). According to ProPublica, “Over the next
three months, nearly a million women in the United States will give birth to
nearly a million babies — a huge influx of mostly healthy, highly vulnerable
patients into a hospital system that’s about to come under unprecedented
strain. Pregnant women, not surprisingly, are anxious. Those in their third
trimester, looking to deliver during an epidemic, are close to frantic.”
As the crisis in our hospitals became clearer, Trump
continued to blame his predecessors.
Though the Obama administration had briefed the incoming Trump
administration on the importance of pandemic planning and left highly competent
officials in charge of the CDC and the NSC’s Office of Global Security, when
asked about the shortage of masks in his daily briefing, Trump said, “Many
administrations preceded me — for the most part they did very little, in terms
of what you’re talking about…We’re making much of the stuff now, it’s being
delivered now.” (185).
On Sunday, March 22, ABC reported that the U.S. “now
has the third most cases worldwide,” over 31,000.
Appearing on CNN, Bronx/Queens representative Alexandra-Ocasio
Cortez said, “The fact that the president has not really invoked the Defense
Production Act for the purpose…of emergency manufactur[ing] is going to cost lives.” (186)
Because the Trump administration had failed to think ahead and was refusing to invoke the Defense Production Act—while stealing supplies from states to stock the national reserves—administration officials were tasked
with coming up with contingency plans for hospitals as they run out of PPE,
ventilators, and vital medical supplies.
As reported by the Washington Post, “Most disturbing
for some people is the idea that the wealthiest nation in the world is leaving
its caregivers unprotected in this crisis because it did not plan for it and
wasted precious weeks before responding.” (187)
Further into the piece, the authors looked at the Trump
administration’s original sin:
“CDC Director Robert Redfield heard from Chinese counterparts
on Jan. 3 that a spreading respiratory illness could be caused by a novel
coronavirus. Redfield told Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who
sought to immediately notify the White House National Security Council,
according to four senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss internal government actions. Azar briefed Trump on Jan. 18
about the virus, but the president was said to be quickly disinterested. (188) The
CDC, HHS, National Institutes of Health, State Department, National Security
Council and other agencies and aides began meeting to discuss the virus in
January.
“Yet Trump and several of his aides were reluctant to take the
virus seriously until the first confirmed U.S. case surfaced on Jan. 21,
according to two senior administration officials. (189) Trump continued to
downplay the threat of the virus until this month.
“Not until the first week of March did the administration and
Congress agree to an $8.3 billion supplemental spending bill to address the
outbreak, wasting weeks that could have been used to respond to equipment
shortages…”
“…Lauren Sauer, director of operations for the Johns Hopkins
Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, said, ‘Lack of clarity from
the White House has been frustrating….It feels like every decision that is
being made from the administration is the first decision they’ve had to make on
this.’”
Not only was the administration failing to provide clear guidance
to hospitals as to how to cope with the manmade disaster that awaited them, but
due to the shortages—which were exacerbated by the administration outbidding
states—states were competing with one another and even against other countries.
As Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker told CNN, “It‘s a wide Wild West…out there.
And, indeed, we’re overpaying, I would say, for [personal protective equipment]
because of that competition.” (190)
Trump’s response to Pritzker’s criticism of the grossly
inadequate federal response, in the middle of a pandemic he had made infinitely
worse than it needed to be (see #1-#190), was to spend his precious time trolling Pritzker on Twitter (191).
When he wasn’t using Twitter to attack public officials who
tried to hold him accountable, Trump added to the chaos and suffering he’d
already caused by tweeting that “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN,
taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in
the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You!”
As ProPublica reported, “Trump’s push to use
hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 has triggered a run on the drug. Healthy
people are stocking up just in case they come down with the disease. That has
left lupus patients…and those with rheumatoid arthritis suddenly confronting a
lack of medication that safeguards them, and not only from the effects of those
conditions.” (192)
This despite the fact that there was no concrete evidence that
the combination was effective. As Trump’s top medical coronavirus advisor, Anthony
Fauci, told an interviewer, "The information that you're referring to is
anecdotal. It wasn't done in a controlled clinical trial, so you can't make a
definitive statement about it." (193)
Fauci’s inability to keep Trump focused on facts popped up
again on Monday, March 23, in an interview with Science Magazine.
Asked about Trump’s dubious statements about the strategic effectiveness of closing the
border (194) and the timing of China’s disclosures (195), Fauci said, “I know,
but what do you want me to do? I mean, seriously Jon, let’s get real, what do you want me to do?”
Fauci’s lack of sway was again evident in Trump’s messaging at
that day’s briefing. Despite all available information that the impact of the
virus was increasing dramatically, with the country now at over 42,000 cases
and 100 deaths in a day, and the warnings of health officials that a shutdown
was necessary to flatten the curve, Trump minimized the scope of the pandemic
by mentioning the number of fatal auto accidents annually (196), again
compared the coronavirus to the flu (197), and said he would review his
decision to shut the country down once the initial 15-day order was up, potentially
re-opening parts of the country while the pandemic continued to spread (198). He
even claimed that there would be more suicides from social isolation than
deaths from the virus itself (199).
That same day, Michael Poznansky of the Washington Post
reported that the administration had had access to “repeated” intelligence
warnings since the beginnings of the virus, but it was unclear if Trump was
aware of the information in real time because “Trump reportedly does not read
intelligence assessments (see #140), does not ask probing questions of his
intelligence advisers (200), and does not schedule intelligence briefings
nearly as often as his predecessors.” (201)
Another major (and unforced) administration error was revealed
by journalist Marisa Taylor, who reported that “Several months before the
coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration eliminated a key American
public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in
China.”
According to Taylor, “the American disease expert, a
medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency, left her
post in July [2019]…The first cases of the new coronavirus may have emerged as
early as November, and as cases exploded, the Trump administration in February
chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and keeping U.S.
experts from entering the country to help.
“‘It was heartbreaking to watch,’ said Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese
American who served in that role, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, between 2007 and 2011. ‘If someone had been
there, public health officials and governments across the world could have
moved much faster.’ (202)
“As an American CDC employee, they said, Quick was in an ideal
position to be the eyes and ears on the ground for the United States and other
countries on the coronavirus outbreak, and might have alerted them to the
growing threat weeks earlier.” (A follow-up article by Taylor would reveal that the disease expert was just one of many health officials in Beijing who were pulled out by the administration, which had eliminated 33 of 47 positions at that location.)
Asked about the story at a press conference, Trump said the
report was “100 percent wrong” but offered no factual rebuttal of the
information provided (203).
Seeking to mitigate the unfolding disaster that Trump had created, Congress was at work on a time-sensitive stimulus bill. As ever,
Republican Mitch McConnell played chicken with the Democrats, crafting a Senate
bill that shortchanged everyday people and desperate medical facilities while
directing enormous sums of taxpayer subsidies to business interests with no strings attached.
When Democrats refused to play ball, McConnell blamed the
Democrats for the delay, a dishonest rhetorical thrust echoed by the president
(204) which forced Nancy Pelosi to step in and shape a stimulus package that would at
least try to strike a balance between public needs and private interests. With
no thanks to the president, Pelosi molded a bill that spent more money on hospitals,
unemployment benefits, and federal disaster management, included progressive tax
cuts (in place of the regressive tax cuts Trump/McConnell wanted), and made airlines
getting huge infusions of taxpayer money follow green practices.
Tuesday, March 24 offered
another post-mortem on the Trump administration’s failures to act on the
coronavirus with “DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck” by
Daniel Lippman at Politico.
The opening paragraphs tell the crux of the story:
“The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its
annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical
infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with
direct knowledge of the matter.
“From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem
with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced
detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation
systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.
“But the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic
dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the
department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impact the COVID-19
outbreak is having on vast swaths of the U.S. economy. (205) Officials at other
agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS
in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to
find quickly.” (206)
Former Obama DHS official Juliette Kayyem said the
administration’s blindness to the value of the models could be attributed to its
singular focus on scapegoating Mexicans:
“We should not be surprised that a department that has for the
last 3½ years viewed itself solely as a border enforcement agency seems
ill-equipped to address a much greater threat to the homeland.” (207)
This short-sightedness robbed crisis management officials of
information that could have helped them from the outset of the virus’s
expansion into the U.S.: “The former DHS
officials said if the pandemic models had been maintained properly, the
administration might have had an earlier understanding of where shortages might
occur, and acted accordingly to address them…(208)
“‘A lot of what we’re doing now is shooting in the dark, and
there’s going to be secondary impacts to infrastructure that are going to be
felt in part because we didn’t maintain these models,’ (209) said one of the
former DHS officials. ‘Our ability to potentially foresee where the impacts are
or may manifest is a result of the fact that we don’t have the capabilities
anymore.’”
The impact of not having these models in the present was grim,
as states strained under the weight of medical supply shortages and record numbers of unemployment claims. Nowhere was this felt
more acutely than New York, which was now “the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic,
with 25,665 cases,” and facing a disastrous shortage of ventilators and other crucial medical equipment. The state had 7,000 ventilators and needed 30,000. The
administration had thus far sent just 400 ventilators (210).
Addressing the shortage, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said, "I understand
the federal government's point that many companies have come forward
and said we want to help, and General Motors and Ford and people
are willing to get into the ventilator business. It does us no good
if they start to create a ventilator in three weeks or four weeks or
five weeks. We're looking at an apex of 14 days….The [Defense
Production Act] can actually help companies, because the federal government can
say, 'Look, I need you to go into this business. I will contract with you today
for x number of ventilators. Here's the startup capital you need….Not to
exercise that power is inexplicable to me.’”
Bridling, as he always does, at criticism—even when it is
well-deserved—Trump falsely accused Cuomo of creating death panels during a Fox
News virtual town hall that day (211) and continued to refuse to activate the
Defense Production Act. This was of a piece with the administration’s pattern
of delay and obfuscation, as reported in “Slow Response to the Coronavirus
Measured in Lost Opportunity” at the New York Times.
Had the administration called on its potential industrial power
in January, when they knew about the virus's destructive power overseas, or even early February, when Democratic senators proposed emergency funding (see #40), hospitals could have had sufficient stocks of equipment when the first big wave of cases came in, but due to administration delays, the proposed partnership between GE and
General Motors wouldn’t produce equipment until June (212). The
administration’s promise to send out 60,000 test kits fell well short of the
“tens of millions needed.”
Even as the administration failed to get ventilators out (despite having an awareness of ventilator shortages in Chinese hospitals two months earlier), even as public health officials recommended a
shutdown of up to “a year or more,” even as the spokesperson for the World
Health Organization had said that very day that the U.S. could be the next epicenter of the coronavirus, Trump told Fox viewers that he wanted the country
to be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” (213)
While identified cases spiraled from 7,800 to 53,268 in just
one week, one of the root causes of the public health disaster was explored the
next day, Wednesday, March 25, by Politico reporters Nahal Toosi
and Dan Diamond (see #100, #131, and #181) in “Trump team failed to follow
NSC’s pandemic playbook.”
According to the piece, Barack Obama’s National Security
Council had a plan for just these kinds of situations, but the Trump
administration had ignored the playbook for the past twelve weeks, thereby
enabling the catastrophe that was unfolding in New York City and other parts of
the country. (214)
One excerpt from the playbook read “‘Is there sufficient
personal protective equipment for healthcare workers who are providing medical
care?’ the playbook instructs its readers, as one early decision that officials
should address when facing a potential pandemic. ‘If YES: What are the triggers
to signal exhaustion of supplies? Are additional supplies available? If NO:
Should the Strategic National Stockpile release PPE to states?’”
The plan consisted of “hundreds of tactics and key policy
decisions laid out in a 69-page National Security Council playbook on fighting
pandemics….Other recommendations include that the government move swiftly to
fully detect potential outbreaks, secure supplemental funding and consider
invoking the Defense Production Act — all steps in which the Trump
administration lagged behind the timeline laid out in the playbook.”
“….The guide further calls for a ‘unified message’ on the
federal response, in order to best manage the American public's questions and
concerns. ‘Early coordination of risk communications through a single federal
spokesperson is critical,’ the playbook urges.
“However, the U.S. response to
coronavirus has featured a rotating cast of spokespeople and conflicting
messages (215); Trump already is discussing loosening government
recommendations on coronavirus in order to ‘open’ the economy by Easter,
despite the objections of public health advisers.
“A former Obama official said, ‘These are recommended
discussions to be having on all levels, to ensure that there’s a structure to
make decisions in real-time.’”
Though briefed on the playbook (officially titled the Playbook
for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and
Biological Incidents) by outgoing Obama administration officials, Trump’s NSC
never followed through on its recommendations (216).
Another example of how not to handle a coronavirus crisis appeared on ProPublica’s website the following day, Thursday, March 26.
“Internal Emails Show How Chaos at the CDC Slowed the Early Response to Coronavirus” gave examples of the Trump administration's miscommunications with state health officials in Nevada and failures to gather accurate data about the number of coronavirus cases (217).
“Internal Emails Show How Chaos at the CDC Slowed the Early Response to Coronavirus” gave examples of the Trump administration's miscommunications with state health officials in Nevada and failures to gather accurate data about the number of coronavirus cases (217).
