Historians consistently rank Abe 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 9/11 to 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 was able to maintain 40% approval ratings by effectively manipulating the lizard brains of white Republicans, but historians considered him one of the worst presidents even before the coronavirus hit America.
Trump’s increase in attention to the virus for the brief window of time between March 13, 2020 (when he declared a national emergency) until he shifted his attention back to his re-election campaign (roughly five weeks later) helped mitigate the damage somewhat, but his inaction from January 3, 2020 (when the administration claimed to have first become aware of the virus) until March 13 made the situation exponentially worse than it should have been. And his failures of governance from March 13 until his escape to Mar-a-Lago on January 20, 2021 greatly outweigh the handful of positive steps he took in that time in scope and number.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci said, numbers don't lie. America's federal response under Trump was the shame of the developed world. Despite President Biden's sea-change policy improvements, the U.S. has officially logged well over 30,000,000 infections (more than 6X any other developed country) and over 600,000 deaths (4-5X any other developed country). Staggering as those numbers are, they are major undercounts. Actual COVID-19 deaths are likely on the order of 900,000 or more and Trump’s own Centers for Disease Control pointed out that true infection rates could be 6 to 24X higher than the official numbers.
This story starts, as many tales of grotesque 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 asked 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. Addressing his lack of qualifications for the job on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump asked voters “what do you have to lose?”
America would find out the hard way.
January 11, 2017-January 2, 2020
As warnings about the importance of pandemic
preparedness pile up, the Trump administration dismantles America's public health infrastructure.
It was common knowledge before Trump took office that an infectious outbreak of some kind was likely to occur during his presidency. As reported on January 11, 2017, Anthony Fauci told a pandemic preparedness forum (held at Georgetown University) “history has told us definitively that [outbreaks] will happen because [facing] infectious diseases is a perpetual challenge. It is not going to go away. The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years.” (W1*) (*Pandemic-related warnings will be abbreviated throughout this piece with a red W)
On January 13, 2017, seven days before Trump took office, officials
from the Obama administration had a three-hour transition meeting with top Trump officials in which they discussed
disaster management. Of the exercises they went through together, the pandemic
response exercise was “perhaps the most concrete and visible transition
exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from
both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a
whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face
specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and
other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national
response was ‘paramount.’” (W2)
Unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who would die of the
coronavirus, and the millions more who would get infected, stable, competent
staffing and effective collaboration in the executive branch were prerequisites
to an effective national response. Whereas Obama's administration would retain
the same cabinet members and White House staff through his first term, 2/3rds
of the Trump staffers attending the transition meeting would be gone by the time the pandemic was in full swing, leading to
a major loss of institutional memory and cross-agency collaboration. (1)
Another key element of an effective national disaster preparedness response was
a president who was engaged in the process. From before he took office, there
were concerns that Trump wasn’t up to the task because of his ignorance 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.” (2)
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 later passed a $2.3 trillion tax cut overwhelmingly tilted to the 1%, Trump’s minions cut funding (3) 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).
(4)
On May 11, 2017, Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Dan
Coats, submitted a threat assessment to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which
said “A novel or reemerging microbe that is easily transmissible between
humans and is highly pathogenic remains a major threat because such an organism
has the potential to spread rapidly and kill millions.” (W3)
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 (5). Among Fitzgerald's priorities was scrubbing seven dirty words—including “evidence-based,” “science-based,” “diversity,” and “fetus”—from CDC budget documentation.
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 (6). 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” (7): “The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off (8) and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. 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 February 13, 2018, Dan Coats (Trump's Director of National
Intelligence) submitted a threat assessment to Congress which stated that “The increase in
frequency and diversity of reported disease outbreaks—such as dengue and
Zika—probably will continue through 2018, including the potential for a severe
global health emergency that could lead to major economic and societal
disruptions, strain governmental and international resources, and increase
calls on the United States for support. A novel strain of a virulent microbe
that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat,
with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire
efficient human-to-human transmissibility.” (W4)
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.”
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)
An article by
Lena Sun of the Washington Post touched on just how big of a
blow these moves were to U.S. disaster preparedness:
“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. (W5)
“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.’” (W6)
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.’” (W7)
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. (18)
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 (19).
On May 15, 2018, Virginia Democrat Gerald Connolly, a member
of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote Bolton a letter “to
express the deep concerns with several recent actions the White House has taken
to downgrade the importance of global health security.” Looking forward, the
letter stated, “We fear these recent decisions will leave the United
States vulnerable to pandemics and commit us to a strategy of triage should one
occur.” (W8)
Democratic senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio piggybacked on these concerns in
a May 18, 2018 letter to
President Trump:
“In our globalized world, where diseases are never more than a plane ride away,
we must do all we can to prepare for the next, inevitable outbreak and keep
Americans safe from disease. I urge you to act swiftly in reaffirming your
commitment to global health security by taking immediate action to designate
senior level NSC personnel to focus on global health security, supporting
adequate and appropriate funding for global health security initiatives, and
leading the way in preparing for the next pandemic threat.” (W9)
In September of 2018, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services diverted $266 million from the CDC to operations to detain immigrant children. (20)
In January of 2019, the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence put out a threat assessment warning that “the United States and the world will remain
vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or
large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates
of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain
international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
(W10)
In their fiscal year 2020 budget, released in March of 2019, the Trump administration proposed a 20% cut to the CDC (21).
On April 17, 2019, at a bio-defense summit, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar said, “Of course, the thing that people ask: ‘What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?’ Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern.” (W11)
According to John Bolton, on June 29, 2019, when Trump met with
Chinese president Xi Jinping in Japan, Trump “turned the conversation to
the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability
and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers
and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral
outcome.”
In July of 2019, under pressure from industry groups, the
administration quietly seeded a future disaster by “relaxing the requirements tied to infection
control” in nursing homes. (22)
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.” (W12)
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.” (23)
On October 25, 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted “We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.” (W13)
On November 18, 2019, one day after the first known case of COVID-19, “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.’” (W14)
January 3, 2020-March 12, 2020
Trump’s original sin. 70 lost days during which
the administration fails to get functional tests or PPE out and refuses to
publicly advocate for social distancing and masks. As infections spread
undetected, the president lies, denies, and minimizes.
Though Josh Margolin and James Gordon Meek of ABC News would later report that the White House had been briefed about the coronavirus in December of 2019, the administration’s story is that they were first informed of the coronavirus on January 3, 2020, when CDC head Robert Redfield received a phone call from Chinese officials. Around this time, intelligence services began putting information about coronavirus in Trump's Daily Brief. (W15)
On January 8, the American public was made aware of COVID-19 when 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.
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 (24).
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 claims they had been notified (25). 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.”
That same day, Rick Bright, who headed the Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Authority (BARDA), pleaded with
his boss, Dr. Robert Kadlec (the
assistant secretary for preparedness and response) to “convene
high-level meetings about the virus.” Kadlec responded that was “not sure
if that is a time sensitive urgency.” (26)
On January 21, the day the first coronavirus case in the U.S. was confirmed by the CDC, Dr. Bright
emailed Laura Wolf (the director of the Division of Critical
Infrastructure Protection, which is under the HHS Office of the Assistant
Secretary for Preparedness and Response). The email asked Wolf
to reach out to Michael Bowen, the CEO of Prestige Ameritech, a domestic
medical supply company.
Appearing on CNBC on January 22, Trump offered the first of dozens of false reassurances when he told an interviewer, “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.” (27) Asked if he trusted the COVID-related information he was getting from China, Trump said he did because “I have a great relationship with President Xi” and “We just signed probably the biggest deal ever made.” (In reality, Trump was covering up for Xi; Trump's intelligence briefings had made it clear China was suppressing information about the virus, but Trump was more concerned about increasing trade with China, which he thought could help him win a second term.)
Earlier in the day, Michael Bowen had emailed “top administrators in the
Department of Health and Human Services” and offered to produce 1.7 million N95 masks per
week for the national stockpile.
Bowen's offer was turned down by Laura Wolf, so he sent a follow-up email
on January 23 which stated “We are the last major
domestic mask company....My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’
government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our
infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman
second.”
Despite Rick Bright's warnings about a coming shortage of masks (W16)—the national stockpiles had around 1/50th of what the country would need during a pandemic—and multiple emails from Bowen alluding to the “imminent risk” of a mask shortage and the mass orders he was getting from China and Hong Kong, the administration would never follow through on Bowen's offer. (28)
This indifference was reflected in two meetings of Trump's disaster management
team that took place on the 23rd. Bright's concerns about medical supplies and
BARDA's lack of funds weren't shared by Robert Kadlec or Alex Azar (29), who “asserted that the United States would
be able to contain the virus and keep it out of the United States. Secretary
Azar further indicated that the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]
would look at the issue of travel bans to keep the virus contained.” Bright was
punished for his outspokenness; Azar and Kadlec excluded him from the next
disaster management meeting. (30)
That same day, Trump was briefed by a CIA analyst and National Security Adviser
Robert O'Brien, who communicated that COVID-19 could “spread globally.” (W17)
On January 24, one day after China had shut down Wuhan and other cities, Trump tweeted praise of China's “transparency” and said that “It will all work out well.” This would be just one of fifteen times Trump praised China in January and February of 2020.
On January 25, Michael Bowen emailed Bright “about the mask shortage, explaining that his company was getting requests from China and that nearly half of the masks in the U.S. are imported from Chinese manufacturers. ‘If the supply stops, US hospital will run out of masks. No way to prevent it.’” Bright forwarded the information to Kadlec the following day. (W18)
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.” (31)
On January 28, twenty-five days after the administration had officially 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 COVID-19, the same day that Department of Veterans Affairs senior medical adviser Dr. Carter Mecher told colleagues that “the projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe” and mitigation efforts would soon be necessary on a “Red Dawn” email (W19), CNN reported that “Trump has not…named a single official within the White House responsible for coordinating the administration's response. (32) 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.”
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 the same day Trump was told (again) by an intelligence briefer that China
was “withholding data” about COVID-19, he gushed at
a campaign rally in New Jersey that he had “signed a fantastic new trade
agreement with China that will boost New Jersey exports and defend New Jersey
jobs.”
On January 29, Peter Navarro, an economic adviser to Donald Trump, sent a memo to the White House warning that coronavirus could kill up to 543,000 Americans. (W20) Despite Navarro's memo, and the fact that the U.S. had yet to take any significant actions to counteract the coronavirus (33), Trump continued his narrative of false assurances with a tweet that he had “Just received a briefing on the Coronavirus in China from all of our GREAT agencies, who are also working closely with China. We will continue to monitor the ongoing developments. We have the best experts anywhere in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!” (34)
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.
On a flight to campaign appearances in the Midwest, Trump received a call from Alex Azar, who warned him a second time of the destructive potential of the pandemic. Trump dismissed Azar as "alarmist." (35)
Later that day, speaking in front of Michigan auto workers on the day the WHO
had 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.” (36)
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." (37)
Though Ross claimed 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 (38) when they announced the formation of a Coronavirus Task Force on the same day.
In contrast to the efficient and responsive crisis management model Barack Obama had set up, in which 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.” (39) 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 testing and tracing and countrywide mitigation (40).
Klain offered a prescient prognosis at the Atlantic Monthly: “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.”
Writing in Foreign Policy the next day, January 31, Laurie Garrett (a Pulitzer-winning science journalist) 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 that day declared a public health emergency and restricted Americans who had been in China over the past two weeks from re-entering the country.
Trump presented the decision as a coup de grâce to the pandemic. Speaking
to Fox’s Sean Hannity on February 2, Trump said, “We pretty much
shut it down coming from China.” (41) 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 New York Times would later point
out that this was a significant underestimate, as 430,000 travelers would enter the country from China from January-April
of 2020, including 40,000 after
the travel ban, 42)
Trump would go on to brag repeatedly about the China ban as an example of a
gutsy leadership move, but he made the decision reluctantly (after Delta
Airlines and American Airlines had suspended flights from China and
United notified the
White House that they were about to do so) and he wouldn't restrict travel
from Europe, which brought many more travelers into the U.S.. than China and would provide the bulk of New York's cases, for six more weeks (43). In just the month of February,
two million Europeans would come to the U.S., hundreds bringing
the virus with them.
In a February 3 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, 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.” (44)
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.”
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. (W21)
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 (45), forcing public health labs to re-run their tests, which would delay reporting of the number of confirmed cases (46), 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 (47).
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.” (W22)
HHS secretary Azar declined the funding, claiming it wasn’t needed. (48)
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 World Health Organization shipped out 250,000 test kits.
The administration could have requested WHO kits, but insisted that the U.S.
develop its own tests. That day, the CDC shipped out 90 test kits.
(49)
On February 7, the same day World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “The world is facing a chronic shortage of gowns, masks, gloves and other protective equipment in the fight against a spreading coronavirus epidemic,” the same day that Rick Bright's suggestion that the federal government begin mass production of masks was rejected by Trump's disaster management team, (50) 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, later desperately needed inside our borders, which would be
exported from the U.S. due to the Trump administration's failure to plan ahead and
ban exports, as Germany, South Korea, and twenty-two others countries did. (51)
Asked at a news conference that day if he was concerned that China was covering
up the full extent of the virus, Trump replied “No. China is working very hard. Late last night, I had a
very good talk with President Xi, and we talked about — mostly about the
coronavirus. They’re working really hard, and I think they are doing a very
professional job. They’re in touch with World — the World — World
Organization. CDC also. We’re working together. But World Health is working
with them. CDC is working with them. I had a great conversation last night with
President Xi. It’s a tough situation. I think they’re doing a very good job.”
He said much the same thing on Twitter, where he praised China's leadership and
pushed misinformation about warm weather ending COVID-19: “Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with
President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading
the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even
building hospitals in a matter of only days. Nothing is easy, but.......he will
be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus
hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in
China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.
We are working closely with China to help!”
Rick Bright
continued his focus on medical supplies on February 8, when he met
with Trump's economic adviser, Peter Navarro (see W20). Bright and Navarro "drafted a memo sent to the White House coronavirus task force that
called for the U.S. to immediately halt the export of N95 masks and ramp up
production." (W23)
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.’” (52) 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.’ (53) 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.’” (54) Just before the rally, when asked by Trish Regan of
Fox News about China's COVID-19 transparency, Trump said that the Chinese
“have everything under control....We’re working with them. You know, we just sent some of
our best people over there...It's going to be fine.”
On February 11, Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell contradicted Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (see #37) 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. (55)
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 (56).
On Valentine’s Day, as worldwide 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 (57) 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.”
On February 18, Trump tweeted opposition to a measure that would limit sales of U.S. technology to China and again defended President Xi. Asked at a news conference what he thought of “the data coming out of China,” Trump said, “Look, I know this: President Xi loves the people of China, he loves his country, and he’s doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation.”
Taking stock of Trump's handling of COVID-19 so far, Atlantic contributor
Peter Nicholas offered perceptive
summations of the Trump Administration’s failures of governance and the
challenges ahead: “He has hollowed out federal agencies and
belittled expertise (see #1), 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,’ (58) 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 #27), 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, telling a reporter “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.” (59)
He also went to bat for President Xi. Asked how confident he was “that China is
being 100 percent honest with us when it comes to this scary virus?,” Trump
said, “I’m confident that they’re trying very hard....I know President Xi. I get along with him very well. We
just made a great trade deal....I think it’s going to work out fine.”
On February 20, Politico reported on the flawed test kits the CDC had sent out 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 (60)—which could have been avoided if Azar had accepted additional congressional funding proposed on February 5 (see #48).