Among the key findings:
1) the CDC gave contradictory information about test guidelines to public health officials (218); 2) the CDC intended to outsource testing to state
health departments, but this was slowed down because of delays with the test
kits; 3) the CDC asked states to use DCIPHER, a web platform, but provided no
training on how to use the platform until February 24 (219); and 4) the CDC
protocol for screening passengers at Los Angeles airport returning from China
was unclear and ineffective (220).
Returning to the present, hospitals were weighing universal do not resuscitate orders in order to keep clinicians safe: “The conversations are driven by the
realization that the risk to staff amid dwindling stores of protective
equipment — such as masks, gowns and gloves — may be too great to justify the
conventional response when a patient “codes,” and their heart or breathing
stops.”
“‘…It’s extremely dangerous in terms of infection risk because
it involves multiple bodily fluids,’ explained one ICU physician in the
Midwest, who did not want her name used because she was not authorized to speak
by her hospital.”
One New York nurse who died from COVID-19 worked on a unit
where clinicians had to wear garbage bags due to a shortage of PPE (221).
That evening, it was reported that 3.3 million Americans had applied for unemployment, a record number, and Trump told Sean Hannity "I don't
believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they'll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they're
saying, 'Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’" (222*)(*The New York Times
would report the next day that the state of New York was so short of
ventilators that patients were actually sharing ventilators)
Trump’s minimizing of the crisis extended to his daily
briefing, where he talked about classifying areas of the country based on known infection
rates and opening up the spots with lower rates, even though testing had been limited,
the extent of the virus was unknown and had been underestimated in the past,
and there were no guarantees of safety.
Trump’s false narratives prompted a discussion at Axios, “Trump's
coronavirus briefings see big audiences. Some argue that's bad.” The piece
explored the inability of networks to factcheck Trump’s claims in real time,
allowing the president’s inaccurate and often unscientific statements to
confuse millions of viewers with poor critical-thinking skills (223).
As just one example, one month earlier, Trump had told reporters,
“when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be
down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (see #71) As of
March 26, the United States had over 1,000 deaths, the most reported cases of any country, and the numbers were increasing significantly every day.
Stories detailing Trump’s denial about the scope of the crisis
continued on Friday, March 27. Aaron
Blake and William Wan of The Washington Post reported that Trump’s
steady stream of public lies and misstatements had been taken at face value by many of his supporters and other low-information voters (224), contributing to most
Republican governors refusing to order shelter-in-place edicts, thereby
endangering public safety (225). Further, the variance in individual states’
commitments to combating the virus was making it hard to create sound
epidemiology models, keeping public health officials from knowing true risk levels (226), which
should be the driver of public policy. As was pointed out, the cities that
lifted shelter-in-place orders too soon during the 1918 Spanish flu paid a steep price.
The same day that it
was reported that the number of cases had passed 100,000, twice what they had been three days earlier (and yet still a major underestimate due to test delays),
Jonathan Swan at Axios reported that “weaning Trump from setting a
date for millions of Americans to get back to work is a delicate, ongoing
process.” One administration official said, "I don’t think he feels in any
way that his messaging was off….He feels more convinced than ever that America
needs to get back to work." (227)
To his credit, Trump did take some productive actions Friday
the 27th—nearly three months after the administration had first been informed of coronavirus.
Earlier in the day, he signed the two trillion-dollar stimulus
bill with no Democrats present, as he couldn’t help being petty and
partisan (228) in this moment of national crisis.
Friday evening he finally invoked the Defense Production Act to have General Motors produce ventilators, more than two months after Robert Kadlec (an Air Force physician and the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at Health and Human Services) had started readying the process. The ventilator request was too little, too late (see #212), and didn't extend to any other badly-needed medical supplies or personal protective equipment (229), but it’s better than what the administration had done so far, which was close to nothing.
Friday evening he finally invoked the Defense Production Act to have General Motors produce ventilators, more than two months after Robert Kadlec (an Air Force physician and the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at Health and Human Services) had started readying the process. The ventilator request was too little, too late (see #212), and didn't extend to any other badly-needed medical supplies or personal protective equipment (229), but it’s better than what the administration had done so far, which was close to nothing.
The ventilators wouldn’t be ready anytime soon, and according to the New York Times, New York was estimated to need "20 million N-95 masks, 30 million surgical masks, 45 million exam gloves, 20 million gowns and 30,000 ventilators, all astronomical amounts compared to New York’s current stockpile.”
On Saturday, March 28, the U.S. passed 2,000 COVID-19 deaths and David Atkins of Washington Monthly wrote about the administration's penchant for giving or withholding medical supplies based on whether governors publicly challenged Trump's false and self-serving narratives about his response to coronavirus.
On Sunday, March 29, as the scale of the crisis and Trump's central role in it was becoming more evident to the public, Republicans reverted to deflection and character assassination, attacking Ron Klain (see #27, #33, #35) for having the audacity to publicly call the administration out for its lackluster response to coronavirus (see #1-#230).
On Saturday, March 28, the U.S. passed 2,000 COVID-19 deaths and David Atkins of Washington Monthly wrote about the administration's penchant for giving or withholding medical supplies based on whether governors publicly challenged Trump's false and self-serving narratives about his response to coronavirus.
On Sunday, March 29, as the scale of the crisis and Trump's central role in it was becoming more evident to the public, Republicans reverted to deflection and character assassination, attacking Ron Klain (see #27, #33, #35) for having the audacity to publicly call the administration out for its lackluster response to coronavirus (see #1-#230).
As medical workers across the country panicked due to a shortage of ventilators, ProPublica reported that a company in Pennsylvania which had received taxpayer money to design a ventilator—the Trilogy Evo—had yet to ship a single unit to the national stockpile—even as they sold units abroad. The administration could have blocked exports of vital medical equipment to help its own citizens, as Germany, South Korea, and 22 other countries had done (see #41), but chose to side with business interests instead.
Another thing the administration wasn’t doing was recommending masks, a common practice worldwide and an oversight they would have to correct later. (231)
On Tuesday, March 31, Politico opened with “What they told us about the coronavirus,” a list of contradictions in the administration’s messaging about whether or to what extent they had control over the situation, how much exposure one needed to get the virus (232), who was susceptible to the virus (233), when we would be able to ease up on social distancing, whether or not we should cover our mouths, the accessibility of tests, and the availability of ventilators. (234)
Later that day, the White House Coronavirus Task Force predicted that there would be 100,000-240,000 deaths in the U.S. due to COVID-19. Though this number was potentially an underestimate, and was far higher than it would have been if the administration had responded in a competent fashion, Trump said at that day’s briefing that if "we have between 100 and 200,000...we altogether have done a very good job.”
On Wednesday, April 1 Trump bragged about his Facebook ratings and Mike Pence tried to play an April Fool’s joke on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. In response to Blitzer’s comment about Trump’s consistent dismissal of COVID-19’s destructive potential through January, February, and the first two weeks of March, Pence said, “Well, Wolf, respectfully, I’d take issue with two things that you just said. I don’t believe the president has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus.”
Back in the real world, the Washington Post reported that the national stockpile of protective gear was “nearly depleted” due to the Trump administration’s lack of foresight (235) and Margaret Talev of Axios reported that coronavirus was further exacerbating the yawning levels of inequality helped along by Trump’s tax cut and reverse-Robin Hood budget priorities. While nearly half of upper-middle class Americans and 39% of the wealthy were able to work remotely and stay safe, only 17% of middle-class Americans and single digits of lower middle- and poor Americans could work remotely, forcing our most economically-vulnerable citizens to risk infection or go broke.
And as millions were losing their healthcare, Raw Story reported that Trump was ignoring requests by “advocacy groups and more than 100 members of Congress” to re-open the Affordable Care Act marketplace. (236)
Human desperation continued to dominate news stories on Thursday, April 2.
Matthew Yglesias of Vox reported that unemployment filings for the previous week reached 6.6 million, smashing the record set the week before.
Ina Fried looked at the uptick of domestic violence in Seattle (near the first reported infection in the U.S.), a sign of things to come, while Nadja Popovich of the New York Times showed how far behind the U.S. was in diagnosing the disease due to the administration’s lag time in getting functional test kits out.
ProPublica reported that New York State, the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S., was being forced to pay “Up to 15 Times the Normal Prices for Medical Equipment” and looked at the anxieties of pregnant medical workers on the front lines who lacked PPE (or clear safety guidelines from the CDC, 237).
In this grave national moment, Trump did what he does best (publicly trolling political opponents) with an open letter to Democratic senator Chuck Schumer of New York.
As of Friday, April 3, over 7,000 Americans had died from COVID-19 and the U.S. had its biggest single-day bump in cases—30,000. African-Americans were being hit particularly hard.
In “How Trump surprised his own team by ruling out Obamacare,” Adam Cancryn, Nancy Cook, and Susannah Luthi of Politico provided a behind-the-scenes account of Trump’s decision not to open the Affordable Care Act (see #236) to people who’d lost their health insurance: “[Opening Affordable Care Act enrollment] made sense to many in both the industry and Trump’s own administration, because Americans who lose their health insurance as a result of losing their job are already eligible to sign up for Obamacare outside the traditional monthlong enrollment period. With the coronavirus pandemic straining hospitals and the administration’s projections growing increasingly dire, health officials began signaling to insurers that it was preparing to give the broader pool of uninsured Americans a fresh shot at getting coverage…
“And by late March, administration officials sent word to insurers that the call would soon be official: They were reopening Obamacare, an unprecedented move that would have recognized the depth of the public health emergency.
“Major health insurance groups prepped news releases in anticipation of an announcement as soon as March 28, two people with knowledge of the arrangements said.”
Loathe to expand a program they had long wanted to kill, or to spend more money later if further funding was needed to maintain coverage, the administration instead opted for the much narrower and wholly inadequate policy of helping hospitals defray the costs of infected patients.
One Republican “close to the administration” told a reporter, “You have a perfectly good answer in front of you, and instead you’re going to make another one up….It’s purely ideological.”
The administration’s failure to get functional test kits out in a timely fashion was again put under a microscope on Saturday, April 4 in “Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help.”
The piece reported that “On Jan. 10, CDC scientists received an important break when the Chinese government published the pathogen’s genetic sequence. The sequence, a long string of letters representing the RNA structure of SARS-CoV-2 described a coronavirus never before seen in humans. It also gave scientists a path to create a precise diagnostic test that could detect the virus.”
On January 15, a top scientist at the CDC told health officials from around the country that they would have test kits soon.
The CDC test wasn’t approved until February 4, but the model sent out to states and localities was flawed, leading to further delays. Due to FDA regulations, public health labs weren’t allowed to use their own tests unless they jumped through an inordinate number of bureaucratic hoops. As minimum requirements, labs were required to complete a 28-page application and spend two weeks testing their kits. Alex Greninger, a scientist at the University of Washington (see #154), reported being denied (after having spent 100 hours on testing and documentation) because he'd submitted his application via email.
On February 27, “CDC Director Robert R. Redfield [testified] to the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and nonproliferation that the ‘CDC believes that the immediate risk of this new virus to the American public is low.’”
This contradicted what Redfield knew to be true (238), as “Privately, the CDC concluded that a ‘much broader’ effort to testing is needed. An internal memo titled, ‘A Plan to Increase Covid-19 testing in the U.S.,’ frankly acknowledged the approach was not working. The spread of the virus was ‘leading to significant impact on healthcare systems and causing social disruption,’ it said. ‘A much broader interagency approach is needed to fill the greater need for diagnostics by commercial manufacturers and laboratories capable of developing their own tests.’”
The CDC didn’t loosen regulations until February 29, six weeks after they had promised health officials that they’d have test kits "soon," leaving state and local public health officials in the dark about infection rates and allowing COVID-19 to spread in the shadows.
On the Sunday, April 5 edition of “Meet the Press,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams told host Chuck Todd, "The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment. It's going to be our 9/11 moment. It's going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives, and we really need to understand that if we want to flatten that curve and get through to the other side, everyone needs to do their part. Ninety percent of Americans are doing their part, even in the states where, where they haven't had a shelter in place. But if you can't give us 30 days, governors, give us, give us a week, give us what you can, so that we don't overwhelm our healthcare systems over this next week. And then let's reassess at that point. We want everyone to understand you've got to be Rosie The Riveter you've got to do your part."
The next day, Monday, April 6, Republican judges ensured that Wisconsin would be the one state to hold a primary during the height of a pandemic (16 other states and territories had postponed primaries).
Knowing that COVID-19 would disproportionately impact turnout in the Democratic strongholds of Madison and Milwaukee, where people would be at greater risk of catching the virus and would have to wait longer to vote due to population density, state Republicans appealed Democratic governor Tony Evers’ executive order to postpone the election.
The Republican majority on the state Supreme Court forced the vote in order to give an advantage to the Republican Supreme Court candidate backed by Trump, then the Republican majority on the federal Supreme Court killed a Democratic request to extend the deadline for absentee ballots by six days, leaving tens of thousands of voters who hadn't received absentee ballots in time with two terrible options (staying home and not voting or risking their health by voting in person).
Despite putting hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites’ safety at risk for partisan advantage and purposely disenfranchising thousands or tens of thousands of Democrats, Republicans lost the state Supreme Court race by almost eleven points.
Asked about the Supreme Court contest at a briefing on Tuesday, April 7, Trump claimed Tony Evers had sought to move the election because he (Trump) had endorsed the Republican candidate, though Democrats had filed a lawsuit trying to move the election back before Trump issued his endorsement.
And though vote-by-mail elections are less expensive, more secure, and more convenient than in-person elections, and Trump had mailed his ballot in, Trump signaled that he would suppress the Democratic vote in the upcoming presidential election with a baseless attack on mail voting: “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they’re cheaters,” the president said, adding, “They collect them, and they get people to go in and sign them, and then they have forgeries in many cases. It’s a horrible thing.” (239)
Further negative impacts on working-class Americans were reported in “Public transit’s death spiral” on Wednesday, April 8. While 36% of essential workers across the country used public transportation, transit lines were operating “at only 10% capacity” due to funding shortages and workers getting sick. Transport managers were faced with the challenge of keeping service running despite cash shortages while maintaining safety for riders and employees alike, and there was no telling when or if vital transportation systems would be fully functioning again.
As public transit strained under budget shortfalls, the Trump administration was handing out billions of dollars with scant oversight, in violation of the terms of the bipartisan stimulus bill.
According to reporter Kyle Cheney, Trump diminished government oversight by dismissing the chairman of one of the watchdog boards tasked with overseeing stimulus fund disbursement, choosing a highly partisan White House loyalist likely to generate Democratic opposition as one of the inspector generals, and “issuing a signing statement that said it would be unconstitutional to require Executive Branch watchdogs to report any obstruction in their investigations, unless Trump himself approves.” The result was that taxpayer money would be sent out to banks, hospitals, and small businesses with little attention to where those funds were needed most. (240)
On Thursday, April 9, as the number of reported infections in the U.S. continued to skyrocket, with record tallies of daily deaths just a few days out, Jonathan Swan reported that “Some Trump aides eye May 1 start to coronavirus reopening.”
One official told Swan, “We are looking at when the data will allow the opportunity to reopen” the economy, in hopes that Trump wouldn’t have to run for a second term during a steep recession. (241) An official at Health and Human Services said, “Talk of reopening the American economy — when we don’t fully understand the virus, and can’t even crank our own domestic assembly lines to make diagnostic tests, respirators and ventilators — isn't just myopic, it's flat out ridiculous.”
Stuck with the reality that even targeted re-openings which put citizens in danger would do little to improve the deep economic slump he had contributed to, Trump continued to shift the blame to others, from the Obama administration to Democratic governors to China to the World Health Organization.
As for his own administration’s response, when asked by a reporter if he could have done more, Trump said, “I couldn’t have done it any better,” part of a pattern of 116 times Trump had congratulated himself or his administration.
Friday, April 10, marked the two-year anniversary of Trump’s elevation of John Bolton to head the National Security Council (NSC). Bolton had fired the head of Homeland Security, Tom Bossert (see #12), who had “called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” and disbanded the Global Security Office inside the NSC (see #17), effectively gutting the administration’s main pandemic response unit.
Unconcerned with these relevant but inconvenient facts, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that they would be running digital ad spots praising Trump’s response to the coronavirus.
While the RNC tried to re-write history, Mike Pence quietly cleaned up one of Trump’s messes, according to Gabby Orr of Politico. To make sure that houses of worship connected to the White House knew that Trump wasn’t serious when he’d said that he wanted churches open on Easter (see #213), and wouldn’t embarrass the administration with public services on Easter, Pence and his staff called allies in the faith community and made the case for social distancing.
ProPublica reported on another one of the messes caused by Trump's incompetence—due to a shortage of PPE, hospital clinicians were having to ration time with patients to avoid infection, leading to shortfalls in patient care, patients being alone for hours at a time (242), and patients dying alone. (243)
On Saturday, April 11, America passed 20,000 known deaths, making the U.S. #1 in the world.
Dave Jamieson of Huffington Post reported that the administration had used Friday afternoon—a great time to dump damning information—to announce that “employers outside of the health care industry generally won’t be required to record coronavirus cases among their workers, a decision that left some workplace safety advocates incredulous.
“…if employers don’t have to try to figure out whether a transmission happened in the workplace, it could leave both them and the government in the dark about emerging hotspots in places like retail stores or meatpacking plants.” (244)
“Debbie Berkowitz, a worker safety expert at the National Employment Law Project, told HuffPost in an email that the implications of the guidance are larger than they seem. She said it would lead employers outside of health care to ‘not consider any of these [infections] work-related and therefore something they can prevent.’
“‘This is despicable and will lead to more cases among workers and the public,’ (245) she said in an email. ‘[OSHA] should be requiring employers to keep workers six feet apart, provide double cotton layer masks, hand sanitizers throughout facilities, [and] time to wash hands with soap and water.’”
Sunday, April 12, Katie Thomas and Knvul Sheikh of the New York Times reported that Chloroquine, a drug very similar to Hydrochloroquine, falsely billed by Trump as a miracle cure for COVID-19 (see #192), was causing irregular heartbeats in test subjects.
On Monday, April 13, Politico led with “States still baffled over how to get coronavirus supplies from Trump.”
Fourteen weeks after CDC head Robert Redfield was first informed of the virus, the administration was still failing states. Pleas from Jared Polis (the Democratic governor of Colorado) to FEMA were ignored. Messages from Polis to Mike Pence were ignored. Miraculously, when Republican Senator Cory Gardner made a request to the administration, ventilators were sent out the next day, but even that shipment was far short of what was needed—only 100 units. (246)
The lack of a formal process was creating chaos:
“The federal government’s haphazard approach to distributing its limited supplies has left states trying everything — filling out lengthy FEMA applications, calling Trump, contacting Pence, sending messages to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and trade adviser Peter Navarro, who are both leading different efforts to find supplies, according to local and states officials in more than a half-dozen states. They’re even asking mutual friends to call Trump or sending him signals on TV and Twitter.
“Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.” (247)
“…The confusion is indicative more broadly of how Trump and his administration have responded to a number of crises. The president often bounces from one issue to the next, reacting to the headlines of the day. Record turnover rates and competing power centers have hampered long-term planning. The result has been rotating strategies that are hard to fully chronicle.” (248)
Allocations were based not on need, but on public flattery of Trump:
“‘Right now, you have more discretion at the White House, and we have prized our relationship in order to secure some of the ventilators and other supplies,’ said an aide to one governor, who asked that even the state not be named for fear of jeopardizing the supplies. ‘We operate within the world we live in. We made the decision to have a very constructive and amicable relationship.’” (249)
Trump’s megalomania was again a topic of discussion on Tuesday, April 14.
Amanda Marcotte of Salon opined on the previous evening’s daily presser, which was even more bizarre than usual. In addition to making White House reporters watch a propaganda video claiming against all available evidence (see #1-#249) that the administration had done a good job of handling coronavirus, Trump said that he alone would decide when states opened back up: “When somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's got to be.”
When a reporter questioned this, Trump barked back, “Enough!”
While Trump’s attacks on reporters were boorish and unpresidential, his temper tantrums took much more consequential forms. In his continuing effort to deflect blame, Trump froze U.S. funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) for 60 days, claiming—with no evidence—that the WHO was covering up for China, who had become Trump’s key scapegoat for the administration’s failures. (250)
As reported by Quint Forgey and Nahal Toosi on Wednesday, April 15, the move caught overseas allies and Trump’s own staff off-guard: “The order was just the latest example of officials seeking to fill in the details of a lurching policy shift by the president, who is prone to the bureaucratic equivalent of shooting first and asking questions later.”
“Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said there was ‘no reason justifying this move’ by the American president ‘at a moment when [WHO’s] efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the #coronavirus pandemic.’”
The abrupt funding cut-off came after the administration’s 2021 budget proposal had slashed America’s contribution by 50% (251), while the U.S. was still $99 million in arrears to the organization.
Chaos within the administration was further detailed by James Hohmann of the Washington Post in “Leaked CDC and FEMA plan warns of ‘significant risk of resurgence of the virus’ with phased reopening.”
Directly undermining Trump’s advocacy for re-opening the economy, a “draft national strategy to reopen the country in phases, developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emphasizes that even a cautious and phased approach ‘will entail a significant risk of resurgence of the virus.’
“The internal document, obtained by The Washington Post, warns of a ‘large rebound curve’ of novel coronavirus cases if mitigation efforts are relaxed too quickly before vaccines are developed and distributed or broad community immunity is achieved.
“The framework lays out criteria that should be in place before a region can responsibly ease guidelines related to public gatherings: a ‘genuinely low’ number of cases; a ‘well-functioning’ monitoring system capable of ‘promptly detecting’ spikes of infections; a public health system able to react robustly to new cases and local health systems that have enough inpatient beds to rapidly scale up in the event of a surge in cases.”
As Hohmann pointed out, the administration was nowhere near to meeting these criteria—in fact, commercial testing plummeted 30% that week (252)—and Trump hadn’t committed to following the guidelines because he was “fearful of the potential damage to his reelection chances.”
Re-opening the economy to help the 2020 campaign, consequences be damned, was a foregone conclusion within Trump's inner circle, putting his appointees in pre-emptive damage control mode: “Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that if it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly.” (253)
On Thursday, April 16, the Washington Post reported that all of the job gains of the lengthy Obama recovery were gone and coronavirus was becoming America’s leading cause of death.
At that day’s briefing, Trump gave governors the authority to decide when to re-open their states, contradicting his statement earlier in the week that he had “total authority” over state-by-state re-opening.
Friday Trump contradicted Thursday Trump on April 17 when he Tweeted support for fringe-right extremists in Michigan, Virginia, and Minnesota who were protesting stay-at-home orders, even as the U.S. had experienced a record number of deaths (4,591) the day before, twice the record set earlier in the week. (254)
Asked at a press conference if he was recommending the orders be lifted, Trump contradicted himself yet again: “No, but elements of what they’ve done are too much....It’s too tough.”
In a public statement, Washington governor Jay Inslee said, “I hope someday we can look at today’s meltdown as something to be pitied, rather than condemned. But we don’t have that luxury today. There is too much at stake.”
An AP feature on Saturday, April 18 looked at the danger of re-opening before adequate testing had been done.
According to the authors, “…more than a month after [Trump] declared, ‘Anybody who wants a test, can get a test,’ the reality has been much different. People report being unable to get tested. Labs and public officials say critical supply shortages are making it impossible to increase testing to the levels experts say is necessary to keep the virus in check.
“‘There are places that have enough test swabs, but not enough workers to administer them. There are places that are limiting tests because of the CDC criteria on who should get tested,’ said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and associate professor at Brown University. ‘There’s just so many inefficiencies and problems with the way that testing currently happens across this country.’” (255)
The piece went on to mention that testing would have to increase three-fold to give public officials the data they needed to make safe and informed decisions and that Trump was pawning responsibility for testing off on the states, though he knew states didn’t remotely have the resources necessary due to “shortages of swabs, protective gear and highly specialized laboratory chemicals needed to analyze the virus’ genetic material.” (256)
The delays in getting functional test kits out, the biggest factor in America’s first-in-the-world totals in infections and deaths, was the subject of two Washington Post articles, one focused on the CDC’s failure to follow agency protocols, which contributed to contaminated kits being sent out (257), as well as a detailed timeline of all of the Trump administration’s test kit errors.
The Post’s key conclusion: “it took 70 days from [China's initial notification t0 CDC head Robert Redfield] for President Trump to treat the coronavirus pandemic seriously." (258)
David S. Cloud, Paul Pringle, and Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times continued this thread the following day, Sunday, April 19, in “How Trump let the U.S. fall behind the curve on coronavirus threat.”
The piece looked at chronic dysfunction within the top tiers of the administration and the central role Trump’s fixation on the Senate impeachment trial and re-election (i.e. his inability to pivot from political combat to governing, see #141) played in the confusion and inaction:
“Trump's unwillingness to take the health threat seriously and disagreements among his top aides effectively sidelined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leaving key responders without direction from a White House that was focused on the president's impeachment trial in the Senate.”
“…‘In an ideal world, there would have been a structure and someone with vision empowered in the White House,’ said J. Stephen Morrison, a health policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. ‘Everything was seen through the impeachment and reelection process.’”
“…At the White House, Trump and his close advisors, consumed by his impending impeachment trial in the Senate, rebuffed attempts by Redfield's boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, to alert them about the threat, according to a former federal official with knowledge of the communications.” (259)
“...The conflicts inside the White House along with the impeachment trial underway in the Senate kept the health threat barely on Trump’s radar.
“‘You have Trump as the lone-wolf operator,’ said Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump's director of communications and has recently been critical of the president. ‘What happens is everybody gets immobilized. They don't know what their marching orders are … so that's caused them to be very slow-footed in the midst of this crisis.’”
“…The federal government had an array of options to prevent the predictions from becoming a reality, experts said, including invoking the Defense Production Act to require private companies to address shortages of medical masks, ventilators and other equipment; mobilizing the military to construct field hospitals and organize testing centers around the country; and dispatching Navy hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles sooner.
“But there was little urgency to the government response.
“‘It was one failure after another, piling up on each other,’ said Dr. Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘When that happens, it usually means it wasn’t a priority. It was a lack of leadership.’”
The lack of leadership was (again) evident that day when Trump finally triggered the Defense Production Act to increase production of testing swabs, “weeks after reported shortages” and months after easily-foreseen shortages (260), supply shortages that were being exacerbated by the administration’s blockade of supplies ordered by the states themselves. (261)
On Monday, April 20, the gulf between vital public health imperatives and the Trump administration’s self-serving political agenda widened.
Interviewed that morning by George Stephanopolous, Anthony Fauci stressed the danger of re-opening the economy too soon: “If you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re going to set yourself back….So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening, it’s going to backfire [if you reopen prematurely]. That’s the problem.”