The coronavirus task force met on February 21. Reviewing the
escalation in cases abroad, the group “concluded they
would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing, even at the risk
of severe disruption to the nation’s economy and the daily lives of millions of
Americans.”
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 (61) and CDC is not sharing what
went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are
not looking for it.” (62)
Later that day, Peter Navarro wrote a memorandum to
the president stating that “There is an increasing probability of a
full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million
Americans, with a loss of life as many as 1-2 million souls...To minimize
economic and social disruption and loss of life, there is an urgent need for an
immediate, supplemental appropriation of at least $3.0 billion dollars to
support efforts at prevention, treatment, inoculation, and diagnostics...Any
member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for
a crisis that could inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage and take
millions of lives has come to the wrong administration.” (W24)
Unconcerned with trifles like data, Trump told reporters
that day, “We're very much involved. We're very — very cognizant of
everything going on. We have it very much under control in this country.”
On Monday, February 24, trying to make up for previous short-sighted budget cuts, 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.’”
The $2.5 billion request was a pittance, approximately 1/1000th the size of
Trump’s tax cut (63), 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!” (64). 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. Unaware that his public health officials were planning to propose mitigation efforts, Trump scolded Messonier's ultimate boss, Alex Azar, for the toll her announcement had on the stock market (65) and the next day demoted Azar, putting Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus task force. As a result of Trump's temper tantrum, the task force's time-sensitive recommendations for social distancing, school closures, and cancellations of crowded events was put on hold.
It would be three long, deadly weeks before Trump would finally announce social
distancing recommendations on March 16 (66), during which time the CDC would
later estimate “COVID-19
cases increased more than 1,000-fold.” According to researchers
at Columbia University, the last two weeks of delay cost the lives of tens of
thousands of Americans. (67)
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!” (68)
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.”
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.” (69)
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.” (70)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported on the severe shortage of N95 masks American hospitals were facing due to onerous federal regulations (71) and a lack of support from the Trump administration (72), and the administration’s lack of a plan going forward, which was causing confusion and panic among state and local officials (73). Though the administration had had three years to …. As build national reserves of emergency medical supplies, Azar's testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee that day showed that “the Strategic National Stockpile had only 30 million masks. That number is less than one one-hundredth of the 3.5 billion that a specialized group within HHS that focuses on the risk from viral outbreaks has estimated are necessary.” (74)
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 (75), the administration’s failure to get functional test kits out in a timely fashion (76), and needlessly strict test criteria: “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, on the same day he was told that community spread was present in the U.S., Trump tweeted that the U.S. was in “great shape," (77) continued to compare coronavirus to the flu, though the virus has approximately 20 times the mortality rate (78), 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.” (79) 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.”
In picking Pence to lead the administration's response to the 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.
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 medical necessities had been ignored (80).
As of February 27, 2,800 people had died and 82,000 cases had been reported worldwide. Business Insider had the following headline: “Trump defends huge [19%] cuts to the CDC's budget (81) by saying the government can hire more doctors 'when we need them' during crises.” 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."
Despite the increasing gloom, the administration continued to play pretend. Appearing before the House Ways and Means committee, Alex Azar said, “The immediate risk to the public remains low” (82) and “It will look and feel to the American people more like a severe flu season in terms of the interventions and approaches you will see.” Trump 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.” (83) He also tweeted “Only a very small number in U.S., & China numbers look to be going down. All countries working well together!” (84)
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.
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 (see #49) 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.
“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.” (85)
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 (86), 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. (87)
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.” During the rally, Trump accused Democrats of politicizing the
coronavirus and said concern over the issue was a “hoax.” (88)
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.” (89)
The next day, Saturday, February 29, the first American death at the hand of the coronavirus “hoax” was reported. Speaking in Maryland before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said “And we've done a great job. And I've gotten to know these professionals. They're incredible. And everything is under control. I mean, they're very, very cool. They've done it, and they've done it well. Everything is really under control.”
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” the next day, Sunday, 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. (90) 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 (91): “‘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.’”
Dr. Eva Lee, an infectious disease researcher at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, commented in a Red Dawn email (see W18) with
Trump administration public health officials: “We need actions, actions,
and more actions. We are going to have pockets of epicenters across the
country, West coast, East coast and the South. Our policy leaders must act now.
Please make it happen!”
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 (92), 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. (93)
On Wednesday, March 4, the death toll in the U.S. reached ten and New York reported an infected community. Two months after the administration had been notified of the virus, and six weeks after Michael Bowen had written Health and Human Services (HHS) officials about the need for mass production of masks (see #28), HHS finally ordered 500 million N95 masks.
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.” (94) He also blamed the Obama administration for the lag in testing, claiming an Obama regulation had slowed the administration down, which was false (95).
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.” (96)
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 an article 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, 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. (97) 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 #63) and yet still a pittance relative to the scope of the virus, roughly 1/235th of the amount Trump spent on his tax cut, the bulk of which went to the upper 1%. (98)
Many public health officials felt the appropriations came a month too late (99), shortchanging localities of crucial resources for testing and personal protective equipment.
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.” (100)
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.” (101)
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.” (102)
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 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 (103), 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 (104), 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 and Trump’s lack of policy engagement (see #2) 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” because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” (see #58)
“…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, 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. (105)
“‘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.’” (106)
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.” (107)
As of Monday, March 9, the official tally in the U.S. was over 700
infections 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 (108). 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 free fall, 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 (109).
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.’” (110)
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!” (111)
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 (112) and a steep cut to the annual contribution to the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund. (113)
More administration failures were uncovered by David Lim and Brianna Ehley of Politico with a big scoop titled “U.S. coronavirus testing threatened by shortage of critical lab materials.”
The piece detailed how a shortage of lab materials (114) was exacerbating
America’s already-slow pace of testing, thereby jeopardizing public safety
(115) 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.” (116)
All evidence to the contrary (see #1-#116), 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.” 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.”
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.com 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.
(117)
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 #39, #41), 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 #49)
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.” (118)
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, 119), cast blame on China and Europe for having the disease before the U.S., 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.” 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 predicted the future 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.”
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.
In an email thread with Tom Bossert, Trump's former homeland security adviser
(see #12), James Lawler (director of Clinical and Bio-defense Research at
the National Strategic Research Institute) said, “We are making every
misstep leaders initially made in [simulations] at the outset of pandemic
planning in 2006. We had systematically addressed all of these and had a plan
that would work—and has worked in Hong Kong/Singapore. We have thrown 15 years of institutional
learning out the window and
are making decisions based on intuition. Pilots can tell you what happens when
a crew makes decisions based on intuition rather than what their instruments
are telling them.” (121)
The most glaring of the Trump administration’s failures was its inability to get test kits out. 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. (122)
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.” (123)
Duplicate tests were just one element of a failed operation. The Trump administration’s key mistakes were summarized by Politico reporter Dan Diamond 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.” (124)
“…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. (125) 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.” (see #22)
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” 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."
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.” (126)
March 13, 2020-late April 16, 2020
The third longest economic expansion in the last
160 years dies on Trump’s watch. Trump signs the CARES Act and reluctantly
agrees with short-term shutdowns. The administration refuses to marshal federal
resources to remotely the scale necessary, leaving most states (especially blue
states) to fight among themselves for overpriced PPE and ventilators. Jared
Kushner works on a national testing and tracing plan, but abandons it. Sensing
that the pandemic will present a health risk for in-person voting, Trump starts
to attack mail balloting in hopes that vote suppression will help him win a
second term.
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. (127)
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. (128)
According to the BBC, testing capacity in the U.S. was just 22,000 people/day while South Korea, which is 1/6th the size of the U.S., was testing up to 20,000 people/day. And the 22,000 projection was very optimistic, according to Andy Slavitt, Barack Obama’s acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who tweeted, “We can at best do 10,000 tests/day. We should be able to do millions” and “All of this could have been ramped up and solved in January & February and right now we would be talking about containment.”
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.
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.” (129)
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. (130) 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.” (131)
“…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. (132) 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.” (133)
That night, as the administration got ready to take food stamps away from 700,000 Americans in the middle of a pandemic (134), a 1,000-point loss in the Dow prompted Trump to finally declare a national emergency.
At a press conference announcing the news, Trump failed to model coronavirus
safety protocols, as he had done all week, shaking hands and standing cheek-by-jowl with other
administration officials (135). Trump also made a false claim about
Google constructing a testing center 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, 136)
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.” (137)
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].”
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!'”
Peter Wehner, a conservative Republican who had served under multiple Republican administrations, summed up the historical moment 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. (138) These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. 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” and that his administration’s “response was ‘really
working out.’” In fact, Trump’s indifference to the crisis had forced city and
state leaders to step up before a federal response of any kind 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 cut which would steal revenue from Social Security and Medicare and give more money in real dollars to the wealthy and upper-middle class, doing little for the people who needed the money most. (139)
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.” (140)
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 (141) were appearing, as reported by David Lim of 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,” part of a pattern of over 100 self-congratulatory remarks he would make throughout his upcoming press briefings.
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: “Covid-19 hits doctors, nurses and EMTs, threatening health system.” (142)
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 (143) 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.” (144)
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.” 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 #88). 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, a level of ignorance which would lead to a lack of compliance with public safety guidelines and a major spread in infections in the ensuing months. (145) Despite Trump’s numerous failures to protect the public from the virus (#1-#145), 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 (146), 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 (147), respirator masks to protect medical staff (148), and ventilators (the machines that are needed to pump air into the lungs of patients with the most serious coronavirus symptoms). (149)
“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.”
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. (150)
“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.” (151)
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.
“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 (152, 153, 154).
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.” (W25)
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.”
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.” (155)
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 and a needless provocation to a country we should have been collaborating with who could provide the U.S. with pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment (156).
As of Friday, March 20, eleven weeks after administration officials were first officially notified of the coronavirus, states and localities were still waiting for tests so that they could know where outbreaks were concentrated.
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 (157), while labs are confronting daunting backlogs that delay the results (158)….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. (159) 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. (160) 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.” (161)
“….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. (162) In several states, only those who are hospitalized or at high risk, including those with underlying conditions, can be tested.”
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.” (163)
In addition to having shortages of beds, 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. (see #143)
In “Where are the Masks?,” Wajahat Ali revealed that the U.S. had tested only 82,000 people (by comparison to 270,000 tested in South Korea, 1/6th America’s size), leaving clinicians in the dark about whether their patients had the virus, and that “2,629 health workers had been infected” in Italy, giving a preview of what medical workers in the States had to look forward to if stocks of protective gear weren’t ramped up quickly. If clinicians get sick, “no one else will be left, especially in small communities, to take care of patients as the coronavirus exponentially spreads.”
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.” (164)
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.” (165)
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, 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."
Saturday, March 21 featured an autopsy of executive branch failures from Politico’s resident expert on the Trump administration’s response, Dan Diamond.
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.” (166)
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 (167). Local officials also are making unusual crowdsourcing appeals.
“‘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.’”
In addition to not using the Defense Production Act, the administration was actively competing with states for equipment, robbing states of supplies in order to build up national reserves. (168)
Supply-chain shortages would negatively impact coronavirus victims and the clinicians who served them, people who couldn’t get surgeries due to the flood of coronavirus victims into hospitals, and women having babies (169). 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 (see W2), run through a pandemic exercise with them, 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.”
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.”
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.” (170)
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. (see #25) 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. (171) 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.’” (172)
Not only was the administration failing to provide clear guidance to hospitals as to how to cope with the man-made 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.” (173)
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-#173), was to spend his precious time trolling Pritzker on Twitter (174).
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.” (175)
Moreover, 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.” (176)
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 constant bragging about closing off travel from China and 180-degree
turn from praising China effusively in January and February to blaming them for the state
of the pandemic in the United States in March (177), 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 the fact 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 (178), again compared the coronavirus to the flu (179), 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. He even claimed that there would be more suicides from social isolation than deaths from the virus itself (180).
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 (see W14), but it was unclear if Trump was aware of the information in real time because “Trump reportedly does not read intelligence assessments, does not ask probing questions of his intelligence advisers (181), and does not schedule intelligence briefings nearly as often as his predecessors.” (182)
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.’ (183)
“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.
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 (184) 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. (185) 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.” (186)
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.” (187)
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…(188)
“‘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,’ (189) 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. (190)
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.” (191)
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 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 #48), 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 (192). 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 said “the faster we go back, the better it's going to be” during a virtual town hall and told Fox viewers that he wanted the country to be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” (193)
While official cases increased 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 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. (194)
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 (195); 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.
Another example of how not to handle a pandemic 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.
Among the key findings: 1) the CDC gave contradictory information about test guidelines to public health officials (196); 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 (197); and 4) the CDC protocol for screening passengers at Los Angeles airport returning from China was unclear and ineffective (198).
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.” (199)
“‘…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. (200)
That evening, it was reported that 3.3 million Americans had applied for unemployment, a record number (201), 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?’” (202*)(*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, 203)
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 fact check 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. (204)
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.” 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 (205), contributing to most Republican governors refusing to order shelter-in-place edicts, thereby endangering public safety. 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 (206), which should be the driver of public policy. It was pointed out that 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 official 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.” (207)
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 (208) 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, and Trump's use of the Defense Production Act didn't extend
to any other badly-needed medical supplies or personal protective equipment
(209), 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. (210)
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 #39, #41) for having the audacity to publicly call the
administration out for its lackluster response to coronavirus (see #1-#210).
GOP blame shifting continued on Monday, March 30, as Republicans alleged that Democrats bore some responsibility for the administration’s failures because of their impeachment drive, though Democratic senator Chuck Schumer had “urged the Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 26 to declare coronavirus a public health emergency, which would free up $85 million in funding to control the outbreak” and Democratic senator Chris Murphy had made a similar request on February 5 (see #48).
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 had 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 #51), 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. (211)
What the administration was doing was providing false
hope. Speaking to
reporters that day, Trump said, “Stay calm, it will go away. You know it
-- you know it is going away, and it will go away, and we're going to have a
great victory.” (212)
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 (213), who was susceptible to the virus (214), when we would be able
to ease up on social distancing (see #193), whether or not we should cover our
mouths (215), the accessibility of tests, and the availability of ventilators.
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 (see #28) 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. (216)
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. (217)
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. (218)
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 (219), 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” (see #173) and
looked at the anxieties of pregnant medical workers on the front lines who lacked PPE (220) or clear
safety guidelines from the CDC. (221)
In this grave national moment, when unity was more important than ever, Trump
trolled Democrats with an open letter to Democratic senator Chuck Schumer of New York and
a tweet blaming
states, who hadn't had numerous intelligence warnings about coronavirus in
January and February, and didn't have anywhere near the pandemic resources the
federal government had, for the predicament the administration had put them
in: “Massive amounts of medical supplies... are being delivered directly
to states...Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied
(politics?). The complainers should have been stocked up and ready long before
this crisis hit.” (222)
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 #217) 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.” (223)
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 (see#55), 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 #140), reported being denied (after having spent 100 hours on
testing and documentation) because he'd submitted his application via email.
(224)
On February 27, though the U.S. had done virtually no testing, “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.’” (225)
This contradicted what Redfield knew to be true, 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, the U.S. passed 10,000 official deaths and 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’ last-minute 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,
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. Trump also claimed he had had no inkling of
Peter Navarro's prescient warnings in January (see W19): “I read about it maybe a day, two
days ago,...It was a recommendation that he had, I think he told certain people
on the staff, but it didn't matter. I didn't see it.”