Despite his awareness of the public health dangers and his public statement four days earlier that governors should decide when to end or modify statewide shelter-in-place laws, behind the scenes Trump was pushing governors—particularly Republican allies—to re-open the economy prematurely for fear that mass unemployment could doom his re-election bid (262).
As reported in “Trump revs up for a state-by-state fight over coronavirus shutdowns":
“Over the next two weeks at the urging of the Trump administration, the map of the U.S. will start to resemble a patchwork quilt, with some states open for business while others remain locked down because of the spread of the virus.”
“Over the next two weeks at the urging of the Trump administration, the map of the U.S. will start to resemble a patchwork quilt, with some states open for business while others remain locked down because of the spread of the virus.”
Trump was only too happy to exploit divisions between the majority of Americans who grasped the threat of the virus and the vocal minority of rabid ideologues who didn’t:
“Senior administration officials and Trump advisers say the level of hostility between the president and governors will probably only increase in the coming days, in part because Trump sees so much political opportunity in stoking those divisions during his reelection campaign. Governors have become his latest political foil, along with China and the World Health Organization, and he’s trying to bully and scapegoat them amid his administration’s response to the pandemic. (263)
“Senior administration officials and Trump advisers say the level of hostility between the president and governors will probably only increase in the coming days, in part because Trump sees so much political opportunity in stoking those divisions during his reelection campaign. Governors have become his latest political foil, along with China and the World Health Organization, and he’s trying to bully and scapegoat them amid his administration’s response to the pandemic. (263)
“Small protests over the weekend in Texas, North Carolina, Michigan and New Hampshire only highlighted the frustration of some Americans about the shuttering of huge swaths of the economy. Trump aides and advisers are closely monitoring those protests because they think the demonstrations give momentum to the president’s argument to reopen the economy as soon as possible — not to mention a potential source of energy heading into the fall election.”
Though governors had nowhere near the purchasing/negotiating power and resources of the federal government, and could neither afford nor realistically be expected to get hold of the amount of supplies necessary, “The White House has been setting itself up for weeks now to blame governors for the response to the coronavirus, including any failure to procure medical equipment and resources, or problems that arise from restarting businesses and resuming public life.” (264)
While the administration sought to deflect attention from their failure to plan ahead, statnews.com reported on Tuesday, April 21, that Trump’s allergy to science and reasoned disagreement was continuing to hamper the administration’s COVID-19 response: “Rick Bright, one of the nation’s leading vaccine development experts and the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, is no longer leading the organization, officials told STAT.
“The shakeup at the agency, known as BARDA, couldn’t come at a more inopportune time for the office, which invests in drugs, devices, and other technologies that help address infectious disease outbreaks and which has been at the center of the government’s coronavirus pandemic response.” (265)
“…BARDA was expected to play an even larger role in the coming months; Congress more than tripled BARDA’s budget in the most recent coronavirus stimulus package. Already, the office has a role in some of the splashiest Covid-19 projects, including partnerships with Johnson & Johnson and Moderna Therapeutics, both of which are developing potential Covid-19 treatments.”
Appearing on “Face the Nation” a few days later, Trump’s former FDA head Scott Gottlieb said, "I think changing leadership in that position right now certainly is going to set us back….It's hard to argue that that's not going to have some impact on the continuity and also make businesses, companies that need to collaborate with BARDA, a little bit more reluctant now to embrace BARDA now that there's a cloud hanging over it and some uncertainty about the leadership."
It would come out later that Bright (see #23) was demoted because he had disagreed with Trump’s focus on the pie-in-the-sky cure-all of hydroxychloroquine, part of Trump’s consistent pattern of punishing public health officials who didn’t parrot his ill-informed talking points.
The same day, the National Review, a conservative publication, put the lie to one of Trump’s favorite talking points in February and early March (see #70, #108, #197) with “Coronavirus Kills More Americans in One Month Than the Flu Kills in One Year.”
The theme of Trump’s blatant lies and bad advice came up again at that day’s briefing when PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor related an anecdote about a family who’d gotten infected (after taking Trump’s misinformation at face value) and asked the president, “Are you concerned downplaying the virus maybe got some people sick?”
The president of the United States said that the infections he caused in effect didn’t matter because “a lot of people love Trump, right?,” because he’d won an election, because he’d probably win another one. Though the amount of testing and detection was still not remotely adequate almost four months after the administration had first been notified of the virus, and the desperate and chaotic situation in America due to Trump's failures was likened to “a third world country,” Trump then told Alcindor that his single action of closing off travel from China—even as he allowed infected travelers to stream in from Europe for another six weeks—proved that he had taken COVID-19 seriously.
Just how seriously the administration had taken the pandemic was again revealed the following day, Wednesday, April 22, when Aram Roston and Marisa Taylor of Reuters reported that a “Former Labradoodle breeder was tapped to lead U.S. pandemic task force.”
The piece explained how Alex Azar had put the day-to-day operations of the Coronavirus Task Force in the hands of Brian Harrison, a 37-year-old with a background in dog breeding. Harrison “was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields.” (266)
At that day’s press briefing, the lies continued when Trump said, “If [coronavirus] comes back though, it won’t be coming back in the form that it was, it will be coming back in smaller doses that we can contain….it’s also possible it doesn’t come back at all.” This flatly contradicted CDC head Robert Redfield’s statement the day before that the second wave of COVID-19 could be worse than the first and represented yet another example of the mixed messaging the administration was putting out to the public. (267)
As of Thursday, April 23, U.S. unemployment rates had reached Depression-era levels. Trump continued to push misinformation, claiming that sunlight could wipe out coronavirus: “‘The whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s pretty powerful,’ Trump said during a White House press briefing. He raised the possibility of hitting a human body ‘with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light.’” (268)
He also sang the praises of the miracle cure of injecting disinfectants: “Then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?" (269)
The next day, Friday, April 24, COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. passed 50,000, more than twice the number of deaths in any other country.
As media wheels spun over Trump’s off-the-wall comments from the day before, he tried to shake off bad press by falsely claiming he was being sarcastic. His comments were no laughing matter, as a rash of disinfectant-related accidents would prove. (270)
Another one of Trump’s coronavirus quick fixes was revealed as quackery when Trump’s own “Food and Drug Administration warned consumers…against taking malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting after deaths and poisonings were reported.”
That weekend, on Sunday, April 26, Helena Bottemiller Evich of Politico reported on the incompetence of Trump’s Agriculture Department in “USDA let millions of pounds of food rot while food-bank demand soared.”
According to Evich: “Tens of millions of pounds of American-grown produce is rotting in fields as food banks across the country scramble to meet a massive surge in demand, a two-pronged disaster that has deprived farmers of billions of dollars in revenue while millions of newly jobless Americans struggle to feed their families.
“While other federal agencies quickly adapted their programs to the coronavirus crisis, the Agriculture Department took more than a month to make its first significant move to buy up surplus fruits and vegetables — despite repeated entreaties.”
“….Images of farmers destroying tomatoes, piling up squash, burying onions and dumping milk shocked many Americans who remain fearful of supply shortages. At the same time, people who recently lost their jobs lined up for miles outside some food banks, raising questions about why there has been no coordinated response at the federal level to get the surplus of perishable food to more people in need, even as commodity groups, state leaders and lawmakers repeatedly urged the Agriculture Department to step in.” (272)
On Monday, April 27, with the U.S. death toll over 55,000, Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that Trump had received “more than a dozen [intelligence] warnings” about the coronavirus in his January and February Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), even as he publicly dismissed concerns about COVID-19. (273) It was unclear if Trump ignored the warnings or never heard them because he “routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week.”
When asked on Tuesday, April 28, about his non-response to more than a dozen intelligence briefings about COVID-19, Trump claimed that “most people thought earlier this year that the coronavirus was going to blow over.”
As of Wednesday, April 29, the U.S. had passed 60,000 official deaths and one million infections, far more than any other country; there were 2,502 deaths that day alone. Trump announced that he would not be extending social distancing recommendations past Thursday. Jared Kushner “predicted that by July the country will be 'really rocking again.'”
AP reported that the U.S. economy had contracted 4.8% in the first quarter of 2020, the biggest drop since the economy lost 8.4% of its value in the final quarter of 2008, as George W. Bush’s presidency was winding down. Forecasters predicted that the second quarter of 2020 would be even worse.
Eager to shift attention away from the grim human toll of the administration’s failure to get ahead of COVID-19, senior administration officials were pressuring intelligence agencies to find a link between coronavirus and state-run labs in China, as reported in the New York Times on Thursday, April 30. (274)
This theory—part of a coordinated Republican response to change the subject—had floated around the right-wing echo chamber for a while, but “Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.”
“….In a statement released earlier on Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the intelligence community ‘will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.’
“Intelligence agencies, the statement said, concur ‘with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.’”
On Friday, May 1, Courtenay Brown and Kyle Daly of Axios reported on the inability of many states to keep up with unemployment claims.
“One out of every five working Americans” (30,000,000) had filed for unemployment over the prior six weeks, but this was an undercount. The true number could be as high as 44,000,000, but was hard to determine because understaffed state agencies couldn’t keep up with the applications.
As millions of Americans and their families struggled to get by, the administration continued to try to conceal its gross negligence by blocking Anthony Fauci from appearing before a Democratic-led House Appropriations Committee investigating the administration’s COVID-19 response—at the same time as it was announced that Fauci would be allowed to speak to a Republican-led Senate Health Committee hearing. (275)
Later that day, in another act of petty revenge, the administration replaced Christi Grimm, a Health and Human Services deputy inspector general who had authored an unflattering but objective report: (276)
“Her report, released last month and based on extensive interviews with hospitals around the country, identified critical shortages of supplies, revealing that hundreds of medical centers were struggling to obtain test kits, protective gear for staff members and ventilators. Mr. Trump was embarrassed by the report at a time he was already under fire for playing down the threat of the virus and not acting quickly enough to ramp up testing and provide equipment to doctors and nurses.”
The administration announced the move Friday evening so that the story would be buried.
The next day, Saturday, May 3, it was reported that the U.S. had just had its most reported deaths in a single day: 2,909. A few hours later, the Washington Post published a blockbuster exposé entitled “34 days of pandemic: Inside Trump’s desperate attempts to reopen U.S.”
The article revealed that despite the warnings of public health officials of a second wave of infections, Trump had been obsessed with re-opening the economy for the sole purpose of helping his re-election bid.
To this end, the administration had formed a “small team led by Kevin Hassett - a former chairman of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases (277)….[who] quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations.”
“…senior administration officials said [Hassett’s] presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast - and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government's pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.
“For Trump - whose decision-making has been guided largely by his reelection prospects - the analysis, coupled with Hassett's grim predictions of economic calamity, provided justification to pivot to where he preferred to be: cheering an economic revival rather than managing a catastrophic health crisis.
“…By the end of April - with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War - it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. ‘A catastrophic miss,’ as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it. The president's course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools.
“‘It's going to go. It's going to leave. It's going to be gone. It's going to be eradicated,’ the president said Wednesday, hours after his son-in-law claimed the administration's response had been ‘a great success story.’” (278, 279)
“…And though Trump was fixated on reopening the economy, he and his administration fell far short of making that a reality. The factors that health and business leaders say are critical to a speedy and effective reopening - widespread testing, contact tracing and coordinated efforts between Washington and the states - remain lacking.” (280)
Asked by ABC’s David Muir why he hadn’t done anything to shore up the national reserves of PPE in the first three years of his administration, Trump blamed the Mueller investigation of Trump campaign collusion with Russia and the impeachment investigation, and said the administration’s coronavirus response was “maybe our best work.”
“In a week when the novel coronavirus ravaged new communities across the country and the number of dead soared past 78,000, President Trump and his advisers shifted from hour-by-hour crisis management to what they characterize as a long-term strategy aimed at reviving the decimated economy and preparing for additional outbreaks this fall.
“But in doing so, the administration is effectively bowing to — and asking Americans to accept — a devastating proposition: that a steady, daily accumulation of lonely deaths is the grim cost of reopening the nation.” (295)
The article explained that the administration was telling itself the country was more or less good to go because the worst was behind us and hospitals could handle upcoming cases, though the administration’s own models and the multiple waves experienced during the Spanish Flu indicated otherwise. Since the administration wasn’t willing to set up national testing (see #291), or contact tracing (296), their focus was on propaganda—convincing gullible Republicans and independents that it was safe to ease up on restrictions, even if it wasn’t, even if 10,000+ Americans were dying every week.
Sunday, May 10, as it came out that multiple members of the administration had contracted COVID-19, Adam Cancryn of Politico documented the conspicuous disappearance of Trump’s top public health officials, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: “The Trump administration in recent weeks has clamped down on messaging, largely shifting its focus to cheerleading a restart of the nation’s economy even as states and businesses clamor for guidance on how to do so safely.
“Key health agencies remain relegated to the background. Some congressional requests for health officials’ testimony are being rejected. (297) And though the task force is still intact, it has not held a press briefing for 13 days — the longest the public has gone without having Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx at the White House podium since the briefings began in late February. (298)
“‘It’s a blind spot that the federal government doesn’t see this first and foremost as a public health crisis,’ said Joshua Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University. ‘This is the public health crisis of the century, and we’re sometimes treating it as anything but.’”
Despite this short-sightedness, and the administration’s long list of other failures and shortcomings (see #1-#298), Trump met that day with reporters in the White House Rose Garden to puff up his record and give the American public more false assurances about the advisability of reopening our economy.
“…Dr. Redfield pleaded with senators to build up the nation’s public health infrastructure, even as he acknowledged that the C.D.C. had not filled 30 jobs authorized by Congress last year to expand its capacity to track outbreaks, and had yet to put in place a ‘comprehensive surveillance’ system to monitor outbreaks in nursing homes, which have been hard hit by the pandemic.” (300, 301)
Though the administration’s own models showed a doubling of cases with premature re-openings, though only two states had met the CDC criteria to re-open, though Dr. Fauci and most voters opposed it, Trump continued to push schools to reopen in the fall, a move that would put children and teachers and their families at risk so that Trump’s failure to contain the pandemic wasn’t so evident at election time. (308)
Two stories on Monday, May 4, made it clearer than ever that Trump was willing to sacrifice tens or hundreds of thousands of American lives to win a second term.
“Models shift to predict dramatically more U.S. deaths as states relax social distancing” revealed that “A key model of the coronavirus pandemic favored by the White House nearly doubled its prediction Monday for how many people will die from the virus in the U.S. by August – primarily because states are reopening too soon.
“The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine is now projecting 134,000 coronavirus-related fatalities, up from a previous prediction of 72,000. Factoring in the scientists’ margin of error, the new prediction ranges from 95,000 to 243,000.
“Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of IHME, told reporters on a call Monday the primary reason for the increase is many states’ ‘premature relaxation of social distancing.’”
Even as the White House knew relaxing social distancing and other stay-at-home measures would kill tens of thousands more Americans (at a minimum), and up to 3,000 people daily, later that day it was reported that “Trump cheers on governors as they ignore White House coronavirus guidelines in race to reopen.” (281)
One state that followed Trump’s lead was the Republican enclave of Texas. As reported on Tuesday, May 5, Texas saw its biggest single-day infection totals two days after throwing off social distancing guidelines.
The circumstances in Texas were predictable, given the state of the pandemic. As reported by the New York Times that day, “Any notion that the coronavirus threat is fading away appears to be magical thinking, at odds with what the latest numbers show.”
Despite the clear connection between premature re-openings and increased infections, Trump faced no political repercussions among his base because most Republican voters were in the dark about COVID-19 due to poor critical thinking skills and/or a resistance to valid sources of information. A poll reported by Margaret Talev of Axios showed that 76% of Republicans didn’t realize that the official death tallies were undercounts due to under-reporting in many states and a large number of people who weren’t counted because they died before being diagnosed with COVID-19. Forty percent of Republicans actually thought the official numbers were too high. (282)
Some of the Republican ignorance was attributable to the fact that communities of color had so far been hit at far higher rates than the white-majority communities many conservatives lived in. As reported in Politico, “Counties across the country with a disproportionate number of African American residents accounted for 52 percent of diagnoses and 58 percent of coronavirus deaths nationally, according to a new study released Tuesday.”
The study, “conducted by epidemiologists and clinician-researchers at four universities in conjunction with the nonprofit AIDS research organization amFar and PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access,” helped to fill in the gap left by Trump’s CDC, which had failed to publish detailed demographic data about COVID-19 deaths. (283)
“The disproportionate toll on African Americans ‘calls for interventions like considering emergency enrollment for the Affordable Care Act,’ said Dr. Patrick Sullivan, professor of epidemiology at Emory University. ‘And in the longer-term Medicaid expansion in the South.’” As of the article posting, the administration had yet to do anything to help expand healthcare to impacted communities (see #236), even as states were slashing Medicaid rolls due to a lack of funding. (284)
Further carnage was predicted in a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania which projected that 350,000 Americans would die by the end of June if social distancing measures were relaxed countrywide, 233,000 more than were projected to die if social distancing was maintained.
In another jaw-dropping stat revealed that day, first quarter consumer debt hit an all-time high. (285)
Bad economic news continued on Wednesday, May 6, as it was reported that the U.S. had lost over 20 million jobs in April, the most since records had started in 2002: “‘Job losses of this scale are unprecedented,’ said Ahu Yildirmaz, co-head of the ADP Research Institute, which compiles the report in conjunction with Moody’s Analytics. ‘The total number of job losses for the month of April alone was more than double the total jobs lost during the Great Recession.’” (286)
Food insecurity was one of the ramifications of the economic catastrophe made infinitely worse than it otherwise would have been by Trump’s inaction in the first 10 weeks of the pandemic (see #258). According to a study cited at the Brookings Institution blog, children were “experiencing food insecurity to an extent unprecedented in modern times” and “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.” (287)
Despite the obvious need to counteract food shortages among millions of Americans, Republicans were blocking Democratic proposals to increase food stamp benefits. (288)
At a time when people were anxious and steady, transparent, and empathic leadership was more important than ever, Trump continued to blameshift, scold, and brag. During an Oval Office meeting meant to honor National Nurses Day, Sophia Thomas (president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners) mentioned that she’d had to use the same N95 mask for three weeks due to a shortage of PPE at her place of employment. Throwing Trump a bone that he didn’t deserve, she softened her statement by adding that, “We’re nurses, and we learn to adapt and do whatever, the best thing that we can do for our patients.”
Trump’s response was to talk over Thomas, toss out the baseless anecdotal claim that “I’ve heard the opposite….I’ve heard that they’re loaded up with gowns now,” then blame Obama: “Initially we had nothing, we had empty cupboards, we had empty shelves, we had nothing because it wasn’t put there by the last administration.”
More evidence of Trump’s “best work” was revealed on Thursday, May 7, when it came out that the administration had “[buried] detailed CDC advice on reopening.”
According to Jason Dearen and Mike Stobbe of the AP, the CDC had put together a detailed plan of safety guidelines for public health officials around the country to follow, but the administration had blocked the report from coming out. The likelihood is that Trump’s people feared that a safe, slow opening could hinder the economic rebound they felt was necessary for Trump to win a second term. (289)
Trump’s preference for spin over public health was further reviewed in “Trump won't wear a mask in public because he's afraid he might look ridiculous and it will harm his reelection chances, report says.” Though Trump was making his staff wear masks, he refused to follow his own CDC’s guidelines in public appearances because he felt that “wearing a face mask would ‘send the wrong message’ that he is more focused on health than reopening the economy, which aides think is key to his winning in November.” (290)
Though most federal GOP officials publicly agreed with Trump’s re-opening death march, at least in part because of a fear of reprisals, Republican senator Lamar Alexander was willing to tell the truth because he was about to retire. As reported by David Lim of Politico, at a hearing of the Senate HELP Committee that day (which he chaired), Alexander said that the U.S. had not done “nearly enough” testing to safely reopen. Alexander also said, “there is no safe path forward to combat the novel coronavirus without adequate testing.”
The article went on to state that “The Harvard Global Health Institute released new data Thursday that suggest more than 900,000 coronavirus tests need to be completed daily to consider safely relaxing distancing measures, as a growing number of states are doing.
“That number is significantly higher than the approximately 250,000 tests per day the country is currently running, according to data from The COVID Tracking Project. Premier Inc., a group purchasing organization, released a survey Thursday that found health systems will need to at least triple the current testing capacity to restore nonemergency services even partially.
“Premier’s survey found two factors that are major obstacles to increasing coronavirus testing: not enough chemical reagents needed to perform tests and shortages of swabs to take patient samples.”
The shortage in reagents and swabs was rooted in Trump’s resistance to ordering a national testing plan and revving up the Defense Production Act to the extent necessary. (291) To most observers, this would appear to be a major failure in planning and execution with horrible human costs, but Trump told the press more testing wasn’t necessarily the answer, as it would just increase the official number of infections and deaths: "In a way, by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad." (292)
A real world way in which the administration had made itself look bad was explored on Friday, May 8, in “Coronavirus: US death toll would have been halved had it acted 4 days sooner, study says.”
According to the article, “The daily death toll from Covid-19 in the United States could have been more than halved if authorities had acted more swiftly in recommending self-isolation and the wearing of face masks, according to a new study.
“Several US states began issuing stay-at-home orders in late March, while federal health authorities began recommending the use of face masks for all in early April. However, had such measures been implemented just four days earlier, the roughly 2,000 Covid-19 deaths currently being recorded each day would have been cut to less than 1,000, the study said. (293)
“Furthermore, lifting the measures in a bid to kick-start the economy would almost instantly increase the daily death toll to more than 3,000…” (294)
Despite the knowledge that not acting sooner had doubled deaths, despite the knowledge that reopening too soon would increase the daily death toll significantly, despite the feeling among 2/3rds of Americans (and 87% of Democrats/informed Americans) that it wasn’t time to reopen, Trump continued to give false assurances to the American public.
In “As deaths mount, Trump tries to convince Americans it’s safe to inch back to normal,” posted on Saturday, May 9, four Washington Post reporters examined the administration’s campaign strategy:
“But in doing so, the administration is effectively bowing to — and asking Americans to accept — a devastating proposition: that a steady, daily accumulation of lonely deaths is the grim cost of reopening the nation.” (295)
“Key health agencies remain relegated to the background. Some congressional requests for health officials’ testimony are being rejected. (297) And though the task force is still intact, it has not held a press briefing for 13 days — the longest the public has gone without having Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx at the White House podium since the briefings began in late February. (298)
“‘It’s a blind spot that the federal government doesn’t see this first and foremost as a public health crisis,’ said Joshua Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University. ‘This is the public health crisis of the century, and we’re sometimes treating it as anything but.’”
The next morning, Monday, May 11, Trump continued to block the pandemic from his mind and stay on message, claiming that Democratic governors were making the tough but necessary choice to stay locked down in order to hurt his campaign, even as he was making his absurd claim purely to serve his campaign.
While the Trump administration devoted an ever-increasing share of its time and attention to the upcoming election, it continued to fail at the much more immediate task of governing. As reported by Sarah Owermohle for Politico, “Meeting the overwhelming demand for a successful coronavirus vaccine will require a historic amount of coordination by scientists, drugmakers and the government.
“The nation’s supply chain isn’t anywhere close to ready for such an effort.” (299)
“The nation’s supply chain isn’t anywhere close to ready for such an effort.” (299)
Despite this short-sightedness, and the administration’s long list of other failures and shortcomings (see #1-#298), Trump met that day with reporters in the White House Rose Garden to puff up his record and give the American public more false assurances about the advisability of reopening our economy.
Standing by signs that read “America leads the world in testing,” which was true in total numbers—because of the country’s size and number of infections—but was false per capita, Trump declared “In every generation, through every challenge and hardship and danger, America has risen to the task.” Despite 81,000 deaths and more than a million infections, many/most due to his administration’s gross negligence, Trump added, “We have met the moment and we have prevailed.”
As reported by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times the next day, Tuesday, May 12, there was still no evidence that the worst of the pandemic was behind us.
Stolberg’s “At Senate Hearing, Government Experts Paint Bleak Picture of the Pandemic” discussed the testimony of top administration public health officials Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield, who “predicted dire consequences if the nation reopened its economy too soon, noting that the United States still lacked critical testing capacity and the ability to trace the contacts of those infected.”
Fauci told the Republican-controlled Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that if “states reopen their economies too soon, ‘there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,’ which could result not only in ‘some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery.’”
Fauci and Redfield were barred by the administration from appearing before House committees controlled by Democrats who were guaranteed to ask more pointed—and relevant—questions. (see #275)
The war between Trump and public health officials who want to keep us safe was in the news again on Wednesday, May 13.
“Trump deepens rift with top doctor Fauci on US reopening” looked at Trump and Fauci’s conflicting priorities, including Trump’s insistence that schools re-open in the fall, which Fauci felt would put children’s health in danger.
In “Team Trump Pushes CDC to Revise Down Its COVID Death Counts,” published at the Daily Beast, it came out that Trump was badgering CDC officials to obscure the scope of the pandemic (and the scope of the administration’s failures) by giving Americans bad data, even as the CDC’s numbers were already an underestimate. (302)
One CDC official told the Daily Beast, “The system can always get better. But if we’ve learned anything it’s that we’re seeing some of these individuals who have died of the virus slip through the cracks….It’s not that we’re overcounting.”
Millions more were at risk of slipping through the cracks due to the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to cut food stamp eligibility during the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression (303). In December of 2019, the administration had imposed work requirements on food stamp recipients with the excuse that jobs were plentiful. In March, as the coronavirus surged, a district court judge put the rule on hold. Though children were going hungry (see #287), jobs were scarce and there was no sign of a job market rebound around the corner, and millions of Americans were forced to go to food banks, Trump’s Department of Agriculture vowed to challenge the court ruling.
Republicans were also making their constituents’ lives much more challenging than they needed to be by opposing vote-by-mail options proposed by House Democrats. Three out of five voters supported Democratic efforts to “provide mail-in ballots to all voters for elections occurring during the coronavirus pandemic,” and the dangers of forcing voters to show up at polling places during a pandemic were obvious, but congressional Republicans saw a political advantage in suppressing the vote by keeping voters scared—especially in high-density Democratic cities—as low-turnout races are favorable to the GOP. (304)
Mail-in balloting has been shown to be safer, less expensive, and more secure, and has worked like a charm in states in which it has been implemented, but Republican voters in the poll opposed the practice 48-42%, a reflection of the brute effectiveness of Trump’s hyper-partisan messaging and his GOP allies’ lockstep adherence to counterfactual talking points. (305)
The theme of Republican disinformation campaigns was revealed again in “Battle over coronavirus rules and reopenings across US is increasingly partisan, and bitter,” a column by Melissa Etehad of the Los Angeles Times which dropped on Thursday, May 14.