And though vote-by-mail elections are less expensive, more secure, and more
convenient than in-person elections,
and he used mail voting himself, 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.” (226)
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. (227)
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. (228)
Another failed allocation of federal resources came to light when the
Washington Post reported on
a whistleblower report about the failure of Jared Kushner's coronavirus
response team to secure PPE “in part because none of the team members had
significant experience in health care, procurement or supply-chain operations.
In addition, none of the volunteers had relationships with manufacturers or a
clear understanding of customs requirements or Food and Drug Administration
rules.” (229)
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. 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.” (230)
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 #193), 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 (231), patients being alone
for hours at a time (232), and patients dying alone. (233)
On Saturday, April 11, America passed 20,000 known deaths, making
the U.S. #1 in the world. COVID-19 was now the leading cause of death in the United States.
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.” (234)
“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,’
(235) 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 Hydroxychloroquine,
falsely billed by Trump as a miracle cure for COVID-19 (see #176), 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.
(236) 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. (237)
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.” (238)
“…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.” (239)
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.’”
(240)
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-#240) that the
administration had done a good job of handling COVID-19, 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 (241). Trump claimed—with no evidence—that the WHO was covering up
for China, part of his P.R. strategy to scapegoat China and racialize the
pandemic (242), even as he had publicly praised China 15 times in January and February (and sent them medical
equipment, #51) while he was hoping to cement a trade deal.
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% (243), 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.’ (244)
“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 (245)—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.” (246)
Meanwhile, it came out that stimulus money to desperate Americans would
be delayed by
Trump's insistence that his signature appear on the checks. (247)
On Thursday, April 16, the Washington Post reported
that all of the job gains of the lengthy Obama recovery were gone (248) as the pandemic surged. Just days
after reaching 20,000 deaths, the U.S. passed 30,000 deaths.
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. Allowing states to make their own decisions
would allow Trump to blame governors if infections spiked, even if he had urged
them to re-open in the first place. (see #246)
April 17, 2020-June 16, 2020
Convinced his re-election hinges on an economic
recovery, Trump disappears the Coronavirus Task Force and publicly pushes to
re-open the economy, even as the pandemic continues to rage. Many of Trump’s
Republican allies in state governments follow his lead, causing a huge
upsurge of infections and deaths in red states. Focused on keeping up
appearances rather than maintaining public safety, Trump starts insisting that
schools open in the fall.
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. (249)
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.” (250)
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.’” (251)
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.” (252)
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
(253), 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 to CDC head Robert Redfield] for President Trump to treat the
coronavirus pandemic seriously." (254)
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) 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.” (255)
“…‘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.” (see #58)
“...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.’” (256)
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 (257), supply shortages that were being exacerbated by the administration’s blockade of supplies ordered by the states themselves. (see #168)
On Monday, April 20, the U.S. passed 40,000 deaths and the gulf between vital public health imperatives and the Trump administration’s self-serving political agenda widened.
Interviewed that morning by George Stephanopoulos, 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.” (W26)
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 (258).
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.”
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.
“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 (see #155), “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.” (259)
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.” (260)
“…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 #26) 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. (261)
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 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 (262), and the desperate and chaotic situation in America due to Trump's failures had been likened to “a third world country,” Trump then told Alcindor that his single action of closing off travel from China—even as he had 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.” (263)
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. (264)
As of Thursday, April 23, U.S. unemployment rates had reached Depression-era levels (265). 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.’” (266)
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?" (267)
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. (268)
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.” (269)
“….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.” (270)
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. 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.” (see #181, #182)
That same day, Trump's Attorney General William Barr sent a two-page memo to all 94 United States Attorney Offices instructing
them to sue any state and local governments who “go too far” in public
safety mandates. (271)
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.” In reality, there had been numerous warnings in January and February that the virus would blow up (see W14-W23).
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 (272). Spinning himself silly, Jared Kushner “predicted that by July the country will be ‘really rocking again.’” (273)
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.
This theory—part of a coordinated Republican response to change the subject and misinform the public (274)—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 due to the
steep economic collapse tied to Trump's failure to contain the virus. (275)
“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. (276)
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: (277)
“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 morning, on Saturday, May 3, it was reported that 2,909 Americans had died on Thursday, one of the highest totals to date. 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 public health officials’ warnings of a second wave of infections (see #244), 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 (278)….[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 (279) - 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. (see #230)
“…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.’” (280)
“…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.” (281)
Two stories on Monday, May 4, made it clearer than ever that Trump was willing to sacrifice 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. (W25)
“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.” (282)
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 significant 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. (283)
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. (284)
“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, even as states were slashing Medicaid rolls due to a lack of funding. (285)
The U.S. passed 70,000 official deaths and 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. (W27)
In another jaw-dropping stat revealed that day, first quarter consumer debt hit an all-time high. (286)
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.’” (287)
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 #254). 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.” (288)
Despite the obvious need to counteract food shortages among millions of Americans, Republicans were blocking Democratic proposals to increase food stamp benefits. (289)
At a time when people were anxious and steady, transparent, and empathic leadership was more important than ever, Trump continued to blame shift, 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.”
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.”
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 detailed 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. (290)
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.” (291)
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.” (W28)
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 (292) and swabs was rooted in Trump’s unwillingness to order a national testing plan and rev up the Defense Production Act to the extent necessary. To most observers, this would’ve been seen as 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.”
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…”
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:
“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.” (294)
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 #292) or contact tracing (295), their focus was on propaganda—convincing gullible Republicans (see #145, #204, #283) 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.
Though the country wasn't ready to re-open, Trump applauded governors who put
their constituents at risk by tweeting the
slogan "TRANSITION TO GREATNESS." (296)
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.’”
The next morning, Monday, May 11, Trump continued to shut the pandemic from his mind and stay on message. Though the coronavirus task force had reported spikes in infection rates around the country just days earlier, Trump claimed 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. (299)
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, drug makers and the government.
“The nation’s supply chain isn’t anywhere close to ready for such an effort.”
(300)
Despite this short-sightedness, and the administration’s long list of other
failures and shortcomings (see #1-#299), 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 re-opening 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 over 80,000 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,” a false claim intended to create the dangerously ignorant impression that COVID-19 was winding down and American life could return to normal. (301)
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.” (W29)
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.’”
“…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.” (302, 303)
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.
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. (304)
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 (305). 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 #288), jobs were scarce, there was no sign of a 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. (306)
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, his GOP allies’ lockstep adherence to counterfactual talking points, and the negative impact of his base’s cult-like ignorance on public policy. (307)
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. In Wisconsin, Republicans on the state Supreme Court overturned the Democratic governor's shelter-in-place order, to which Trump tweeted “The Great State of Wisconsin, home to Tom Tiffany’s big Congressional Victory on Tuesday, was just given another win. Its Democrat Governor was forced by the courts to let the State Open. The people want to get on with their lives. The place is bustling!” (308*) (*The state would go on to have a huge spike in infections directly tied to the premature re-opening.)
Unwilling to do what was necessary to slow down the pandemic, Trump fell back on his favored tool of deflection, claiming that the U.S. had more cases because we did more testing (309) and 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” (310) 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, and the official numbers were far lower than the actual death tolls.
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 re-open 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. (311)
On Saturday, May 16, Trump received the honor of 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. (312)
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 $2+ 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.
The top story on Monday, May 18, the day the U.S. passed 90,000 deaths due to administration negligence (see #1-#312), 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. (313)
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 predicted 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. (W30)
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.”
(314)
“…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. (315)
“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.’” (see #43)
The administration’s disregard for public health continued into the present,
as Dr. Fauci had been taken off the air (see #297) 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.” (316)
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.” (317)
Another example of the fallout from the Trump administration’s shockingly inadequate response to COVID-19 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.” (318)
“…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.”
One might think the direct connection between lax social distancing and an increase in infections would be obvious, and that the credibility of public health officials would be reinforced by this inescapable conclusion, but Trump’s months of misinformation had disconnected tens of millions of Americans from reality. A recent Pew poll showed that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to trust scientists (319) and think scientists should have an active role in forming policy (320), much more likely to grasp the value in social distancing (321), much more likely to grasp the importance of testing in mitigating the damage of the virus (322), and much more likely to know that the U.S. had had far more cases than any other country.
Republican voters’ COVID-19 ignorance 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-#322).
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. (323)
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 on time 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. (324)
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 national system in place nearly five months after first being notified of COVID-19’s threat, creating predictably divergent 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”: (325)
“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.”
“…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.” (326)
During the day’s dueling Memorial Day events, Joe Biden and his wife wore masks, while Trump did not.
(327)
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. (328)
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. (329)
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 #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323. #325). Only 40% of Republican voters (as opposed to 87% of Democrats) understood that COVID-19 was far more lethal than seasonal flu (330). 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. (331)
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. (332), 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 (333) and the GOP’s resistance to expanding food stamps (see #289).
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 (334), the administration was setting many states up to fail by not creating a coordinated federal testing program, even as the need for a national testing program was becoming clearer all the time. (335)
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’ and that states should develop their own testing plans.”
“[Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health
Laboratories] and others said it’s reasonable to expect states to implement
some aspects of the testing, such as designating test sites. But acquiring
tests involves reliance on national and international supply chains — which are
challenging for many states to navigate.
“‘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. (336)
Trump passed his personal 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 own 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.”
In other news, the United States, under Trump’s leadership, had had both 3X as
many deaths as any other country and the biggest increase in unemployment among comparable developed countries (337), which was
about to lead to an “avalanche of evictions,” predominantly in red states with limited tenant
protections. (338)
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 #152-#154)
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 (339). A key to this steadfast support of a president who had so obviously failed us 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.” (340) 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.
ICU bed use was increasing in hot spots around the country (341) and only six states met the minimum (which is not to say adequate) standards for re-opening, even as virtually the whole country had re-opened to one extent or another, largely at Trump’s prodding.
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 George Floyd 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].” (342) Trying to deflect
attention from his own catastrophic failures of governance, Trump once again
blamed China for the first-in-the-world rates of deaths and infections in the
U.S., then 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. (343) 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.” (344)
“...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.’”
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. (345)
Trump wasn’t about to get distracted by trifling matters like food prices 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. (346)
Sunday, May 31, it was reported that Florida, a state whose Republican governor (Ron DeSantis) 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.” (W31)
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.” (347)
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.” (348)
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." (349)
While Trump fixated on staging a super-spreader convention, it was reported that his inactions had contributed to the loss of 1.4 million healthcare jobs in the U.S. (350) 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. (351) The scale of the pandemic caused by Trump’s mismanagement had also left nearly a hundred million Americans to delay healthcare procedures in order to clear facilities for COVID-19 patients. (see #152-#154)
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.” (352)
Government aid was keeping many Americans afloat, but the administration had
failed to get benefits out to millions (353), 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 #284) 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 and federal aid, cities were being forced to make steep cuts to essential services (354). 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 (355), 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 (356)—20 states had seen increases in cases over the prior five days, largely because of the premature economic re-opening Trump was celebrating. (357)
On Saturday, June 6 the U.S. passed 110,000 official deaths and it came out 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.”
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. (358)
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. (359)
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.
And as had been the case all along, America’s first-in-the-world numbers
were a significant undercount, because thousands of Americans had died from COVID-19
before being diagnosed and 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 be super-spreader events. (360)
The reality TV presidency continued full throttle 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 fueled by Trump's campaign strategy 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. (361)
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 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 (362). After being ever present in the media through March
and April, Anthony Fauci had long since been sidelined. (see #297, #348) The
CDC had mostly stopped providing guidance to state public health officials.
(363) The FDA was turning back to lesser priorities, including tobacco
regulations. (364)
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, uncertain of whether or not they were
infected, and likely to infect others. (365)
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 that had followed Trump's lead 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. (366, 367)
A doctor at the Harvard Global Health Institute was projecting 100,000 more deaths in the U.S. by September 1 due to the premature
re-opening of the economy and the surge in cases which was following.
As the ranks of the unemployed increased, with 1.5 million new filings (368), 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. 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. (369)
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.”
“…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 (370). 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.” (371)
“…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. (372)
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.” (373)
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 #70) 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.” (374)
In the real world, Houston was on the “precipice of disaster” due to Republican governor Greg Abbott's lockstep
following of Trump's edicts (375) 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, the administration again demonstrated mixed messaging
when 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.” (376)
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 taken Trump's misinformation at face value, continued to experience a spike in infections (377). 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.” (378)
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 (379), and the trauma
of regular exposure to sickness and death. (380)
Healthcare workers in Republican-led states which had downplayed public safety
recommendations at Trump's behest were feeling his shortcomings as a leader and
a human being daily. Cases in Alabama (381), South Carolina (382), Oklahoma
(see #377), 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.”
June 17, 2020-August 16, 2020
After a “slowdown” to 20,000 official
infections/day, the premature re-opening of the economy contributes to a second spike
to 77,000 infections/day and a high of 1,500 deaths. Against a backdrop of
double-digit unemployment, the GOP abandons stimulus talks, allowing additional
benefits to run out for millions. Though national plans to combat the virus
have been effective in the rest of the developed world, the administration refuses
to come up with a coordinated federal response, leaving states to flounder with
inadequate testing, tracing, and PPE.
On 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, the vast majority of whom hadn’t voted for Trump, were being
victimized by Trump’s inaction at inordinate rates. (383) 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 (384), compounding the administration’s earlier delays
in disbursing money to tribes. (385) 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-no-mind list was Anthony Fauci. (see #297, #348)
Interviewed by NPR, Fauci revealed that he hadn’t spoken to Trump for two weeks. (386) Asked if he would like to join thousands of
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.” (387)
Trump's influence in 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” (388) and Trump’s comment to Sean
Hannity the night before that COVID-19 was “fading away.”
(389)
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.” (390)
The coronavirus task force was no longer speaking publicly, 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. (391)
“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 (392), auto loans (393) 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.”
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, The Republican-controlled states of 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 again 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 had
inflicted on 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.” (394)
The anemic federal response was mind-boggling to public health experts
overseas, whose countries had 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.
“‘It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” (395) said Siouxsie Wiles,
an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand
- a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the last three weeks
and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus
routines.”
A piece at
statnews.com looked at how things could have gone differently in the U.S. if a
competent leader—say, Hillary Clinton—had been president when COVID struck:
“Had American leaders taken the decisive, early measures that several other
nations took when they had exactly the same information the U.S. did, at
exactly the same time in their experience of the novel coronavirus, how many of
these Covid-19 deaths could have been prevented?
“That isn’t a hypothetical question. And the answer that emerges from a direct
comparison of the fatalities in and policies of the U.S. and other countries —
South Korea, Australia, Germany, and Singapore — indicates that between 70% and
99% of the Americans who died from this pandemic might have been saved by
measures demonstrated by others to have been feasible.” (396)
Based on a study by Oxford University students, “14 days from the date of the
15th confirmed case in each country — a vital early window for action — the
U.S. response to the outbreak lagged behind the others by miles.” (397)
“…Due to exponential viral spread, [America’s] delay in action was devastating. In the wake of the U.S. response, 117,858 Americans died in the four months following the first 15 confirmed cases. After an equivalent period, Germany suffered only 8,863 casualties. Scaling up the German population of 83.7 million to America’s 331 million, a U.S.-sized Germany would have suffered 35,049 Covid-19 deaths. So if the U.S. had acted as effectively as Germany, 70% of U.S. coronavirus deaths might have been prevented.