Though social distancing had been proven to save lives and the pandemic was still going strong—with 85,000 dead and 1.4 million infected—Republican politicians around the country were following Trump’s lead, forcing states and localities to open before it was safe to do so. (306)
Unwilling to do what was necessary to slow down the pandemic, Trump fell back on his favored tool of deflection, feigning reverence for the medical personnel whose lives had been made miserable by his inaction. At that day’s briefing, he said that the image of medical staff “running into death just like soldiers run into bullets….is a beautiful thing to see.”
On Friday, May 15, the day after Trump waxed poetic about putting doctors and nurses in proximity to death and dying and horrible human suffering, two jaw-dropping statistics came out.
It was reported that “Nearly 40% of low-income workers lost their jobs in March” (307) and Robert Redfield announced that the U.S. would have 100,000 deaths by June 1. Shocking as it was, the latter number was an underestimate, as the U.S. would actually reach 100,000 deaths well before the end of May.
On Saturday, May 16, Trump received the honor of getting a write-up in one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet.
The authors of “Reviving the US CDC” opened by referring to “the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis,” as the U.S. had dozens if not hundreds of plans, depending on the location, and no broad national strategy. (309)
Later on, the article read “only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency,” but this wasn’t happening.
In fact, the administration’s actions indicated that Trump was downright indifferent to the mass suffering of his constituents. The following day, Sunday, May 17, Burgess Everett of Politico reported that “Congress [was] nowhere close to a coronavirus deal as unemployment spikes.”
Though Trump and his Republican allies had passed an enormous and totally unnecessary $1.5 trillion tax cut heavily tilted to the wealthy and rammed through huge increases to the already gargantuan defense budget, the HEROES Act, a bill passed by House Democrats which extended vital aid to state and local governments, and provided money for unemployment benefits, business payrolls, mortgage relief, and front line medical workers, was languishing in the Republican Senate, as Mitch McConnell and his ringmaster—Donald Trump—chose the worst possible moment to stonewall tens of millions of Americans. (310)
The top story on Monday, May 18 was Trump’s claim that he was taking hydroxychloroquine, despite health warnings from his own FDA and studies showing that use of the drug could be fatal. Sure enough, Trump’s self-medication was later aped by Trumpanzees. (311)
Back in the real world, on Tuesday, May 19, a memo leaked from a Pentagon source put the lie to two of Trump’s repeated claims.
Written by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the memo stated that contrary to Trump’s insistence that the worst of the pandemic was behind us, the U.S. armed forces had to maintain disaster readiness because "We have a long path ahead, with the real possibility of a resurgence of COVID-19….Therefore, we must now re-focus our attention on resuming critical missions, increasing levels of activity, and making necessary preparations should a significant resurgence of COVID-19 occur later this year."
And though Esper had told the media just days earlier that “the Pentagon would ‘deliver by the end of this year a vaccine at scale to treat the American people and our partners abroad,’” his memo stated that “The Defense Department should prepare to operate in a ‘globally-persistent’ novel coronavirus (COVID-19) environment without an effective vaccine until ‘at least the summer of 2021.’”
More evidence of the danger in reopening too soon was revealed Wednesday, May 20. A model from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School showed that a premature relaxation of social distancing guidelines around the country could lead to 5.4 million infections and 290,000 deaths by July 24.
The CDC was the one agency whose actions could keep those death rates down, but the CDC had not been allowed to do its job. As reported by Robert Kuznia, Curt Devin, and Nick Valencia of CNN.com, public health officials had been diminished from early in the pandemic: “In the early weeks of the US coronavirus outbreak, staff members in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tracked a growing number of transmissions in Europe and elsewhere, and proposed a global advisory that would alert flyers to the dangers of air travel.
“But about a week passed before the alert was issued publicly -- crucial time lost when about 66,000 European travelers were streaming into American airports every day.” (312)“…In interviews with CNN, CDC officials say their agency's efforts to mount a coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science. (313)
“The result has worsened the effects of the crisis, sources inside the CDC say, relegating the 73-year-old agency that has traditionally led the nation's response to infectious disease to a supporting role.
“‘We've been muzzled,’ said a current CDC official. ‘What's tough is that if we would have acted earlier on what we knew and recommended, we would have saved lives and money.’
“…A senior official inside the CDC told CNN that the agency also alerted the White House to the virus's rapid spread across Europe, but that ‘the White House was extremely focused on China and not wanting to anger Europe ... even though that's where most of our cases were originally coming from.’”
The administration’s disregard for public health continued into the present, as Dr. Fauci had been taken off the air (314) and Republicans were “recruiting ‘extremely pro-Trump’ doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.” (315)
While recruiting quack doctors to push fake news, Trump continued the GOP’s campaign to suppress the Democratic vote in the fall by “[threatening] over Twitter…to pull federal funding from Michigan and Nevada for mail-in-voting efforts.” (316)
Another example of the fallout from the Trump administration’s shockingly inadequate response to COVID-19 (see #1-#316) and the economic shock waves it had created was reported by Jessica Menton at USA Today on Thursday, May 21. According to the dispatch, “Mortgage delinquencies surged by 1.6 million in April, the largest single-month jump in history.” (317)
“…At 6.45%, the national delinquency rate nearly doubled from 3.06% in March, the largest single-month increase recorded, and nearly three times the prior record for a single month during the height of the financial crisis in late 2008.”
“…The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, passed in March, allows homeowners to suspend their mortgage payments for up to a year on federally backed mortgages. It doesn’t protect mortgages that aren’t backed by the government, which make up about half of all mortgages in the USA.”
Though the need for more government relief to homeowners, renters, and the unemployed couldn’t have been clearer, and was prescribed by none other than Trump’s own hand-picked Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, Trump ally Mitch McConnell continued to ignore the HEROES Act passed by House Democrats and made no counter proposals of his own that could be negotiated between the House and Senate, claiming there was “no immediate need” to address the desperation of tens of millions of Americans.
As of Friday, May 22, the U.S. had lost 39 million jobs since the start of the pandemic.
In a misguided effort to reverse this slide, red states were opening up more aggressively than blue/purple states and seeing increases in infections. As reported on the Brookings Institution blog, “for four weeks running, counties newly designated with a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases were more likely to have voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.”
“…COVID-19’s spread is continuing southward and westward from its northeastern concentration at the end of March. Counties identified in the most recent week are heavily located in the South (80 counties) and Midwest (68). There is also a high representation in smaller areas, as 159 of the 176 newly identified high-prevalence counties lie in outer suburbs, small metropolitan areas, or outside of metropolitan areas.”
“…Among new high-prevalence counties from the week of May 11 to May 17, Trump won 151 of them in the 2016 election. Clinton was the victor in just 25.
“…Over the four-week period between April 20 and May 17, 697 new high COVID-19 prevalence counties voted for Trump, compared with just 127 that voted for Clinton.”
Though one might think the direct connection between lax social distancing and an increase in cases would be obvious, and that the credibility of public health officials would be reinforced by this inescapable conclusion, a recent Pew poll showed that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to trust scientists and think scientists should have an active role in forming policy, much more likely to grasp the value in social distancing, much more likely to grasp the importance of testing in mitigating the damage of the virus, and much more likely to know that the U.S. had had far more cases than any other country.
Republican voters’ disconnect from reality was also evident in an ABC poll published Friday which showed that 89% of Republicans approved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, despite an endless and unceasing list of administration failures (see #1-#317).
The insidious impact of Trump’s lies was reviewed again on Saturday, May 23 in a Mediaite piece by Caleb Howe. According to a Yahoo/YouGov poll, 50% of Fox News viewers thought Bill Gates wanted to use a COVID-19 vaccination campaign to implant a microchip in their heads as a tracking device, 65% thought the virus was “engineered in a lab in China,” 46% thought it was “intentionally created” as a “biowarfare weapon,” and 55% thought the official COVID-19 death tallies were too high. (318)
The impact of Trump’s appeals to lockstep stupidity on the right were also explored in “Key swing state warns of November election ‘nightmare.” Because of the GOP’s refusal to help fund mail-in voting, Pennsylvania was facing a nightmare scenario for their upcoming primary, with thousands of voters not receiving ballots and districts lacking the staff to count the ballots when they came in. With Pennsylvania likely to be one of the central states in determining who would win the presidential election, there was a possibility that Republicans’ laser focus on suppressing the vote (served by not funding mail-in voting during a pandemic) could leave the world waiting days—if not weeks—to find out who won Pennsylvania, and therefore, the presidency itself.
As Trump undermined the sacred process of voting, the administration continued to fail to govern. On Sunday, May 24, Loveday Morris and Luisa Beck of the Washington Post compared the responses of Germany and the United States in relation to contact tracing. While Germany had begun contract tracing since their first COVID-19 cases were confirmed, the U.S. still had no system in place nearly five months after first being notified of COVID-19’s threat, with predictable results: “Epidemiologists say the effort [in Germany] has been essential to the country’s ability to contain its coronavirus outbreak and avoid the larger death tolls seen elsewhere, even with a less stringent shutdown than in other countries.”
Because the administration had failed to get behind the practice of contact tracing, Republican voters were once again in the dark, showing a Pavlovian resistance to something they didn’t understand. On Memorial Day, Monday, May 25, Will Sommer of the Daily Beast posted “Trumpsters Are Already Revolting Against COVID Contact Tracing”:
“Donald Trump’s allies in conservative media have a new villain in the coronavirus fight: contact tracing, the rigorous efforts to track the virus’s spread that public health experts say is essential to safely restarting society.” (319)
“Donald Trump’s allies in conservative media have a new villain in the coronavirus fight: contact tracing, the rigorous efforts to track the virus’s spread that public health experts say is essential to safely restarting society.” (319)
“…A wide range of public health officials and experts have insisted that the country needs to vastly expand contact tracing, with one Johns Hopkins study calling for the hiring of at least 100,000 additional contact tracers. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said earlier this month that coronavirus deaths will ‘of course’ increase without additional tracing and testing.”
“…But much of the fearmongering about contact tracing seems to be driven by ignorance of what it actually is. Failed Republican congressional candidate and QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, whose call to ‘#FireFauci’ Trump retweeted in April, has urged her fans to not get tested for COVID-19. She also appears to misunderstand contact tracing, claiming that contact tracers go through phone ‘contact’ lists, rather than in-person contacts.”
Dropping the ball on contact tracing was just one of the administration’s many failures of governance. The administration had also failed to provide the resources necessary for nursing home staff to be tested on a deadline recommended by the administration itself. According to Alan Suderman of the Associated Press, the “lack of testing and other resources have left [nursing homes] nearly powerless to stop the virus from entering their facilities because they haven’t been able to identity silent spreaders not showing symptoms.” (320)
During the day’s dueling Memorial Day events, Joe Biden and his wife wore masks, while Trump did not. (321)
That evening, white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered African-American George Floyd over a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.
The details of the murder weren’t widely known the following day, Tuesday, May 26, so coronavirus continued to get a lot of news coverage. Among other stories, Trump once again displayed and encouraged ignorance among his fan base by calling a reporter “politically correct” for not removing his mask while asking a question. (322)
Another one of Trump’s false talking points—that mail-in voting was rife with fraud—was finally called out by Twitter with a warning label about misinformation attached to two of Trump’s tweets.
The results of Trump’s months of lies and the parroting of his lies by Republican allies and media surrogates were reflected in a Gallup poll which again showed the stone ignorance of Republican voters (see #159, #224, #282, #305, #311, #318, and #319). Only 40% of Republican voters (as opposed to 87% of Democrats) understood that COVID-19 was far more lethal than seasonal flu. Half of Republicans falsely believed official death counts were overstated, ten times’ the number of Democrats.
The magical thinking of Trump supporters and other low-information citizens was evident in the huge crowds that came out on Memorial Day, despite the fact that coronavirus was still going strong. (323)
In the reality-based world, indications showed that the U.S. was still “early in this outbreak,”
hospitalizations were increasing across much of the U.S. (324), the World Health Organization was warning of a second peak resulting from a premature relaxation of safety guidelines, and millions of American children were going hungry because of the slow rollout of the Pandemic-EBT program (325) and the GOP’s continued resistance to an expansion of food stamps (see #288).
In addition to shortchanging children of basic human needs, in part because they refused to come up with a coordinated federal response to food insecurity (326), the administration was setting many states up to fail by refusing to create a coordinated federal testing program. (327)
As reported by Apoorva Mandavilli and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times, the administration’s official “plan”—released in a report—was to outsource testing to the states, though states lacked the resources to test at a capacity necessary to keep citizens safe:
“The [administration] proposal also says existing testing capacity, if properly targeted, is sufficient to contain the outbreak. But epidemiologists say that amount of testing is orders of magnitude lower than many of them believe the country needs.
“The report cements a stance that has frustrated governors in both parties, following the administration’s announcement last month that the federal government should be considered ‘the supplier of last resort’ [328] and that states should develop their own testing plans.”
“‘That’s our biggest question, that’s our biggest concern, is the robustness of the supply chain, which is critical,’ Becker said. ‘You can’t leave it up to the states to do it for themselves. This is not the Hunger Games.’”