“Seventy percent,
though, is the most conservative estimate. Scaled-up versions of South Korea,
Australia, and Singapore would have
experienced 1,758, 1,324, and 1,358 deaths, respectively, in the four months
after 15 cases were confirmed in each country. Had we handled the coronavirus
as effectively as any of these three countries, roughly 99% of the 117,858 U.S.
Covid-19 deaths might have been averted.”
Trump’s mis-governance
had impacted state governments too:
“Often taking cues from the
president’s words, state by state measures were rolled out piecemeal. Florida and Georgia,
for example, waited until April 3 to issue stay-at-home orders while South
Carolina held off until April 7.”
Late Friday night, an opportune time to bury important news, Trump fired Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney of
the Southern District of New York. Not coincidentally, Berman was the top
federal prosecutor in a number of sticky cases involving Trump and his
associates.
On Saturday, June 20, it was reported that the U.S. had 30,000 new COVID-19 cases, the biggest one-day
totals since May 1.
Trump had a super-spreader rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma (398) to an arena that was two-thirds
empty. During his speech, Trump said “I have done a phenomenal job” managing
COVID-19 and stated emphatically that he had asked underlings to “slow the
testing down” (399) because increasing infection numbers made him look bad. He
also called coronavirus the “kung flu” as a dog whistle to his racist
supporters.
On Sunday, June 21, Trump reached his personal milestone of 120,000 dead Americans, a staggering number which was 5X higher than the death
totals of any other developed country—and yet still a significant undercount of
actual COVID-related deaths.
Among the most vulnerable victims of Trump’s failures were residents and
employees (400) of nursing homes, particularly residents with limited financial
resources.
As reported by
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Amy Julia Harris of the New York Times,
“More than 51,000 residents and employees of nursing homes and long-term care
facilities have died (401), representing more than 40 percent of the total
death toll in the United States.” In order to boost profits, nursing homes were
taking in lucrative COVID-19-infected patients (covered by Medicare or private
plans) while “kicking out old and disabled residents [covered by Medicaid] —
among the people most susceptible to the coronavirus — and shunting them into
homeless shelters, rundown motels and other unsafe facilities, according to 22
watchdogs in 16 states, as well as dozens of elder-care lawyers, social workers
and former nursing home executives.” (402)
Medicaid recipients in nursing homes were far from alone in feeling the
devastation wrought by the Trump administration’s grossly inadequate response
to COVID-19. As reported on Monday, June 22, companies providing
mental health and addiction services were flooded with new patients but were
being shortchanged by
the administration’s Health and Human Services Department, who had failed to
disburse stimulus money which could keep operations going. Three months after
the CARES Act had been passed, a third of providers had not received their
money, forcing them to get rid of staff (403) and leaving them short of PPE
(404), and many didn’t know how long they would be able to stay open,
potentially leading to even greater shortfalls in services down the road. (405)
Countrywide, new cases increased 24% from the week before, primarily in red
states who had death-marched along with Trump's election plans. The failures of
the Republican leadership of Arizona and Texas to heed the power of the
pandemic were increasingly obvious, as the Children’s Hospital in Houston opened up space
for COVID-infected adults (406) and Arizona reported that
“83% of inpatient beds and 85% of intensive-care unit beds were in use.” (407)
As bad as things were, the administration’s Health and Human Services
Department was making matters worse by holding up billions
of dollars for testing (408) and contact tracing (409), perhaps because Trump
had ordered them to “slow the testing down.”
Though COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in the U.S., the impact of the virus
had been blunted in continental Europe. The reasons for this stark contrast
were reviewed by Dan Diamond and Sarah Wheaton in “‘The U.S. has hamstrung
itself’: How America became the new Italy on
coronavirus.”
The key distinction between the U.S. response and the response in Europe was
that Europe had focused on public health (mandatory masks, leaving lockdowns in
place longer) rather than short-term campaign considerations. Italy, the first
epicenter in Europe, had had just 264 new cases on Sunday. Spain and France had
had under 500 new cases per day. The U.S. was seeing over 30,000 new cases per
day, a number that was rising sharply.
Trump’s politicization of the virus had contributed to Republican leaders in
individual states failing to protect their constituents and Trump’s decision to
outsource the COVID-19 response had left states to fight a pandemic with
woefully inadequate resources.
Texas outdid itself on Tuesday, June 23, with over 5,000 new infections, a record. Right-wing libertarian governor Greg Abbott, who
had dismissed the virus in the recent past, increased regulations for childcare centers and “gave local officials more
powers to limit public gatherings during the upcoming Fourth of July weekend.”
Arizona, the sight of Trump’s second super-spreader rally that day (410),
reported a record single-day increase in coronavirus cases ahead of Trump’s visit. The rally
itself had no public health requirements; people sat next to each other with
barely a mask in sight (411) and Trump said COVID-19 was “going away.”
(412)
Things were so bad in the States that the European Union was considering a ban on travelers from America. (413) The direct connection between the administration’s poor policy-making and the uniquely horrible results in the States were revealed again when Anthony Fauci told a House Energy and Commerce committee hearing that the administration had given an order for the National Institutes of Health to cancel a study looking at the transmission of viruses from bats to humans, which is likely how COVID-19 had started. (see #22)
Trump fiddled while the U.S. burned, focusing on campaigning rather than governing. Topmost in Trump’s mind was finding ways to deflect his COVID-19 failures onto other entities, including his own CDC and governors who lacked the resources and information that the federal government had had to mitigate the virus. He made a visit to the border wall to show his commitment to keeping brown-skinned people out of the country, went to the mat for monuments of despicable men from our ugly past—including Civil War traitors—and received a warning from Twitter after threatening D.C. protesters with “serious force.”
While Trump raged against the feeling that he was losing control of the country, COVID-19 surged. On Wednesday, June 24, the U.S. had a one-day record of new cases, 36,358, which was forcing state and local officials to consider shutting down again.
Among the many, many victims of the administration’s mishandling of COVID-19 were Americans who were having long-term medical complications, including kidney failure and heart and lung damage, from coronavirus. The administration had vowed to keep medical costs down for these patients, but was failing to do so, leading to staggering medical bills. (414)
According to Susannah Luthi of Politico, “A
spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services declined to say
whether the administration is talking to health plans about a solution. The
government hasn't issued guidance on billing for post-virus conditions, citing
ongoing research and the many unknowns about the long-term effects of
Covid-19.”
As much damage as the administration had already done, they were far from
finished, announcing that they were about to close drive-through testing sites even as cases spiked. (415)
The insidious impact of Trump’s months of lies, and right-wing media’s propaganda offensive on his behalf, were weighed by Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post on Thursday, June 25.
Ingraham looked at “three studies…focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.
“The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’s Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.”
Another study “found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection. But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exaggerated the pandemic’s threat ‘to damage the Trump presidency.’”
In whole, the studies went a long way toward explaining the startling ignorance of many/most Republicans (see #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #319-323, #325, #330, #339, #347, #387) and the ramifications of that ignorance—no masks, no social distancing, increased infection rates, and the chaos, death, and disruption associated with those higher rates. (416)
As bad as things seemed on the surface, they were even worse in reality, as Trump’s CDC estimated that COVID-19 had infected 10X as many Americans as had been reported. (417)
Trump’s response was continued indifference. According to reporter Josh Wingrove, “President Donald Trump has paid little heed to a resurgence in U.S. coronavirus cases -- which on Thursday hit a record level -- announcing no new steps to curb the outbreak and continuing with a normal schedule of meetings and travel as hospitals fill with sick patients.” (418) Trump that day tweeted that cases were “way down,” though the opposite was true. (419) For good measure, Trump’s Department of Justice sided with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Hawaii’s quarantine on out-0f-state travelers. (420)
The administration showed just how much they cared again on Friday, June 26.
Since the pandemic had begun, enrollments in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) had increased 46% from 2019 due to mass job losses. In all, 23,000,000 Americans had coverage through the ACA and 130,000,000 were protected by the pre-existing condition clause. Ignoring the potential fate of more than half of the U.S. population, the administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA. (421)
Though Trump was unconcerned about trifling matters like healthcare security,
he was happy to go to bat for his political allies. When Texas’s Republican
governor and senators complained about the administration’s plan to stop
funding drive-through testing sites, Trump’s HHS extended the money for two more weeks for five of Texas’s seven sites.
Drive-through sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Illinois were
left to close as scheduled.
The spike in cases brought The Coronavirus Task Force out of hiding for the first time in two months. Unfortunately, Mike Pence treated the important public health gathering as a campaign event. While the U.S. posted a record number of new infections for the third day in a row, Pence gave a rose-colored-glasses presentation, claiming that the increases were limited to “specific communities,” (422) that “We have made truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” that “We flattened the curve. (423) We saved lives.”
The vice president put far more energy into rhetoric than reality. According to David Lim and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, “Pence did not announce any new initiatives, resources or strategies in response to the new outbreaks — or even recommend the public wear masks. (424) Instead, he emphasized that the federal government stood ready to assist states if they ask for help on anything from hospital capacity to protective equipment and generally urged Americans to remain vigilant, pray and exercise ‘personal responsibility.’”
Pence couldn’t sustain his lies for more than a single sleep cycle.
As of Saturday, June 27, the daily tally of new infections had climbed 65% in the span of two weeks. (425) As mind-blowing as this number was, it likely undercounted infections by 90%, according to Trump’s own CDC. In response, Pence cancelled campaign events in Florida and Arizona he had defended at the previous day’s press conference.
The gulf between actions and words was even more pronounced with Donald Trump.
Though he had been coaxing Americans to risk their health by consistently
minimizing the severity of COVID-19 in public, holding super-spreader rallies,
refusing to wear a mask, lying to reporters when asked about the pandemic, and
pressuring states to re-open their economies prematurely, behind the scenes
Trump was taking extraordinary precautions.
According to Kevin
Liptak and Kaitlin Collins of cnn.com, “President Donald Trump appears ready to move on from a still-raging coronavirus pandemic -- skipping the first White House task force briefing in months (426) and moving the event out of the White
House itself. But the measures meant to protect him from catching the virus
have scaled up dramatically.”
“…When he travels to locations where the virus is surging, every venue the
President enters is inspected for potential areas of contagion by advance
security and medical teams, according to people familiar with the arrangements.
Bathrooms designated for the President's use are scrubbed and sanitized before
he arrives. Staff maintain a close accounting of who will come into contact
with the President to ensure they receive tests.
“While the White House phases out steps such as temperature checks and required
mask-wearing in the West Wing -- changes meant to signal the country is moving
on -- those around the President still undergo regular testing.”
“…After Trump told aides at the beginning of the outbreak he must avoid getting
sick at all costs, efforts to prevent him from contracting the virus have
progressively become more intensive and wide-ranging. Early steps such as
keeping more hand sanitizer nearby eventually evolved into an intensive safety
apparatus, including the testing regimen requiring dozens of staffers.”
Though he’d been successful to date at avoiding infection, Trump’s failures to
keep millions of his constituents safe were becoming more and more obvious to
the U.S. public. The connection between the administration’s incompetence and
the increase in infections was reviewed in
“With Trump leading the way, America’s coronavirus failures exposed by record
surge in new infections” by Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey, and Yasmeen
Abutaleb of the Washington Post.
Among the key points: “Trump’s public mentions of the coronavirus declined by two-thirds between April and early June. (427) When he did discuss the pandemic, it was often to float misinformation about treatments, masks and testing — science-defying views that have been embraced by his supporters and top Republican lawmakers.” (428)
Anthony Fauci had been blocked from public appearances because he had trouble
“staying on message” (see #297, #348) and the administration had had weeks of
internal debate over whether to hold Friday’s task force briefing or pretend
infections weren’t increasing.
Max Skidmore of the University of Missouri at Kansas City pointed out that
Trump’s decision to ignore public health in service to his campaign was unique:
“We’re the only country in the world that has politicized the approach to a
pandemic.” (429)
Despite the surge in infections, “The president has dramatically scaled back
the number of coronavirus meetings on his schedule in recent weeks, instead
holding long meetings on polling and endorsements, his reelection campaign, the
planned Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Fla., the economy and other
topics, according to two advisers, who, like others, spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.” (430)
Lacking any direction or directives from the top due to Trump’s focus on the
campaign to the exclusion of all else, the administration continued to fail
states: “Some states are still struggling to procure testing kits and supplies
for the kits, including swabs, and have pleaded for the federal government to
play a larger role in coordinating purchases, resolving supply shortages and
distributing the tests. Doctors and health-care facilities are still grappling
with shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), including private
doctors’ offices that cannot perform routine procedures safely because they do
not have the necessary equipment, according to the American Medical
Association.” (431)
As before (see #237), what limited federal resources were being
allocated were given out based on pull, not need: “More than five months after
the first test for the coronavirus was conducted in the United States, testing
equipment is still being doled out based on which states manage to get federal
officials on the phone to press their case. After a recent weekend that saw
demand for testing outstrip capacity, the governor’s office in Arizona placed a
call to the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
said Daniel Ruiz, Ducey’s chief operating officer. Within 24 hours, they had
secured expedited access to a rapid Roche testing machine, he said.”
Ironically, Trump’s shortcomings continued to be felt most acutely by his fan base in the Superstition Belt. Four states with Republican control of the governor’s
mansion and the legislature recorded their highest totals of new infections:
Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, and as of Sunday, June
28, “only two US states [were] reporting a decline in new coronavirus cases.”
The Trump campaign’s lack of concern for the safety of their sheep-like supporters was looked at in a cnn.com story about the super-spreader rally in Tulsa. Before the event, Bank of Oklahoma Center employees had placed thousands of stickers stating “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” throughout the arena to encourage social distancing. Trump campaign staff swept in before the rally and removed the stickers. (432) As could be expected, Trump supporters sat next to each other without masks, setting in motion a record-breaking batch of new infections for the other citizens of Tulsa.
That evening, “60 Minutes” ran a segment which
showed that the Trump administration had taken “the unprecedented step of
allowing COVID antibody tests to flood the market without review.”
“…Over the course of a three-month investigation, 60 Minutes has learned that federal officials knew many of the antibody tests were seriously flawed but continued to allow them to be sold anyway. Now, as Coronavirus surges in parts of the country, that government failure is complicating efforts to know the reach of the Coronavirus.”
“60 minutes” interviewed Robert Castañeda, a clinic owner in Laredo, Texas.
Castañeda told of buying 20,000 test kits which were flawed, leaving the
community uncertain of true infection rates. This scenario was playing out
around the country due to the administration’s unwillingness to regulate the
sale of antibody tests. (433)
Earlier in the day, Trump had shown just how seriously he took leaving a little ol' Laredo clinic owner out of half a million dollars by tweeting a video of a Trump supporter yelling “White Power” before he went golfing with Lindsey Graham.
COVID-19 continued to wreak havoc in anti-science Republican states on Monday, June 29.
According to Patterson Clark and Ryan Heath of Politico, “On the pandemic’s first peak in early April, the states that voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton accounted for 67 percent of new Covid-19 cases. For the newest peak, which we’re still climbing, the states that voted for President Donald Trump have an even larger share: They accounted for 73 percent of new cases on June 28.”
States and local jurisdictions were being forced to backtrack. Arizona Republican governor Doug Ducey, a Trump ally who had re-opened to soon, “ordered bars, gyms, movie theaters, water parks, and tubing operators to close for at least 30 days.”