The administration’s report also greatly underestimated the number of tests necessary, pegging it at 300,000/day, roughly 1/10th of what the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard said was needed. (329)
Trump passed his milestone of 100,000 dead Americans on Wednesday, May 27.
As incomprehensible as the number was, it was an underestimate, perhaps even a major underestimate, as many states were failing to report accurate death counts. Trump’s response to this horrible human tragedy of his making was to tweet-brag: “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number.” (330)
As incomprehensible as the number was, it was an underestimate, perhaps even a major underestimate, as many states were failing to report accurate death counts. Trump’s response to this horrible human tragedy of his making was to tweet-brag: “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number.” (330)
In other news, the United States, under Trump’s leadership, had had not only 3X as many deaths as any other country, but the biggest increase in unemployment among comparable developed countries (331), which was about to lead to an “avalanche of evictions,” predominantly in red states with limited tenant protections. (332)
Trump’s failures to ramp up testing, tracing, and PPE from early in the pandemic also exerted a toll on American citizens’ health and medical services. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, “Nearly half of adults (48%) say they or someone in their household have postponed or skipped medical care due to the coronavirus outbreak.” (see #168)
Despite how much more gravely the impacts of COVID-19 were felt in the United States than other developed countries due to Trump’s failures of leadership, between 80-90% of Republicans continued to approve of his handling of coronavirus. A key to this steadfast support of a president who had so obviously failed us (see #1-#332) was discussed in a study released by two political scientists.
In an article titled “The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism,” Noah Berlatsky discussed the findings, the key one being that “when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.”
“…For instance, people who said they did not want to live next door to immigrants or to people of another race were more supportive of the idea of military rule, or of a strongman-type leader who could ignore legislatures and election results.”
While racist Trump supporters cheered on their toxic strongman, the four Minneapolis police officers responsible for George Floyd’s death were fired and protests around the country continued to flare.
Thursday, May 28 was a bad day for America. It was reported that the economy had contracted by 5% in the first quarter of 2020, and the second quarter was likely to be worse. 2.1 million Americans had lost their jobs and bankruptcies were “soaring.” Millions of Americans who were unemployed and unlikely to find work any time soon were fearing the end of their federal benefits, as Trump’s Republican allies in the Senate continued to ignore the House Democrats’ stimulus bill, passed two weeks earlier, or come up with a counter bill.
As coronavirus and protests raged, Trump picked petty fights with imaginary foes. Though Trump had used Twitter for years as his primary source of messaging, Twitter’s 11th hour decision to fact-check Trump’s misleading tweets about mail-in voting gave the president a hissy fit and prompted him to sign a legally void executive order limiting social media companies’ practices while claiming to "defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history."
Early on Friday, May 29, Trump got another rebuff from Twitter when he expressed his feelings about the protests by reviving a line uttered by a racist Miami police chief in 1967. Tweeting at 12:53 a.m. for some reason, Trump said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” while threatening to send the military out to handle civilian affairs in Minneapolis. Twitter noted that the message violated their rules about “glorifying violence.”
At a news conference that day, Trump went after another imaginary foe, announcing that he would “terminate America’s relationship with the [World Health Organization].” Trying to deflect attention from his own catastrophic failures of governance, Trump once again dragged out the China boogeyman (see #274). Sidestepping the likelihood that China’s lack of transparency may have had some connection to his administration’s own actions, from pulling scientists out of China (see #133 and #202) to engaging in an endless trade war, Trump blamed the WHO for not forcing China’s hand, though the organization had had no means to do so.
According to Amy Maxman of Nature magazine, due to Trump’s decision, “experts in health policy are contending with repercussions that could range from a resurgence of polio and malaria, to barriers in the flow of information on COVID-19. Scientific partnerships around the world would also be damaged, and the United States could lose influence over global health initiatives, including those to distribute drugs and vaccines for the new coronavirus as they become available, say researchers.” (334)
“Proposals for new US-led initiatives for pandemic preparedness abroad do little to quell researchers’ concerns. Some say these efforts might even add incoherence to the world's response to COVID-19, and global health more generally, if they're not connected to a fully-funded WHO.”
“…The rift is poorly timed, given the need for international coordination and cooperation to contend with the coronavirus. ‘In this pandemic, people have said we’re building the plane while flying,’ [Rebecca] Katz [director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University] says. ‘This proposal is like removing the windows while the plane is mid-air.’” (335)
That evening, Wisconsin, a state which had been forced to re-open by right-wing Republican judges on the state Supreme Court, announced that it had a record one-day spike in reported cases.
On Saturday, May 30, David Pitt of the AP reported that the U.S. had just experienced its largest monthly increase in food prices in 46 years. (336)
Trump wasn’t about to get distracted by trifling matters like starvation or the mass protests all across the country which were amplified by his divisive rhetoric. His attention instead went into gushing over the empty pageantry around Elon Musk’s spaceman vanity project and petulantly demanding that North Carolina allow a GOP convention with no masks or social distancing. (337)
Sunday, May 31, it was reported that Florida, a state whose Republican governor had been dismissive of the pandemic, was seeing a major increase in COVID-19 deaths, even as the reported numbers were an undercount masked by COVID deaths attributed to pneumonia or influenza. New deaths in Florida were overwhelmingly happening in nursing homes.
A number of substantive pieces about COVID-19 dropped on Monday, June 1.
Sam Baker of Axios pointed out that “The national lockdown is easing and the pandemic is no longer the single dominant storyline of our lives, but nothing has really changed — we didn’t develop a treatment and the virus didn’t get naturally weaker. It’s just as contagious as it ever was.”
A Washington Post-ABC poll found that Trump’s unceasing demagoguery had created sharp partisan divides in accepting this reality: “57 percent of Americans overall and 81 percent of Democrats say trying to control the spread of the coronavirus is most important right now, even if it hurts the economy. A far smaller 27 percent of Republicans agree, while 66 percent of them say restarting the economy is more important, even if it hurts efforts to control the virus. Nearly 6 in 10 independents say their priority is trying to control the virus’s spread.” (338)
In a rare interview, with the medical site statnews.com, Anthony Fauci said that his meetings with Donald Trump to discuss the federal COVID-19 response had “dramatically decreased.” (339)
What was the president up to in the middle of a pandemic?
Threatening to sic the military on protesters, calling governors “fools” and “jerks” in a conference call because they weren’t using force on protesters, and having demonstrators tear-gassed so that he could walk across the street to St. John’s Church and hold a Bible for an awkward photo op.
On Tuesday, June 2, Trump had a temper tantrum over the refusal of North Carolina’s Democratic governor to allow a GOP convention without COVID precautions on the same day that Deborah Birx warned at a public event that "None of us can be lulled into this false sense of security that the cases may go down this summer."
While Trump fixated on staging his convention, it was reported that his inactions had contributed to the loss of 1.4 million healthcare jobs in the U.S. (340) and that many of the most vulnerable Americans were not getting the COVID-related care they needed, in no small part because the administration had failed to disburse emergency funds approved by Congress. (341) The scale of the pandemic caused by Trump’s mis-governance had also left nearly a hundred million Americans to delay healthcare procedures in order to clear facilities for COVID-19 patients.
The vast impact of the administration’s failures to act sooner and more aggressively were revisited the following day, Wednesday, June 3, when Chris Arnold of NPR reported that “Millions Of Americans Skip Payments As Tidal Wave Of Defaults And Evictions Looms.” Government aid was keeping many Americans afloat, but the administration had failed to get benefits out to millions, and even those who had received benefits were unlikely to be able to make the money stretch more than a couple months, at which time there would be no jobs available.
Another one of the Trump administration’s shortcomings was reported again on Thursday, June 4 in “CDC head apologizes for lack of racial disparity data on coronavirus.” Speaking to a House Appropriations subcommittee, Robert Redfield apologized for the CDC’s continued failure (see #283) to collect race-related COVID-19 data, which was “[hampering] the public health response in communities of color disproportionately affected by the virus.”
The administration and their Republican allies in Congress were also shortchanging cities. Due to a lack of tax revenue, cities were being forced to make steep cuts to essential services. The situation was dire, but the GOP had no plans to act until July, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said any future stimulus bill would “be narrow in scope and focus on short-term economic relief, not longer-term recovery.”
In addition to cities bleeding revenue, food bank demand was still high (see #271), as reported on Friday, June 5.
But none of this concerned Trump, who seized on a better-than-expected jobs report to puff up his ego. At a press conference that day, Trump referred to the second worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression as the “greatest comeback in American history,” a “great day” for George Floyd, and “a great, great day in terms of equality.”
While Trump and his Republican allies gushed about double digit unemployment and pretended that the virus was behind us—Trump hadn’t allowed the virus task force to brief reporters since April 27 (342)—20 states had seen increases in cases over the prior five days.
It came out on Saturday, June 6 that Trump’s triumphalism on Friday over the jobs numbers had been premature, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics had underestimated the unemployment rate by at least three percentage points.
Discussing the jobs report in an interview with Nancy Cook of Politico, former director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling said, “Considering that this was a return of a small percentage of the jobs that were lost only due to Trump's inexplicably slow and weak response to the Covid crisis, he should be far more measured….Trump surely knows he is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose net jobs during their presidency, and he may just be overcompensating.”
Congressional Republicans used the initial, overinflated job numbers—which received far more media attention than the corrected, real numbers—as rhetorical cover for continuing to stonewall on more stimulus. The Democratic House had passed a stimulus bill on May 18.
Within the job numbers was the news that African-American unemployment rates had actually gone up, something that Republicans didn’t talk about much. (343) African-Americans were also dying from COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers. A Sunday, June 7 post at Scientific American showed that this was systemic, not genetic.
According to author Clarence Gravlee, African-Americans were dying at 2.4X the rate of whites, one of the reasons it was so easy for Trump supporters in white-majority areas to ignore the crisis. Discussions around this disparity too often fell back on theories about a genetic disposition to hypertension and high blood pressure among African-Americans, while more convincing environmental factors didn’t get the attention they deserved: “The conditions in which we develop—including limited access to healthy food, exposure to toxic pollutants, the threat of police violence or the injurious stress of racial discrimination—influence the likelihood that any one of us will suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes or serious complications from COVID-19.”
The role of environmental factors in coronavirus transmission came up again on Monday, June 8. According to a study published in Nature magazine, shutdown orders in the United States had spared 60 million Americans from contracting COVID-19.
One country which had addressed coronavirus early and aggressively, New Zealand, reported that they had no active cases. By contrast, the U.S., who had acted slowly and inadequately, had almost two million infections and 104,400 deaths.
Having followed Trump’s lead of inaction and indifference to public health, red states continued to be hit especially hard by coronavirus. (344)
And as had been the case all along, America’s first-in-the-world numbers were a significant undercount, because only half of the states were following CDC guidelines in reporting.
Trump continued to degrade the office of the presidency and act as if the pandemic was over, issuing an order to have 9,500 American troops removed from Germany (in retaliation for Angela Merkel’s refusal to attend a G7 summit with Trump and Vladimir Putin) and announcing that he would re-start crowded campaign rallies which were certain to turn into super-spreader events. (345)
The reality TV presidency continued on high-beam the next day, Tuesday, June 9, when Trump tweeted that Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old protester with cancer who had sustained a fractured skull after being pushed down by a Buffalo police officer, “could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” an assertion which was completely unfounded.
Back in the real world, premature re-openings were contributing to spikes in cases around the country, with 12 states posting their biggest single-day increases. Texas, a state under complete Republican control for over two decades which had done little to combat COVID-19, had its second consecutive day of record hospitalizations.
Farm laborers around the country were especially vulnerable to infection due to the administration’s unwillingness to enact adequate safety regulations or disburse money for testing. (346)
People working long hours under the hot sun to harvest our food are invisible to most Americans, so their problems were easy for Trump to ignore as part of the administration’s tactic of pretending that COVID-19 didn’t matter anymore. On Wednesday, June 10, Dan Diamond of Politico (see #100, #131, and #181) reviewed this P.R. thrust in “White House goes quiet on coronavirus as outbreak spikes again across the U.S.”
As revealed by Diamond, though cases continued to surge throughout much of the country, around 1,000 Americans were dying daily, and hospitalizations in Texas had gone up 42% since Memorial Day, the administration had largely stopped communicating with the public about the virus for over a month, since the last task force briefing. After being ever present in the media through March and April, Anthony Fauci had long since been sidelined. (see #298) The CDC had mostly stopped providing guidance to state public health officials. (347) The FDA was turning back to lesser priorities, including tobacco regulations. (348)
According to reporter Ranuka Rasayasam, not only was COVID-19 not remotely through with us, we weren’t even out of the first wave. The U.S. was “uniquely vulnerable to Covid” due to the number of people without health insurance and the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, specifically the lack of a national strategy for dealing with coronavirus and the resistance to public health guidelines fueled by Trump’s anti-science rhetoric.
Though the U.S. had only 4% of the world’s population, it accounted for more than a quarter of COVID 19-related deaths. Making matters worse, the administration’s unwillingness to force insurance companies’ hands was allowing major insurers such as BlueCross BlueShield and United Healthcare to deny full coverage of testing unless it was deemed “medically necessary,” leaving millions of Americans untested and uncertain of whether or not they were infected and likely to infect others. (349)
Trump had more important things on his mind, including his opposition to renaming military bases named after Confederate generals and planning for his first super-spreader campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event was scheduled for Juneteenth (June 19), a holiday celebrating the freeing of the last slaves, in a town known for “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” In 1921, white mobs had killed hundreds of African-Americans, incarcerated thousands, left 10,000 African-Americans homeless, and destroyed 35 square blocks of “Black Wall Street”—one of the wealthiest black neighborhoods in the country at the time.