Another Trump ally who’d failed to take COVID-19 seriously was Ron DeSantis, the
governor of Florida. On May 20, in an event with Mike Pence, DeSantis had
declared victory over the virus with the words “we succeeded.” (434) Now, as
Florida set records for new infections almost daily, there was some question as
to whether Trump would be able to have his dreamed-of, public safety-free Republican convention in Jacksonville, his backup choice after North
Carolina’s Democratic governor had refused to allow a super-spreader convention
in his state.
In news that actually mattered, the pandemic’s ripples were being felt far and
wide. As had been foreseen many months earlier by public health officials who were ignored, hospitals were getting slammed (435). The pandemic had also “put on hold a
billion-dollar research program focused on new forms of addiction treatment”
(436) and contributed to an increase in overdose deaths brought on by “anxiety,
social isolation and depression.” (437) The administration had done virtually
nothing to offset the loss of treatment options for many addicts, and the
potential death of the Affordable Care Act at the hands of the administration
(see #421) would only make matters worse.
The steep economic slump continued—just 52.8% of American adults were working, a decrease from 61.2% before the pandemic (438)—but Trump ally Mitch McConnell had yet to lift a finger to negotiate a new stimulus deal with the Democrats, who had passed a relief bill in the House of Representatives 45 days earlier “which included over $3 trillion in aid for states and local governments, hospitals and front-line workers.” McConnell said he wouldn’t address the matter until after the Senate’s two-week July 4th vacation.
While Mitch McConnell enjoyed a lengthy vacation at taxpayers’ expense, millions of Americans waited for tax refunds or stimulus checks from his allies in the Trump administration (439), as revealed by cbsnews.com on Tuesday, June 30.
Amid widespread economic desperation, COVID-19 continued to surge. And as high
as infection rates were, they were destined to climb further, potentially much
higher. Dr. Fauci told a Senate committee that the States could soon have up to 100,000 new infections daily.
Soaring infection rates had prompted many high-ranking Republican public
officials, including Mike Pence and congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and
Kevin McCarthy, to wear masks and
to advocate mask usage in public statements. Trump continued to hold out, and
many of his followers mimicked his stupidity, as reflected in an Axios-Ipsos
poll which showed that Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to wear a
mask “at all times,” (440) though the science behind masks was clear—the World
Health Organization had concluded that masks alone could reduce infections by 85%.
To this end, the federal government had started an “America Strong” project in
which they would send “reusable cotton face coverings to critical
infrastructure sectors, companies, healthcare facilities, and faith-based and
community organizations across the country to help slow the spread of
COVID-19.” Unfortunately, due to poor planning and a lack of follow through, the administration could no longer accept new requests.
(441)
In addition, “the Transportation Security Administration, whose agents oversee
security checkpoints at the nation’s airports, also faces a potential shortfall
in face coverings” and other PPE due to “strain and unreliability [in] the
supply chain.” (442)
Amid a national disaster for which the fixes were obvious but unaddressed, the
bulk of the U.S. public was fed up with the administration’s dithering.
According to Pew polls, only 12% of Americans felt “satisfied with the way
things are going in the country” and just 17% were proud of “the state of the
country.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll reported the following day, on Wednesday, July 1, “found that 81% of American adults said they are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ concerned about the pandemic, the most since a similar poll conducted May 11-12.” Nine of out of ten Democrats were concerned, seven out of ten Republicans.
Americans had good cause to be concerned, as the U.S. had had over 50,000 new daily infections for the first time. 45 states had seen an increase in
weekly infections. And as high as the totals of new infections were, they were
being undercounted by about 90%, according to Trump’s former FDA head, Scott
Gottlieb (see W20, #265), who pegged actual
new daily infections at half a million.
Deaths were being undercounted too. According to a Yale study, 122,000 more Americans had died from COVID-19 than had been reported.
As cases escalated along with Americans’ anxiety, Trump continued to divide America, calling a Black Lives Matter stencil scheduled to be
inscribed in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan a “symbol of hate,” threatening
to veto measures to remove the names of Confederate generals from military
bases, and threatening to get rid of anti-segregation housing rules.
Thursday, July 2, it was reported that the U.S. had had its biggest single-day jump in infections. COVID-19 cases were “flat or growing in 48 states.” Cases in Republican-run Florida had increased 109% over the prior week and Thursday hit a record, with over 10,000 new (reported) infections.
Republican-controlled Texas continued to bear horrible human costs because of
governor Greg Abbott’s earlier indifference to the COVID threat, reaching new
highs of daily infections. Texas was such a mess that the far-right,
anti-science, anti-government Abbott was requiring that
face masks be worn in any county with 20 or more confirmed infections.
State and local governments were feeling the brunt of the coronavirus, but were
getting little help from the federal government. As revenue dried up, public
sector jobs were being slashed (443), with many more public employees susceptible to
layoffs in the future. Trump ally Mitch McConnell’s delays were making matters
worse, leaving state and local leaders in limbo as the new fiscal year started
July 1. (444)
At a briefing with reporters that day, Trump said the
States was getting the coronavirus “under control.”
It was reported on Friday, July 3 that the U.S. had achieved a global high of 55,000 new cases on Thursday, with 37 of 50 states seeing an increased rate of infections. (445)
Rather than try to mitigate the growing public health crisis stemming directly
from Trump’s refusal to take the pandemic seriously for 70 days (see #254) and
then pushing states to re-open prematurely, the administration’s new message
was, in effect, “Learn to live with it.” (446)
According to Carol
E. Lee, Kristen Welker, and Monica Alba of nbcnews.com, “Administration
officials are planning to intensify what they hope is a sharper, and less
conflicting, message of the pandemic next week, according to senior
administration officials, after struggling to offer clear directives amid a
crippling surge in cases across the country.”
Key to the messaging would be minimizing the sky-high infection rates by
highlighting the low death rates among recent infections relative to April
infections (a result of young people contracting the disease) and emphasizing
quack medical fixes (447).
As administration campaign hacks crafted their latest snake oil P.R. strategy, Trump held another super-spreader campaign rally. Though he was considered the worst president in American history by 200 political scientists in 2018, Trump chose Mount Rushmore, located on land stolen from Native Americans. As with Trump’s other rallies, no social distancing or masks were required (448), and Trump aimed low, playing to his followers’ racism and decrying attacks on monuments to false idols.
While the clown show continued on high beam, the Biden campaign hired 600 lawyers to
pre-empt the Trump campaign’s aggressive attempts to keep Democrats from
voting.
America celebrated Independence Day, Saturday, July 4, by setting a record for new daily infections: 57,683. Texas and Florida continued
to serve as cautionary tales of what not to do in the middle of a pandemic;
both states reported daily records.
Meanwhile, every other developed country around the world was seeing a fraction of the number of cases of the U.S., the laughingstock of the first world.
Trump hit his milestone of 130,000 dead Americans on Monday, July 6.
In just the first few days of July, America had had over 300,000 new infections. 12 states had seen new highs in seven-day infection totals. Arizona’s ICU beds were 89% full. Miami-Dade County was shutting back down. West Virginia was requiring face masks in public buildings. Jared Kushner's claim that the U.S. would be “really rocking again” in July (see #273) had taken on a whole new meaning.
Trump and other administration figures attributed the steep rise in infections to increased testing, but the data proved otherwise. (449) As shown by Caitlin Owens and Andrew Witherspoon of Axios, areas such New York and D.C. actually had more new tests than new cases, while Florida had 9X the number of new cases as tests, a pattern that played out throughout the country in areas that had failed to take the virus seriously.
As tens of millions of Americans struggled to pay their bills, facing eviction and worse as government benefits were set to expire at the end of the month, Brian Slodysko of the AP reported that “Forty lobbyists with ties to President Donald Trump helped clients secure more than $10 billion in federal coronavirus aid, among them five former administration officials whose work potentially violates Trump’s own ethics policy, according to a report.” (450)
Mike Tanglis, one of the authors of the report, said “The
swamp is alive and well in Washington, D.C…..These (lobbying) booms that these
people are having, you can really attribute them to their connection to Trump.”
Uninterested in the swamp he’d made far more pestilent, Trump continued to deflect from issues that mattered to everyday Americans’ lives (451) with racist tweets showing his displeasure with the renaming of the Washington Redskins, making a dog whistle reference to the “China virus,” attacking NASCAR for removing the confederate flag from race tracks, and suggesting that Bubba Wallace—the only black NASCAR driver—should apologize for inheriting “the only garage pull out of 1,684 stalls at 29 inspected NASCAR tracks to be fashioned as a noose.”
The impact Trump’s racist demagoguery was having on the U.S psyche was
reflected in polling. A Gallup poll showed “the largest partisan gap Gallup has ever
measured for a presidential approval rating in a single survey.” The same poll
showed that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans had gone up several
points to 91% in the past month as the resident of the United States had poured
gasoline on the fire lit by George Floyd’s murder.
Partisan divides in critical thinking skills (see #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323. #325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440) were further reviewed on Tuesday, July 7, by Margaret Talev of Axios. Based on four months of data, Talev found that young Republican men without degrees took the pandemic “the least seriously” of all demographic groups (452) and that Republicans were half as likely as Democrats to wear a mask “at all times,” in no small part because of Trump’s messaging.
The latest example of Trump’s brainwashing had come out that morning when he’d
tweeted that “We have the lowest Mortality Rate in the World. The Fake
News should be reporting these most important of facts, but they
don’t!” As Anthony Fauci said at
a public event later in the day, “it's a false narrative to take comfort in a
lower rate of death….There’s so many other things that are dangerous and bad
about the virus. Don’t get into false complacency."
Fauci was proven right, again, when the U.S. set a record of new infections that day, hitting 60,209. At the rate things were going, the University of Washington projected that the U.S. would have over 208,000 COVID-related deaths by November due to the administration’s colossal incompetence.
Other victims of the administration’s failures included millions of Americans
who were being shortchanged in the Farmers to Families Food Bank program.
The program “aimed to take food from farmers typically produced for restaurants and deliver it to the millions of people who lost their jobs or were otherwise hit by the coronavirus lockdown,” but the delivery targets weren’t being met because Trump’s USDA had chosen inexperienced contractors who weren’t up to the task. According to reporter Christopher Walljasper, as of early June, rates of food insecurity had doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, but only 63% of the money allocated for the program had been used, shortchanging food banks and the struggling Americans who rely on them. (453)
Trump was more focused on imaginary foes than starving constituents. As part of
his ongoing effort to remove attention from his COVID-19 failures (see
#1-#453), shift the blame to China, and blame the World Health Organization
(WHO) for China’s lack of transparency, the administration officially notified the WHO that the U.S. would be leaving the
organization—and the billions of people who benefit from it—high and dry.
On Wednesday, July 8, America’s public health crisis continued to escalate.
Trump reached his personal milestone of three million official infections as his adopted home state of Florida continued to be the poster boy for mis-governance, with 56 ICUs at full capacity and cases increasing.
As high as the numbers were, they weren’t capturing the true extent of the
pandemic because the U.S. still wasn’t testing at an adequate capacity. “‘A hot mess’: Americans face testing delays as
virus surges” by Christopher Weber and Acacia Coronado
of the AP looked at America’s continued testing shortcomings, six months after
the administration was first notified of the virus.
According to Weber and Coronado, “Four months, 3 million confirmed infections
and over 130,000 deaths into the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., Americans
confronted with a resurgence of the scourge are facing long lines at testing
sites in the summer heat or are getting turned away. (454) Others are going a
week or more without receiving a diagnosis. (455)
“Some sites are running out of kits, while labs are reporting shortages of materials and workers to process the swabs. (456, 457)
“Some frustrated Americans are left to wonder why the U.S. can’t seem to get its act together, especially after it was given fair warning as the virus wreaked havoc in China and then Italy, Spain and New York.”
Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard’s Global Health Institute pinpointed the culprit: “I am stunned that as a nation, six months into this pandemic, we still can’t figure out how to deliver testing to the American people when they need it….It is an abject failure of leadership and shows that the federal government has not prioritized testing in a way that will allow us to get through this pandemic.”
The abject failures at the federal level extended to PPE. Six months after the administration had become aware of the virus, the U.S. was still shortchanging the brave men and women at the front lines of the crisis.
According to William Wan of the Washington Post, “Nurses say they are reusing N95 masks for days and even weeks at a time. (458) Doctors say they can’t reopen offices because they lack personal protective equipment. (459) State officials say they have scoured U.S. and international suppliers for PPE and struggle to get orders filled. (460). Experts worry the problem could worsen as coronavirus infections climb, straining medical systems.
“‘A lot people thought once the alarm was sounded back in March surely the
federal government would fix this, but that hasn’t happened,’ said Deborah
Burger, a California nurse and president of National Nurses United, a union
representing registered nurses. Like many health-care workers, Burger blamed
the Trump administration for the lack of equipment, noting the administration
has insisted the responsibility falls to state and local officials, with the
federal government playing only a supporting role.
“The specter of equipment shortages comes as other issues that plagued the country’s early response to the pandemic return: surging cases, overwhelmed hospitals, lagging testing and contradictory public health messages. But the inability to secure PPE is especially frustrating, health-care workers say, because it is their main defense against catching the virus.”
Because of the federal government’s unwillingness to regulate vendors or
provide adequate assistance to the states, private for-profit companies were
gouging businesses and local and state governments which were already dealing
with huge budget shortfalls: “Demand for protective equipment has soared,
but unlike in March, when efforts focused on getting PPE for major hospitals —
especially in New York, Detroit and Chicago — supplies now are desperately
needed by primary care offices, nursing homes, prisons and psychiatric and
disability facilities. As many states continue to reopen their economies,
demand has also surged from the construction industry and other sectors. With
soaring demand, prices have skyrocketed.”
The big story of the day was Trump’s insistence that schools open in the fall so that America could play a game of charades in which we pretend we aren’t in the middle of a pandemic during the height of campaign season in order to help Donald Trump win a second term.
Trump cited school re-openings in other developed countries, but those
countries had a tiny fraction of the infection rates the U.S. would likely have
this fall.
And as Caitlin Owens and Marisa Fernandez of Axios pointed out,
maintaining social distancing and consistent usage of masks in schools across
the country would require resources that struggling local governments lacked,
and the administration had yet to offer up the scale of federal aid needed to
bridge the gap. Forcing schools to re-open without these measures in place
would lead to millions of children around the country serving as vectors of
infection to older and more vulnerable Americans. (461)
Trump’s real incentive to open schools was to prime the pump so he could campaign
on his “management of the economy” (a.k.a. his inheritance of Barack Obama’s record sustained
growth). Lily Eskelsen GarcÃa, president
of the National Education Association, said “He's hoping some indicator goes up
that people are going back to work….and he is saying, ‘Sacrifice your children,
sacrifice their teachers, sacrifice their families that they could infect,
because I need something to sell in November.’” (462)
The administration was playing chicken with peoples’ lives by threatening to withhold federal money to schools which refused to play along (463), and Trump’s advocacy directly contradicted the safety guidelines put out by his own CDC (464). To narrow the gulf between Trump’s selfish desires and public safety, Mike Pence vowed to water down the CDC’s guidelines. (465)
Part of Trump’s challenge in convincing schools to follow his lead was that he had no credibility when it came to COVID-19. He’d recently said that 99% of coronavirus cases were “totally harmless” though 4.5% of people who caught the disease died, “14% of confirmed coronavirus cases led to hospitalizations — including 2% in intensive care units,” and even those who weren’t hospitalized were subject to serious brain degeneration. (466)
He had demanded that churches re-open and rescinded limitations on crowded church choirs in order to kowtow to his evangelical base, which was contributing to the spikes around the country. (467)
He had insisted on a rally in Tulsa even as the city’s main public health official had warned against it, which was leading to a surge in cases there. (468)
Miraculously, 80% of Republicans still approved of Trump’s “handling” of the coronavirus.
Trump continued to build on his record of failure the following day, Thursday, July 9, as the U.S. hit a new record of daily infections—over 65,000—shattering the record set earlier in the week. 42 states were showing an increasing number of infections.
The missteps of Trump’s political allies in the sun belt were especially
obvious, as hospitals across the South and Southwest were swamped with new
cases. Laz Gamio of the New York Times presented the hard data. Since prematurely re-opening their economies with Trump’s
prompting, Florida had seen a 7-day increase in infections of 1,393% (469),
South Carolina a 999% increase (470), Arizona an 858% increase (471), Texas a
680% increase (472), and Georgia a 245% increase (473). New York, which had
ignored Trump’s bad advice, had seen a decrease of 52% in the same time frame.
The spike in infections caused by the Trump administration’s anti-science rhetoric and astonishing failures of governance continued to depress the economy. 1.3 million more Americans had filed for unemployment (474). Long term, the pandemic was accelerating the trend of small businesses going under and being replaced by corporations and soulless, faceless chains with minimal concern for their customers and no connections to the communities they operated in, a process certain to lead to increasing concentrations of wealth at the top, fewer choices for consumers, and lower wages for workers. (475-477)
At the root in the spike of infections was mixed messaging from Trump and his state-level allies, who had spent months contradicting public health officials, which had led to tens of millions of scientifically-illiterate Americans ignoring guidelines and infecting others in the process.
The Centers for Disease Control had the resources and know-how to educate the public, but were being handcuffed by Trump. As reported in a deep dive (“CDC feels pressure from Trump as rift grows over coronavirus response”) by Lena Sun and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post, the agency’s use of evidence-based practices was creating friction with Trump’s political handlers, who were largely rendering the agency “invisible.”
As Tom Frieden (Obama’s CDC head) put it, the CDC was “not being allowed to
guide policy, not being allowed to develop, standardize, and post information
that would give, by state and county, the status of the epidemic and of our
control measures.” (478)
In one example of many, Sun and Dawsey cited an instance were senior adviser
Paul Alexander had sent a rage email to CDC principals accusing the agency of
“undermining the President”—because they’d had the audacity to publish a report showing
the risks COVID-19 posed to pregnant women. (479)
Trump’s war on science was in the news again on Friday, July 10, as
it came out that Dr. Fauci hadn’t briefed Trump in two months (480) and hadn’t seen him since June 2 (481). Fauci told the Financial Times, “I
have a reputation, as you probably have figured out, of speaking the truth at
all times and not sugar-coating things….And that may be one of the reasons why
I haven’t been on television very much lately.”* (*Fauci, the government’s top
infectious disease expert, had not been physically present at that week’s
coronavirus task force briefing with reporters, having been asked to dial in by
phone instead, 482)
Asked on Wednesday about Fauci’s comment that the U.S. was “knee-deep in the
first wave” of the virus, Trump had said, “I think we are in a good place.
I disagree with him.” Two days after Trump’s “good place” comment, the
U.S. notched a new record of daily infections—over 67,000—and
an increase in the weekly death toll. (483)
Infections were spread all over, but states which had re-opened too soon, or never taken the virus seriously, continued to have most of the hot spots. Wisconsin, which had been forced to open up when Republican judges overruled the Democratic governor’s stay-at-home order, had seen a doubling in positive tests over the prior two weeks and a record number of new infections on Thursday and Friday.
The five biggest hospitals in far-right Mississippi
were full up and
four other hospitals had only 5% of their beds left.
75% of the hospital beds in South Carolina (a state without a single statewide Democratic
officeholder) were full, even as infections were
on the way up. According to a New York Times analysis, South
Carolina had the third worst outbreak rate per capita in the world,
behind only Florida and Arizona, two other states under complete Republican
control.
One district in Phoenix—the location of Trump’s June 23 super-spreader
rally—had so many deaths that the morgues were at 96% of capacity and the city was looking to rent refrigerated trucks.
(484)
Because of the administration’s failures to act in a timely fashion, or in an adequate fashion, or to even give a shit, the U.S. was moving toward a herd immunity strategy “by default.” Yet the country wasn’t ready for that either (485):
“Letting the virus spread while minimizing human loss is doable, in theory. But it requires very strict protections for vulnerable people, almost none of which the U.S. has established.
“Cases are skyrocketing, with hospitalizations and deaths following suit in
hotspots. Not a single state has ordered another lockdown, even though per
capita cases in Florida and Arizona have reached levels similar to New York and
New Jersey’s in April.”
“…Separating older, sicker people from younger, healthier ones while the virus
burns through the latter group could be a way to achieve herd immunity —
assuming immunity exists — without hundreds of thousands of people dying.
“But the U.S. hasn’t adopted such a strategy with any planning or foresight.
Although younger people make up a larger portion of coronavirus cases now than
they did earlier in the pandemic, vulnerable people still go to work or live
with non-vulnerable people.”
All told, the U.S. was looking at 250,000 dead by the end of the year, according to Dr.
Zeke Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most human beings who had brought horrible suffering on millions of people through their own actions (and inactions) would feel a degree of remorse, or maybe even humility, but Trump fell back on self-pity. In “Trump the victim: President complains in private,” by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post, it came out that “Callers on President Donald Trump in recent weeks have come to expect what several allies and advisers describe as a ‘woe-is-me’ preamble.
“The president rants about the deadly coronavirus destroying ‘the greatest
economy,’ one he claims to have personally built. He laments the unfair ‘fake
news’ media, which he vents never gives him any credit. And he bemoans the
‘sick, twisted’ police officers in Minneapolis, whose killing of an unarmed black
man in their custody provoked the nationwide racial justice protests that have
confounded the president.”
“…The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim -
of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all
of which happened to him rather than the country.”
“‘…We had the greatest economy in the world,’ Trump said in an Oval Office
meeting last month, talking about how good the statistics were before the
coronavirus, said one adviser. An outside adviser in frequent touch with the
White House offered a similar recollection, saying that Trump simply keeps on
repeating, ‘I had this great economy and they made me shut it down.’”
“…Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of the
forthcoming book, Strongmen, a history of authoritarian leaders, said Trump's
victimization complex fits a pattern of authoritarian leaders past and present.
“They have no empathy, and they only see the world through how things affect
them personally,’ Ben-Ghiat said. ‘They're not there to govern. They're there
to enrich themselves, they're there to plunder the nation, and they're there to
be world historical.’”
On Saturday, July 11, while Trump wallowed in self-pity, it was
reported that the U.S. had a record number of new cases—over 69,000—for the
third day in a row.
Saddled with bad news of their own making, the administration targeted the one
official under the Trump umbrella who actually had any integrity, Anthony
Fauci. As reported by the Washington Post, administration
officials circulated “a
list of all the times he ‘has been wrong on things,’” hoping to damage his
public credibility as he undermined Trump’s propagandistic talking points with
factual analysis. (486)
Someone who had swallowed Trump’s propagandistic talking points whole was Ron DeSantis,
the Republican governor of Florida. DeSantis’s failures led news on Sunday,
July 12, as infections continued to skyrocket in Florida, with a one-day
total of over 15,000 official
cases. As reported at Axios,
“NBC Nightly News’ pointed out that if Florida were a country, it would have
the world's fourth-highest tally of new COVID-19 cases (a record 15,300) for
the 24 hours ending yesterday, after the U.S. (66,281), Brazil (45,048) and
India (28,637).”
In competition with Florida for the least effective response to COVID-19 were the Republican-run states of Texas and Arizona; Arizona's situation was deemed “the worst in the entire country” by a top public health official. On Monday, July 13, it came out that Texas—like Arizona—was renting refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow of deaths from morgues. (487)
Many Americans who got infected but didn’t end up on the wrong side of a meat
truck would be susceptible to long-term heart damage, according to a study co-authored
by Marc Dweck of the University of Edinburgh. As many Americans were facing
heart damage, lung damage,
and brain degeneration which could have been avoided with a competent federal
response, 5.4 million Americans had lost their health
insurance (488), a fraction of the
number who could lose coverage if the administration’s legal challenge to the
Affordable Care Act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. (see #421) Many
of those who had lost health insurance were out of work and still waiting for their unemployment benefits. All told, 18 million
Americans were on unemployment and 50 million had
applied since the virus began. (489)
Overwhelmed by the waves of bad and totally objective news, Trump shared a tweet (490) from former game show host Chuck Woolery that
read “Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but
most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and
keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of
it.” Just days later it would come out that Woolery’s son had contracted COVID-19, prompting the game show host to deactivate his Twitter
account.
While Woolery accused the CDC, the media, Democrats, and doctors of lying,
Trump reached another personal milestone by having made 20,000 “false or misleading claims.”
As of Tuesday, July 14, the United States had what Helen Branswell
of statnews.com called “a raging dumpster fire”:
“Where a number of countries in Asia and Europe have managed to dampen spread
of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the point where they can consider returning to a
semblance of normalcy…many international borders remain closed to Americans.
(see #413)
“On Sunday, Florida reported more than 15,000 cases — in a single day. South
Korea hasn’t registered 15,000 cases in the entire pandemic to date.”
“…The website Covidexitstrategy.org has updated its previously tri-colored U.S. map, which
showed states as either green, signifying they are trending better; yellow,
making progress; or red, trending poorly. A fourth designation, called ‘bruised
red,’ signals states with uncontrolled spread; criteria for this category
includes hospitals nearing capacity both in terms of overall beds and ICU
space. Already 17 states are wearing bruised red.” (491)
This was an ugly reality that Trump wanted to obscure, so his henchman (trade
adviser Peter Navarro) went after the one official willing to tell it like
it is in an op-ed in USA Today which claimed that “Fauci has been wrong about
everything I have interacted with him on.” (492)
Trump’s contempt for science was also demonstrated that day by the news that the administration’s CDC would no longer be in control of collecting and disseminating coronavirus death and infection information.
According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: “The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.
“The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.”
The move was designed to withhold information from the public: “…the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers (493), modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions. (494)
“‘Historically, C.D.C. has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters (495), access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak,’ (496) said Jen Kates, the director of global health and H.I.V. policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.”
“…Centralizing control of all data under the umbrella of an inherently political apparatus is dangerous and breeds distrust,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response under former President Barack Obama. “It appears to cut off the ability of agencies like C.D.C. to do its basic job.” (497)
Cutting off the ability of the CDC to do its job had been the administration’s practice from early in Trump’s presidency. A bipartisan group of four former CDC directors explained the damage this had done in “We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has” for the Washington Post.
The opening line told the tale: “…The four of us led the CDC over a period of more than 15 years, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations alike. We cannot recall over our collective tenure a single time when political pressure led to a change in the interpretation of scientific evidence.”
Politicization had caused confusion, division, and ultimately, more infections: “…Unfortunately, [the CDC’s] sound science is being challenged with partisan potshots, sowing confusion and mistrust at a time when the American people need leadership, expertise and clarity. These efforts have even fueled a backlash against public health officials across the country: Public servants have been harassed, threatened and forced to resign when we need them most. (498) This is unconscionable and dangerous.
“We’re seeing the terrible effect of undermining the CDC play out in our population. Willful disregard for public health guidelines is, unsurprisingly, leading to a sharp rise in infections and deaths. America now stands as a global outlier in the coronavirus pandemic…The United States is home to a quarter of the world’s reported coronavirus infections and deaths, despite being home to only 4.4 percent of the global population.
“Sadly, we are not even close to having the virus under control. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
One of the main reasons the virus wasn’t even close to being under control in the U.S. was the Trump administration’s decentralization of the COVID-19 response to states that were unprepared to handle a pandemic. As reported by Dan Goldberg and Alice Miranda Ollstein, “Leaving the nation's coronavirus fight to individual states has created gaping holes in the public health response that have allowed the infection rate to soar and death rates to rise once again. (499)
“While countries like New Zealand and Germany have taken a unified national approach to fighting the virus — and are enjoying the fruits of a successful mitigation strategy — the Trump administration’s federalist philosophy has helped create chaos across the South and West.
“Cash-strapped cities and states trying to create their own testing, tracing and public awareness campaigns from scratch are desperate for federal support as they grapple with questions about whether it’s safe for people to return to school and work, along with bars and beaches.” (see #391)
Cash-strapped cities and states were again being forced to compete against each other for supplies (see #173) because the administration had refused to ramp up the Defense Production Act to the extent necessary, and the lack of a national contact tracing plan was leaving us with only one-third the number of tracers needed to get COVID-19 under control.
David Eisenman of the UCLA Center for Public and Health Disasters summed up the lack of planning and execution that brought us to this point: “We shut down the country for three months and we could have used that time for all kinds of planning and preparing, and we did not use it at all.” (500)
Planning, preparation, and thinking ahead were clearly not the Trump administration’s forte, as several stories on Wednesday, July 15 showed.
Maggie Severns of Politico reported that the administration had reduced training requirements for caregivers in nursing homes after the pandemic had made its way to American shores. Previously, nurses’ aides had been required to have 75 hours of training. Acting on the wishes of the nursing home industry, the administration had lowered the requirement significantly, allowing nursing homes to hire people whose sum total of training was eight hours online. (501)
And the online training wasn’t actually eight hours long. According to Severns, “There is no requirement that students watch the required videos or download the assignments during the training, and there is only one untimed assessment. A POLITICO reporter was able to register for the eight-hour program and obtain a temporary nurse’s aide certificate, using the internet to look up test answers, in less than 40 minutes.”
As a result, inexperienced workers were being put in charge of eldercare during the middle of a pandemic. Jesse Martin (the SEIU vice president in Connecticut) told Severns, “Working in nursing homes is complicated….You have PPE, you have infection control procedures. Putting someone brand new into the care setting with Covid is a recipe for disaster." (502)
Other victims of the administration’s short-term thinking included constituents of Republican governors who had taken Trump’s advice. Writing for the Hill, James Zirin reviewed the red state missteps:
“The temperatures are soaring this week in seven Sunbelt states of Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee. So are the number of new cases of COVID-19, and the pro-Trump Republican governors of these states have much to answer for.
“In the spring, when the weather was more temperate, the spread figures seemed to be under control in these states. And the governors, all Trump loyalists, largely followed the president’s lead in suggesting that once the weather got warmer, the coronavirus would, as Trump put it, ‘disappear…like a miracle.’”
Far from disappearing like a miracle, daily infections were hitting a record national high of 67,632.
Renuka Rayasam reviewed the frazzled state of the nation in “How scared should you be?”:
“Halfway through July, the situation is actually worse in many parts of the country than at the start of the pandemic…”
“…About 7 to 9 percent of the population, or 23 million people, have been infected to date, estimates Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Minnesota. He said transmission won’t slow until at least half of the population becomes infected. If cases continue growing at today’s pace, even with a lower death rate, he projects that about 800,000 people will die before any sort of herd immunity kicks in.”
“…Unlike other countries now comfortably opening businesses and schools, the U.S. wasted valuable time during its lockdown (503), said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The positive test rate is in double digits in many states, a sign that the virus is spreading faster than it can be controlled through testing and contact tracing. ‘What I am continually seeing in these states is that they keep making the same mistake in not being able to do the core elements of public health,’ he said. The problem, in his view: Testing supplies are limited, test results are too slow to be useful in guiding behavior, there are still too few contact tracers and many states don’t have a handle on who is actually infected. Until state or federal officials can fix those problems, hotspots will continue to emerge around the country.”