Red, anti-science states continued to lead the pack in infections on Thursday, June 11.
Florida had its highest daily total of (reported) new cases and Arizona was running out of hospital beds.
A doctor at the Harvard Global Health Institute was projecting 100,000 more deaths in the U.S. by September 1.
As the ranks of the unemployed increased, with 1.5 million new filings (350), Trump’s Small Business Administration was refusing to meet their legal responsibility (under the Cares Act) to disclose how $660 billion of taxpayer money had been disbursed. (351) Due to the administration’s lack of oversight of applicants, and lack of direction to the banks disbursing funds, big businesses had capitalized while many small businesses had been left in the lurch. (352)
The administration and state officials were also ignoring requests from Native American epidemiologists asking for “access to data showing how the coronavirus is spreading around their lands, potentially widening health disparities and frustrating tribal leaders already ill-equipped to contain the pandemic.” (353)
“…The communication gaps threaten to hinder efforts to track the virus within Native populations that are more prone to illness, disability and early death and have fragile health systems. Tribal authorities say without knowing who's sick and where, they can't impose lockdowns or other restrictions or organize contact tracing on tribal lands. The lack of data also is weighing on epidemiologists who track public health for the nearly three-quarters of Native Americans who live in urban areas and not on reservations.”
“…Native American organizations have repeatedly run into roadblocks trying to get data from federal officials over the past month. The CDC has denied a series of requests from the nation’s 12 tribal epidemiology centers for raw coronavirus data — even though state health departments are allowed to freely access the information.”
“‘…If you can’t measure [the coronavirus,] you can’t manage it,’ said Stacy Bohlen, the executive director of the National Indian Health Board, which provides policy expertise to the 560 federally recognized Native American tribes. ‘It’s another chronic failing of what Indian people experience across the health system. We know it’s happening across the country.’”
The administration was also pretending not to notice the public health necessity of universal access to mail ballots in the fall. During the recent Georgia primary, voters had waited up to six hours to vote, not unlike what had happened in Wisconsin in April, when Republican judges refused to extend deadlines for absentee ballots. Republicans looked the other way because voters of color (overwhelmingly Democrats) were disproportionately impacted in both instances.
Something that was a priority for the administration was avoiding legal accountability for its upcoming super-spreader campaign rally in Tulsa. As reported by Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post, “The sign-up page for tickets to President Donald Trump's campaign rally in Tulsa next week includes something that hasn't appeared ahead of previous rallies: a disclaimer noting that attendees ‘voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19’ and agree not to hold the campaign or venue liable should they get sick.”
It was a savvy legal decision by the Trump administration. The next day, Friday, June 12, it was reported that just a week before the rally, a Tulsa Whirlpool plant had closed due to a COVID-19 outbreak. It was also reported that “Tulsa County now has its highest seven-day average of coronavirus cases since the outbreak began in March.”
Holding the rally in a COVID-19 hot spot was of a piece with Trump’s strategy of pretending coronavirus was behind us. Trump’s economic advisor Lawrence Kudlow (see #66) stayed on message that day when he told "Fox & Friends" that the virus was “contained” and “They are saying there is no second spike. Let me repeat that. There is no second spike.” (354)
In the real world, Houston was on the “precipice of disaster” and Florida had another daily record in infections, a number that was a significant undercount, according to Florida’s “top coronavirus data scientist.”
At a briefing that day, CDC officials suggested that Americans maintain social distancing, wear masks when out in public, and “warned that large gatherings in confined places pose the highest risk for spreading the coronavirus, a day after President Donald Trump's campaign announced his first post-lockdown rally.” (355)
Appearing on ABC News, Anthony Fauci said more or less the same thing: “The best way you can avoid either acquiring or transmitting infection is to avoid crowded places, to wear a mask whenever you’re outside and if you can do both, avoid the congregation of people and do the mask, that’s great.”
A study by Cambridge and Greenwich universities repeated this guidance, showing that the universal use of face masks could significantly mitigate the damage of a second or third wave of COVID-19.
Florida, one of the states that had most aggressively flouted public safety recommendations, had a record total of new cases for the third day in a row on Saturday, June 13.
Oklahoma, another deep red state that had largely ignored public health recommendations, continued to experience a spike in infections. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci had both counseled against holding the rally, a feeling that was shared by Bruce Dart, the Tulsa County health director. As reported on Sunday, June 14, Dart told a local newspaper, “COVID is here in Tulsa, it is transmitting very efficiently….I wish we could postpone this to a time when the virus isn’t as large a concern as it is today.”
As of Monday, June 15, the United States had gone to hell in a handbasket, saddled with a pandemic, the worst economic decline since the Great Depression, and mass protests over systemic police brutality, all of which would have been far less pronounced with a competent and empathic leader. Trump’s breathtaking failures were reflected in a Gallup poll which showed that the number of Americans who were proud of their country was at a record low.
On Tuesday, June 16, a separate poll, conducted by the University of Chicago, found that “Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in 50 years.” (356)
Contributing to Trump’s dubious achievement of creating record amounts of unhappiness was the stress of health workers who felt the brunt of Trump’s failures most acutely, in the sheer scope of the pandemic in the States, the lack of PPE, the fear of getting sick themselves and getting their families sick, and the trauma of regular exposure to sickness and death. (357)
Healthcare workers in Republican-led states which had ignored public safety recommendations were feeling Trump’s shortcomings as a leader and a human being daily. Cases in Alabama, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arizona were increasing rapidly; Arizona’s spike was directly attributed to Republican governor Doug Ducey’s decision to let a stay-at-home order expire. Texas had new highs in cases and hospitalizations.
Trump continued his happy talk about the economy, but Jerome Powell, Trump’s appointed Fed chairman, told the Senate Banking Committee that “Significant uncertainty remains about the timing and strength of the recovery….Much of that economic uncertainty comes from uncertainty about the path of the disease and the effects of measures to contain it. Until the public is confident that the disease is contained, a full recovery is unlikely.”
More grim news came the next day, Wednesday, June 17. A model created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (at the University of Washington) which had been previously used by the White House now forecast that the U.S. would have in excess of 200,000 deaths by October 1.
People of color, most of whom hadn’t voted for Trump, were being victimized by Trump’s inaction at inordinate rates. (358) An analysis done by the Brookings Institution showed that people of color ages 35-44 were dying at 10X the rate of Caucasians of the same age. The report’s authors wrote that "Race gaps in vulnerability to Covid-19 highlight the accumulated, intersecting inequities facing Americans of color (but especially Black people) in jobs, housing, education, criminal justice – and in health.”
Another group of color who was shortchanged by the Trump administration was Native American tribes who were waiting on $679 million promised in the congressional stimulus passed months earlier. The administration was holding up the funding (359), compounding the administration’s earlier delays in disbursing money to tribes. (360) A federal judge ruled that the administration had to pay up within the week as “Continued delay in the face of an exceptional public health crisis is no longer acceptable.”
Also on Trump’s pay-n0-mind list was Anthony Fauci. (see #339) Interviewed by NPR, Fauci revealed that he hadn’t spoken to Trump for two weeks. Asked if he would like to join 19,000 Caucasian yahoos crammed together elbow-to-elbow with no masks in Tulsa, Fauci replied, “I’m in a high-risk category. Personally, I would not. Of course not.”
The lack of masks was largely driven by Trump’s modeling. Despite the clear scientific basis for wearing a mask during a pandemic, despite the fact that Trump’s own surgeon general had recommended that Americans wear masks, despite the threat that not wearing a mask posed to their families, co-workers, and others in their communities, many Republicans refused to use masks out of a misguided solidarity to Trump and a desire to “stick it to the libs.” (361)
Seeding opposition to masks and other aspects of the administration's COVID-19 failures were explored in depth in “With the Federal Health Megaphone Silent, States Struggle With a Shifting Pandemic,” which focused on the administration’s abandonment of a federal response.
The piece looked at the contradiction between the increasing rate of infections through much of the country and the administration’s messaging, including Mike Pence’s claim in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that concern about a second wave was “overblown” (362) and Trump’s comment to Sean Hannity the night before that COVID-19 was “fading away.” (363)
Former CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser, who had done regular briefings in 2009 during the H1N1 pandemic, pointed out that “As states are moving to reopen the economy, as people are increasing their social activities, it becomes even more important that the public understand the critical value in following public health guidance — wearing masks, social distancing, washing hands, staying home if you’re sick….without that daily reinforcement, you have what is happening around the country — people not believing the pandemic is real, cases rising in some places and the possibility that some communities’ health care systems will get overwhelmed.” (364)
The coronavirus task force was no longer speaking publicly, (see #298) which “has left the country with no singular public voices updating citizens, businesses and state and local governments on best practices. Where once there were voices, now there are just echoes — a promising study in Britain about a steroid that may save the lives of the sickest patients, new evidence of the benefits of staying outdoors. But there is no clarion federal guidance.
“Past pandemics, and simulations conducted by the federal government to prepare for new ones, all teach the same lesson: Having clear, consistent and regular communication with the public is essential to managing any infectious disease outbreak. The C.D.C. has a 462-page manual for crisis communications, which it uses to train state and local health officials.
“’It’s a great guide, and it’s just been tossed out the window,’ said Joshua M. Sharfstein, an expert in public health communications at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.”
Even as Trump appeared indifferent to the impact of COVID-19 on the people he was supposed to serve, the pain was real. As reported by AnnaMaria Andriotis of the Wall Street Journal, on Thursday, June 18, “Americans have skipped payments on more than 100 million student loans, auto loans and other forms of debt since the coronavirus hit the U.S., the latest sign of the toll the pandemic is taking on people’s finances.” (365)
Trump was more focused on himself, telling the Wall Street Journal that some people wore masks just to “signal disapproval of him.”
Meanwhile, Oklahoma, the site of Trump’s upcoming rally, was among the handful of hot spots in the country, showing a 91% increase in cases in the past week.
On Friday, June 19, Texas, Florida, and Arizona continued to lead the way, posting record numbers of infections. By contrast, Democratic governors and mayors were pushing constituents to wear masks through laws or public recommendations.
Trump showed his contempt for democracy, saying in an interview that mail-in voting (high turnout) was the biggest threat to winning a second term and tweeting that “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!”
The psychological impact of the chaos Trump lives and breathes and has brought to American life was reflected in polling done by the American Psychological Association which found that 72% of Americans polled “believe this is the lowest point in the country’s history that they’ve ever been alive to see.” Another key finding was that “66% of respondents say that the government’s ongoing response to the coronavirus continues to stress them out on a daily basis. Among that group, 84% are mostly worried about the federal government’s response.” (366)
The anemic federal response was mind-boggling to public health experts overseas, whose countries handled the pandemic much more aggressively, resulting in a fraction of the deaths and infections seen in the United States. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, “As coronavirus cases surge in states across the South and West of the United States, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.
Because of the Trump administration's colossal dereliction of duty, human misery is sure to continue in the United States in the months to come as the informed-and-sensible quarantined continue to suffer separation anxiety from friends and family, as the still-employed (and anyone buying groceries) risk contracting the virus every time they step out their door, as record levels of unemployment continue and millions are unable to meet basic financial needs, as hospitals overflow, as cities and states slash social services to get supplies the feds should have provided, as 2,300,000 plus-and-counting Americans get infected and hundreds of thousands die horrible and premature deaths.
Human beings are fallible. No presidential administration is perfect.
But it didn’t have to be this way. Had the Trump administration heeded advice from the outgoing Obama administration, or kept a competent disaster management team in place, or acted aggressively from the moment they were notified of the virus on January 3, or used World Health Organization test kits, or recommended social distancing sooner, or maintained consistent and transparent messaging, or leveraged the formidable resources of the federal government early and often, or formed anything resembling a coherent national response, or put public health ahead of campaign concerns, or had even a modicum of concern for the human impact of their decisions, we would be looking at a radically better future, as seen in Germany, South Korea, and every other developed country, all of whom have a fraction of the deaths and infections the U.S. has experienced.
Asked by NPR’s Terry Gross what went wrong with the test kits, Politico reporter Dan Diamond quoted an administration official whose answer could apply to all of Trump’s failures:
Human beings are fallible. No presidential administration is perfect.
But it didn’t have to be this way. Had the Trump administration heeded advice from the outgoing Obama administration, or kept a competent disaster management team in place, or acted aggressively from the moment they were notified of the virus on January 3, or used World Health Organization test kits, or recommended social distancing sooner, or maintained consistent and transparent messaging, or leveraged the formidable resources of the federal government early and often, or formed anything resembling a coherent national response, or put public health ahead of campaign concerns, or had even a modicum of concern for the human impact of their decisions, we would be looking at a radically better future, as seen in Germany, South Korea, and every other developed country, all of whom have a fraction of the deaths and infections the U.S. has experienced.
Asked by NPR’s Terry Gross what went wrong with the test kits, Politico reporter Dan Diamond quoted an administration official whose answer could apply to all of Trump’s failures:
“Terry, the question might not be what went wrong; it's what went right?”
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
Lingering Myths of the 2016 presidential election:
Bernie was robbed by the DNC!
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