Because of these countless failures, the U.S. was looking at a projection of 224,000 dead by election day.
In addition to a staggering, first-in-the-world death toll,
the Trump virus was causing headaches for elections workers. As of Thursday,
July 16, New York had yet to finish counting the vote from the June 23rd primary because
of the volume of mail ballots.
Due to the lack of a vigorous national testing and tracing system, this
scenario was likely to play out again in the presidential election, as many of
those who could would avoid voting in person. As reported by
the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. was doing just a fraction of the amount of
testing necessary to counteract the coronavirus, a problem which promised to
get worse with the flu season. The keys to containing COVID-19 were more and
cheaper testing, faster test results, widespread contact tracing, and targeted
isolation. The foundation’s plan being ignored by the White House could be
implemented for $75 billion, roughly 1/30th of the amount the GOP had spent
on Trump’s tax cut for the rich.
Making up for the mistakes of the past was not a priority for the
administration, which was engaged in a full-court press to force schools to
re-open in the fall. As cases were increasing in 37 states and 45% of counties nationwide were experiencing “uncontrollable spread,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that the administration would not “let the science
[public health concerns] stand in the way” of prying schools open. (504)
Putting children and teachers in harm’s way was seen as necessary in order to
goose the economy as unemployment filings increased “by more than 1 million
for [the] 17th straight week.” (505)
Coronavirus refused to cooperate with Trump’s artificial timeline. On Friday,
July 17, it was reported that the U.S. had hit a new high of daily infections—77,217.
969 Americans died in the same time frame, the biggest one-day totals since
June 10. Though the administration wasn’t saying it publicly (506), a
Coronavirus Task Force report obtained by the Center of Public Integrity
recommended that 18 states with the highest infection rates should reverse their re-openings.
Among the troubling data points in the rising numbers was a big increase in
infections among Americans under 18, which made up around 6.4% of cases
nationally, including nearly 10% of the total cases in California and
Mississippi. In Florida, 31% of children tested positive for COVID-19. The
increase in infections among children made the danger of opening schools
prematurely even clearer.
Though these concerns were at the forefront of public dialogue, the
administration continued to censor public health officials who’d been asked to
provide guidance for school officials. As reported by Bianca Quilantan, CDC
head Robert Redfield (or a “designee”) had been invited by Bobby Scott (the
Democratic chair of the Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education
Subcommittee) “to discuss the immediate needs of K-12 public schools as many
districts look to reopen in the fall.” Redfield had been blocked from appearing even as the CDC was delaying safety
guidelines for schools. In a statement, Scott said, “It is alarming that the
Trump Administration is preventing the CDC from appearing before the Committee
at a time when its expertise and guidance is so critical to the health and
safety of students, parents, and educators….This lack of transparency does a
great disservice to the many communities across the country facing difficult
decisions about reopening schools this fall.”
While the administration took a libertarian approach to protecting American
children and their families from the pandemic, Trump ordered an authoritarian crackdown in Portland, unleashing soldiers from the Department
of Homeland Security on unsuspecting protesters.
On Saturday, July 18, it was reported that the U.S. had had its
second consecutive day of over 70,000 new infections and Trump reached his personal milestone of 140,000
dead Americans. Coinciding with this startling—and yet still lowball—number, an all-star team of reporters at the New
York Times published “Inside
Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus,” a long read
explaining why the U.S. had had by far the steepest human costs of any
developed country.
The piece revealed that even in April, as 2,000 Americans were dying daily from
COVID-19, the administration was secretly planning on pawning the problem off
onto state governments which were ill-equipped to handle the pandemic (507).
According to the authors, “Over a critical period beginning in mid-April,
President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading,
that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain
its remaining ‘embers’ and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.
“In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop
only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the
economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.
“…Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an
examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he
embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that
he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong
leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill
large numbers of Americans.” (508)
The administration’s virus response had been a comedy of errors, the blind
leading the blind: “Key elements of the administration’s strategy were
formulated…by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health
emergencies and were taking their cues from the president.” (509)
When the administration did seek scientific advice, they relied on the
rosy assessments of Deborah Birx rather than the hard-headed (and accurate)
views of Dr. Fauci, as Birx’s advice would enable Trump to do what he already
wanted to do—re-open the economy (510). On April 16, voluntary public safety
guidelines had been issued and Trump had told governors, “You’re going to call
your own shots,” effectively allowing state leaders to re-open prematurely.
Around the same time, there was a marked shift in Birx’s communications with
the University of Washington, which was providing data models: “‘We made clear
that to get the epidemic under control and bring it down to effectively zero
transmission required the social distancing mandates to be in place,’ said
Christopher J. L. Murray, the director of the modeling program. ‘April 22 —
somewhere around that period. That’s when the tone shifted. They started to ask
questions about what will be the trajectory and where with the lifting of
mandates?’” (511)
Birx predicted that cases would peter out, but “Dr. Birx’s belief that the
United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The
Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social
distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country
slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from
what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.
“The difference was critical. As communities across the United States raced to
reopen, the number of daily cases barely dropped below 20,000 in early May. The
virus was still circulating across the country.”
“…Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that
Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level, including national testing
strategies and contact tracing to track down and isolate people who had
interacted with newly diagnosed patients.
“‘These things were done in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, Vietnam, in
Singapore, in New Zealand and in China,’ said Andy Slavitt, a former federal
health care official who had been advising the White House.
“‘They were not secret,’ he said. ‘Not mysterious. And these were not all
wealthy countries. They just took accountability for getting it done. But we
did not do that here.’”
The administration’s lack of accountability—specifically their fear of a more
accurate accounting of the true extent of deaths and infections—showed up again
in negotiations with Congress over the relief package. As reported by
Erica Werner and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, “The Trump
administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct
testing (512) and contact tracing (513) in the upcoming coronavirus relief
bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.
“The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators
want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (514), and
billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at
home and abroad, the people said. (515)
“…One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to
allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing [1/3rd
the amount sought by House Democrats], but that certain administration
officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely.”
Administration resistance was tied to their P.R. effort to shirk responsibility
for the crisis: “Trump and other White House officials have been pushing for
states to own more of the responsibility for testing and have objected to creating national standards, at times seeking to minimize the federal government’s
role.”
More results of the administration’s abdication of duty were reported on Sunday,
July 19.
As bad as Trump’s official unemployment numbers were, they only told part of
the story. Four to seven million Americans had experienced cuts in wages (516),
several million had seen their wages capped (517), and millions more had seen
their hours cut back (518). Overall, one in eight employed Americans were coping
with reduced incomes, which meant less spending, which
impacted revenues for already-struggling businesses.
This was just one way in which the U.S. population, under Trump’s
mis-leadership, continued to feel the pandemic far more acutely than the
citizens of other developed countries. The failure of the U.S. federal
government to effectively mobilize its vast financial and medical resources was probed in “The crisis that shocked
the world: America’s response to the coronavirus.”
The disaster movie vibe was unique to the United States: “Many countries have
rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States,
coronavirus transmission is out of control. The national response is
fragmented, shot through with political rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March
have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results leaving the
country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly
irrelevant.”
America's failings could be tied directly to core elements of Trump’s
governance:
“The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has
exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and
racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and
death.
“…While other countries endured some of the same setbacks, few have suffered
from all of them simultaneously and catastrophically. If there was a mistake to
be made in this pandemic, America has made it.”
The “single biggest miscalculation was rushing to reopen the economy while the
virus was still spreading at high rates through much of the country” and the
“death rate from covid-19 in the United States looks like that of countries
with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources and technological
infrastructure.”
The key takeaway: “…Future historians will not treat kindly Trump’s efforts to
divide (519) and confuse, said James Grossman, executive director of the
American Historical Association.
“‘You look at the Great Depression and how Roosevelt made a concerted effort to
unite the country — the fireside chats, the New Deal. That is the instinctive
reaction of almost every president in crisis. Even if you don’t succeed, you
try to convince people that they’re all in this together,’ Grossman said. ‘This
presidency is the exception and anomaly.’”
Dan Primack and Nicholas Johnston of Axios picked up this
theme again on Monday, July 20, with “We blew it.”
Due to the Trump administration’s lack of foresight and execution, test results
were taking a week and longer, allowing asymptomatic carriers to continue to
transmit the virus (520), and since the U.S. had little contact tracing in
place, test results would be late and often not followed up on to the extent
they should be (521). Stimulus funds dedicated to K-12 education had been just
enough to cover basic costs; the U.S. had yet to pony up anything approaching
the amount of money necessary to keep schools safe. Stimulus money to keep
millions of Americans afloat was about to run out due to the failure of Trump
and his GOP Senate allies to respond to a second stimulus bill passed by the
Democratic House on May 15. The Paycheck Protection Program, intended to help
small businesses, was also about to run out due to GOP negligence, and the
administration still hadn’t even disbursed all of the funds authorized by the
original bill.
Nowhere were the human consequences of this hyper-partisan stupidity and recklessness more
evident than Florida, which had more than 10,000 official infections for the
sixth consecutive day, part of a national trend showing that America’s 7-day
average had increased for 41 consecutive days. (522)
Despite the costs of his divisive and dishonest tactics, Trump doubled down on lies and distortions in an interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace. In the space
of just 40 minutes, Trump made false claims that increased testing explained
the rise in cases (523), that the U.S. had “the best testing in the world,”
that mail-in voting would “rig” the 2020 election, that the U.S. had the lowest
COVID-19 mortality rates in the world (524), that the administration wasn’t
trying to discredit Anthony Fauci (see #492), that masks “cause problems,”
(525) and that Democrats opposed re-opening schools just to hurt him
politically. (526)
One of the major impacts of Trump’s months of disinformation was explored
on Tuesday, July 21. In “Why masks are (still) politicized in
America,” Anna North of Vox examined just how out of step the
U.S. was with other developed countries:
“More than five months into the Covid-19 pandemic,
the evidence for masks keeps getting stronger.
“One study in Germany found
that mask mandates reduced the growth of infections by about 40 percent. Another estimated
that mask rules in 15 US states and Washington, DC, may have prevented as many
as 230,000 to 450,000 cases.”
Despite the obvious public health necessity of wearing a mask, “The words of
Trump and other [Republican] public figures appear to be having an impact on
the behavior of ordinary people, whose mask-wearing habits break down along
party, racial, and gender lines. The result is that one of the cheapest and simplest
ways to curb the spread of Covid-19 has been turned into a political football —
and it’s costing people their lives.” (527)
“…The effects of this politicization can be seen in recent polling on mask use.
In a Pew poll conducted
June 4 to 10, 76 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said they
wear a mask in stores all or most of the time. Just 53 percent of Republicans
and Republican-leaning voters said the same. Men are also less likely to
prioritize mask-wearing than women — in another Pew poll, conducted in mid-June, 42 percent of men said people in
their community should wear masks in public places, while 53 percent of women
said the same. The disconnect could reflect the fact that more men identify as
Republican, as well as the fact that Trump and others have implicitly or
explicitly linked a refusal to wear a mask with toughness and masculinity.
“White Americans are also less likely than other racial groups to routinely
wear masks, according to the early June Pew data. In that poll, 78 percent of
white people said they wear masks in stores at least some of the time, compared
with 86 percent of Black respondents, 87 percent of Latinx respondents, and 89
percent of those of Asian descent. While there are many possible reasons for
the racial gaps, including party affiliation and the fact that many Black and
Latinx communities have been especially hard hit by Covid-19, racist rhetoric
by Trump and others may play a role in convincing some white people not to wear
masks.”
Murtaza Akhter of the University of Arizona College of Medicine summed up just
how out of touch anti-maskers were with the rest of the civilized world: “We
just really need a cultural shift….This isn’t even a debate in other places.”
Due in no small part to self-centered young people and low-information Republicans ignoring public health guidelines, the U.S. saw over 1,000 reported deaths for the first time in nearly two months.
As high as the official death and infection totals were, they were a major
undercount. Trump’s own CDC estimated that infection rates could be anywhere
from six to 24 times higher than reported.
One of the reasons we didn’t have better data was continued delays in getting
test results. As reported on Wednesday,
July 22, “Laboratories across the U.S. are buckling under a surge of
coronavirus tests, creating long processing delays that experts say are
undercutting the pandemic response.
“With the U.S. tally of confirmed infections at nearly 4 million Wednesday and
new cases surging, the bottlenecks are creating problems for workers kept off
the job while awaiting results (528), nursing homes struggling to keep the
virus out (529) and for the labs themselves as they deal with a crushing
workload.
“Some labs are taking weeks to return COVID-19 results, exacerbating fears that
people without symptoms could be spreading the virus if they don’t isolate
while they wait.
Tom Frieden, who had led the CDC under Barack Obama, told reporters “There’s
been this obsession with, ‘How many tests are we doing per day?’ but ‘The
question is how many tests are being done with results coming back within a
day, where the individual tested is promptly isolated and their contacts are
promptly warned.’”
Public health experts pointed out that “Test results that come back after two
or three days are nearly worthless…because by then the window for tracing the
person’s contacts to prevent additional infections has essentially closed.”
As with the administration’s many other failures, the lack of a national
testing program (or sufficient aid to states to run their own tests) was hitting people of color the hardest. According to Soo Rin Kim, Matthew Vann, Laura Bronner and
Grace Manthey of 538.com, “[testing] sites in communities of color in many
major cities face higher demand than sites in whiter or wealthier areas in
those same cities. The result of this disparity is clear: Black and Hispanic
people are more likely to experience longer wait times and understaffed testing
centers. (530)
“…An assessment of city and state health department websites also revealed,
over and over, fewer testing sites in areas primarily inhabited by racial
minorities.”
People of color were also disproportionately impacted by the economic collapse resulting from Trump’s
failures to contain the pandemic. The latest jobs numbers were grim. On Thursday,
July 23, it came out that 1.4 million new unemployment claims had been filed in the prior week, an increase of
100,000 from the week before, bringing the total to 30 million Americans without work. As one example of many, Yelp estimated that “more than
half of the restaurants temporarily closed are now permanently shuttered.” (531)
Against a backdrop of mass misery, the GOP continued to play games with peoples’
lives. As reported by Sarah Ferris and
Andrew Desiderio, “Tens of millions of unemployed Americans are about to lose
their economic lifeline during the worst recession in 80 years, with eviction
protections set to expire (see #338) at the same time.” (532)
“…Without quick action from Congress, the still-growing ranks of America’s unemployed
will receive their final round of an extra $600 benefit within days, with no
certainty about when more help might arrive.”
The benefits were about to expire because Trump’s key congressional ally,
Republican Mitch McConnell, hadn’t bothered to address the issue until more
than two months after
House Democrats—who had been thinking ahead—had passed a stimulus bill. Due to
McConnell’s delay, even fast-tracked negotiations would leave millions hanging,
as states tasked with administering the benefits would take weeks to catch up
with the likely changes to federal policy.
According to the
reporters, thanks to the uncertainty caused by McConnell’s delay, “Any changes
could create an accounting disaster for the state systems, which are still
struggling to keep up as the number of new workers applying for unemployment
benefits each week remains at nearly two times the peak seen during the Great
Recession.”
While Mitch McConnell single-handedly screwed tens of millions of Americans,
Ron DeSantis, Republican governor of Florida, proved that he thoroughly
deserved the COVID-19 dunce cap. That day, it was reported that Florida had
had 173 coronavirus deaths, a new record, which amounted to one death every 11 and ½ minutes. DeSantis had been warned of the threat of resurgence months earlier by Rebekah
Jones (then-manager of Florida’s coronavirus dashboard), but the data she was
presenting didn’t align with his Trumpian desire to re-open the economy, so he
fired her and had underlings rig the data to undercount deaths and infections
once she was gone. DeSantis’s maneuvers were proving shortsighted, and
ironically, hurt his mentor; Trump announced that infection rates were so
severe in Florida that he would have to cancel his
dreamt-of super-spreader convention.
And there weren’t many other spots around the country he could move the event
to. Nationwide, 2,600 new infections were
being discovered on the hour, “the highest rate in the world.”
One thing Trump wouldn’t budge on was his insistence that American children go
back to school in the fall so that the severity of the pandemic (and his
colossal failures to mitigate it) wouldn’t be quite so obvious in the crucial
weeks before the election. Bowing to Trump’s perception of his short-term
political interests, the CDC released safety guidelines which placed more emphasis on the costs of keeping
children out of school than the far grimmer consequences of forcing them into
classrooms with insufficient public safety resources. (533)
And the truth was that we weren’t prepared. As pointed out by reporters Ryan
Heath and Myah Ward, “most schools in most countries are still closed” and the
U.S., due to structural factors and infection rates, was unsuited to re-open: “the administration is missing key context when it points
to European countries with open schools as a model to follow.
“A combination of three factors exist in Europe, New Zealand,
Australia and other countries, which enabled them to re-open their schools.
1. The virus is under control because of widely adhered nationwide pandemic
rules. We’re talking daily deaths in the single digits.
2. They have functional safety nets of universal health care and public schools
with enough funds to adapt to hybrid learning or other teaching models.
3. Teachers unions have typically been involved in planning from the get-go.
That’s essential, because teachers are the only viable enforcers of new safety
rules.
Everywhere else is missing at least one of these ingredients, and in the U.S.
all three ingredients are missing in most states and at the federal level.”
Most Americans grasped this in part or in whole, but many Republicans, unable
to see through Trump's self-serving rhetoric, continued to demonstrate ignorance of the human stakes, as shown in polling done by the AP in conjunction with the
NORC Center for Public Affairs. (534)
Forty-three percent of Republicans felt that K-12 schools could “open as usual”
or “open with minor adjustments,” while only six percent of Democrats believed
this. Forty-four percent of Democrats said schools should “not open at all,”
while only 14% of Republicans felt this way. Nine of ten Democrats knew that
re-opening should be contingent on students and teachers wearing masks, while
half of Republicans didn’t think masks were necessary. Twice as many Democrats
as Republicans understood that “schools should use a mix of in-person and
virtual instruction to reduce the number of students in buildings.”
Friday, July 24, marked the 4th consecutive day that the U.S. officially posted over 1,000 deaths from
COVID-19. Thirty-seven states had experienced increases in infections over the prior
two weeks and Trump reached his personal milestone of four million infections
nationally. A graphic flashed
on CNN showed that “It took the U.S. a little more than three months to get to
1 million coronavirus cases, then two weeks to add the most recent 1 million.”
The rapid increase was coming primarily from Republican-led states whose
governors had marched in lockstep with Trump's commands. Trump allies were encouraging him to come up with a national strategy to combat COVID-19, but all they were getting was
mechanical news conferences and a lot of spin.
While Trump was focused on his campaign to the exclusion of all else, small
businesses were struggling. According to a survey done by the National
Federation of Small Businesses, 45% of the businesses that had gotten loan
approval through the $360 billion Economic Injury Disaster Loan program
(EIDL) had yet to receive their money from Trump’s Small Business Administration (535). And
the $660 billion Payment Protection Program (PPP), established by Congress to
prop up small businesses, was running out of money, leading to a wave of
closures and an increase in unemployment (536). As detailed by
Eli Rosenberg of the Washington Post, “A recent report from Goldman
Sachs found that only about one in six businesses that received loans said they
felt confident they could pay their employees without further assistance.”
Western Europe “had used a different model: universal payroll aid that saw
governments paying as much as 80 percent of workers' salaries to keep them on
payroll for a longer time, which has kept more businesses afloat and less
people out of work.”
Europe’s success was based not only on the stimulus model they chose, but on
their ability to contain the virus so much more effectively than Trump had.
Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, told the Post that
the failure of the PPP to achieve long-term success “basically says the same
thing as our outlier status in the numbers of death and infections: We blew
it….Other countries managed to both contain the coronavirus after three months,
and also keep large numbers of workers on payrolls. We didn't do either.”
As much as Trump had screwed things up so far, he was far from finished.
Looming on the horizon was potentially the most chaotic and hazardous American
election since the Civil War. Garrett Graff previewed the horror show in “8 Big Reasons Election Day 2020 Could Be a
Disaster.”
Graff went through election highlights from 2020 so far—vote tally failures at
the Iowa caucuses, mass confusion in the Wisconsin primary due to GOP lawsuits, the long
lines in Georgia—and pointed out that use of the analogy of a perfect storm to
describe the upcoming election was misplaced, as just about all of the problems
expected in the presidential election could be predicted (and prevented) in
advance.
The threats to a functional election included the lack of safety for elections
workers and Americans who were voting in person, confusion and long lines as a
result of the reduction in and relocation of polling places, onerous
requirements for the use and validation of absentee ballots, a lack of staff to
respond to absentee ballot requests, slow delivery times for the ballots due to
the struggles of the U.S. Postal Service, and 50,000 “poll watchers” hired to
harass voters, particularly voters of color in inner cities.
The common thread in these scenarios was Republican malfeasance or negligence.
In order to reduce turnout, Republicans had filed lawsuits across the country
to oppose mail-in balloting and force voters to risk their health by voting in person (537). The lack of resources for
local elections officials was a result of Senate Republicans only agreeing to $400 million in funding after House Democrats had asked for 9X as
much money, then refusing to negotiate in good faith (538). The 50,000 poll
watchers were hired by the GOP after harassment of voters was deemed legal by
Republican Supreme Court judges who gutted a key section of the Voting Rights
Act in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. The sorry
state of the U.S. Postal Service stemmed from years of Republican budget cuts
and the actions of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a former Trump donor who
was dismantling the agency without regard for how it would impact service (539).
On Saturday, July 25, the U.S. had over 1,000 official deaths for the fifth consecutive day. Hospitals were jammed
in Florida and Texas, leading to shortages in
key medical staff.
The Washington Post had a lengthy feature about the policies of Ron DeSantis, governor of
Florida, whose COVID-19 response had been driven by the short-term interests of
Donald Trump, with “decision-making…increasingly shaped by politics and
divorced from scientific evidence.”
Florida had been used by Trump to drive other states off the cliff:
“…the crisis in Florida has been particularly acute, infectious-disease
specialists say, because politics have dictated the response at crucial
junctures - never more so than with the state's reopening, which was cast by
the governor as a return to normal rather than as a new and even more
precarious phase of the pandemic.
“Trump told aides that Florida's early success gave other states a
justification to reopen, according to three administration officials.
Meanwhile, DeSantis quickly turned presidential rhetoric into gubernatorial
orders, all while rejecting measures, including a statewide mask mandate and an
extended stay-at-home order, that helped other states contain their outbreaks.”
The results were in: “One out of every 52 Floridians has been infected with the
virus. The state's intensive care units are being pushed to the brink, with
some overcapacity. Florida's unemployment system is overwhelmed and its tourism
industry is in shambles.”
Asked about DeSantis’s response to the pandemic, a spokesman for Trump
told the Post “Ron DeSantis is doing a great job and will go
down in history as a great governor of Florida.”
Ron Desantis’s failures of leadership were demonstrated again on Sunday,
July 26 when Florida passed New York for
total number of COVID-19 infections, making it second only to California, a
state twice its size. Due to Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo’s competent and
aggressive response to the coronavirus, New York now had the pandemic under control. Florida was among the states on New York’s travel advisory list.
Across the country, the U.S. had over 1,000 official deaths for a 4th consecutive
day, contributing to Trump posting
his lowest COVID-19 approval ratings to date—32%.
On Monday, July 27, Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker of the
Washington Post asked the obvious question. Given that Trump’s election hopes were tied to getting the
pandemic under control, or at least appearing to get the
pandemic under control, "Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus
crisis?”
Based on the far lower death and infection rates in the rest of the developed
world, the route to success was obvious: channeling America’s vast resources
through a coordinated federal response. Yet Trump continued to dither and
impose sickness, death, and misery on tens of millions because of his personal
shortcomings:
“People close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions
and impressions, say the president's inability to wholly address the crisis is
due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive
feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News;
and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with
the pandemic.” (540)
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci elaborated
further:
“‘His operating style is to double- and triple-down on positions and to never,
ever admit he's wrong about anything….His 50-year track record is to bulldog
through whatever he's doing, whether it's Atlantic City, which was a failure,
or the Plaza Hotel, which was a failure, or Eastern Airlines, which was a
failure. He can never just say, ‘I got it wrong and let's try over again.’”
Trump had shown little concern for the mass suffering he had unleashed until it
had impacted Republicans: “In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began
presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among
‘our people’ in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They
also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically
important states in the Midwest - including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.”
The results of Trump’s pathologies manifested in over a dozen states reporting record numbers of infections, which was
taking a toll on small businesses. Already shortchanged by the administration’s
slow disbursement of money from the EIDL program (see #535) and indifference to
replenishing funds for the Payment Protection Program (see #536), small
businesses were “drowning in”
expenses tied to COVID-19 safety features that would not be necessary if the
coronavirus were under control. (541)
But Trump was unwilling to acknowledge the severity of the pandemic.
Incredibly, he advocated that more states re-open their economies fully (542) and took to Twitter to
share a video from right-wing quack doctor Stella Immanuel (543), known for pimping
hydroxychloroquine, dismissing the irrefutable science behind wearing masks,
and other bizarre claims. The video was removed from
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Grim realities made it all too clear why Trump wanted to hide behind his
Twitter account. Despite Trump’s assertion that
much of the country was “corona-free,” on Tuesday, July 28 it
was reported that 21 states (an increase from the week prior) were still in the red zone, with more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people.
Infection spread caused by a premature re-opening of the economy and a lack of
federal response was continuing to hamper the economy. Consumer confidence dropped even further from the low numbers in June. (544)
Most of this damage could have been avoided with a competent federal effort. As pointed out in a paper by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, “More than 117,000 Americans had died of COVID-19 by mid-June. If our response had been as effective as Germany’s, estimates show that we would have had only 36,000 COVID-19 deaths in that period in the United States. If our response had been as effective as South Korea, Australia, or Singapore’s, fewer than 2,000 Americans would have died. We could have prevented 99% of those COVID-19 deaths. But we didn’t.” (see #397)
The contrast between the focused pandemic responses overseas and the indifference of the U.S. federal government was highlighted again on Wednesday, July 29, when Trump reached his personal milestone of 150,000 dead Americans. As mind-blowing as the number was, it was a significant undercount. Included in this total were 1,400 deaths that day, the most since May.
Despite the premature re-opening of the economy, it came out that the second quarter contraction of America’s gross domestic product showed “the biggest drop in more than seven decades of records.”
The combination of the worst economy in seven decades and the administration’s refusal to increase SNAP benefits (see #289) was leaving the richest country in history “with almost 30 million Americans reporting that they’d not had enough to eat at some point in the seven days through July 21.”
Absent federal action, high levels of food insecurity (see #288, #289, #305, #333, #334, #345, #355, #453) were guaranteed to continue, as roughly half of the jobs lost during the pandemic were unlikely to return. (545)
The economic devastation was causing a rise in crime around the country (546). Remarkably, though the state of the economy and the rise in crime were directly tied to the administration’s failure to combat COVID-19, Trump tried to scare gullible white people into believing that crime would be even worse if Joe Biden were president. Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York College at Cortland told the AP, “Irony is way down the list of things that President Trump worries about.”
One of the biggest ironies was that with all of Trump’s concern for the economy, he apparently exerted no pressure on his Republican Senate ally Mitch McConnell to keep federal stimulus flowing to his constituents. On Thursday, July 30, in the midst of an increase in unemployment filings to 1.4 million—the 19th straight week with one million or more new filings—all signs showed that $600 of additional weekly unemployment benefits for 30,000,000 Americans and an eviction moratorium protecting the 25-33% of Americans who were short of rent would expire because of months of inaction by McConnell. (547)
Another result of McConnell’s delay was that K-12 schools starting in-person instruction in August wouldn’t have anywhere near the amount of money and resources needed to open safely (548). And federal assistance in the Republican stimulus plan (when or if it was ever acted on) was predicated on school districts maintaining the same level of funding they’d had previously, an impossibility given revenue reductions due to the contraction of the economy.
Few governors were more gung-ho about marching schoolchildren into the buzz saw of the pandemic than Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose state had had a record of 217 official COVID-19 deaths the day prior—the third consecutive day of record fatalities—and whose ICUs in Miami-Dade County were at 146% of capacity.
Florida's failures were extreme, but deaths were trending upward across the country. 1,529 Americans died from COVID-19 on Thursday, one every minute. Public health guidelines put out by Harvard University’s Global Health Institute and Edmond J. Safra Center recommended that 13 states lock down immediately; all but Nevada were red states which had voted for Trump. The institute found that infections in 22 other states were at “dangerous levels” and said that “stay-at-home orders are advised.” (W32)
Asked how it was that infections and deaths were so much worse in the United States than in every other developed country, Anthony Fauci said, “Other, certainly Asian countries, and certainly the European Union, when they so-called locked down — shut down, shelter in place, whatever you want to call it — they did it to about 95 percent of their countries….Some countries got hit badly, but once they locked down and turned things around, they came down to a very low baseline — down to tens or hundreds of new cases a day, not thousands. They came down and they stayed down.
“Now, in the United States, when we shut down, even though it was a stress and a strain for a lot of people, we only did it to the tune of about 50 percent of the country shutting down….Our curve goes up and starts to come down. But we never came down to a reasonable baseline. We came down to about 20,000 new infections per day, and we stayed at that level for several weeks in a row. Then we started to open up — getting America ‘back to normal’ — and started to see the cases go from 20,000 a day to 30,000, 40,000. We even hit that one point last week of 70,000 new cases a day.”
Trump’s response to the crisis of his own making was largely window dressing. As reported by Alayna Treene and Jacob Knutson of Axios, the administration had concocted a P.R.-based “Embers Strategy” in which they focused on hot spots (while ignoring infections in the vast majority of the country, 549) and Trump hyped vaccines that wouldn’t arrive until early 2021 under the best-case scenario.
The shortcomings of a targeted (as opposed to a comprehensive) federal approach to fighting the pandemic were reviewed by German Lopez of Vox in “San Francisco’s lonely war against Covid-19.”
As reported by Lopez, San Francisco had had one of the most aggressive responses to the pandemic in the country. San Francisco mayor London Breed had declared a state of emergency on February 25, the 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.”
The city had closed down even before the state of California, which had been the first state to shut down, and had stayed closed after the state re-opened. Residents had tended to wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines. Relative to other American cities its size, San Francisco had kept infections low, but there was no guarantee this would continue due to the Trump administration’s failure to provide local governments with adequate PPE and testing resources.
Grant Colfax, who heads San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, told Vox, “We are not isolated; we are interconnected….The virus exploits that very interconnectedness of our society. Without a consistent, robust, and sustained federal response that is driven by science … eventually things cannot be sustained.”
The U.S. could have had a robust and sustained federal response, and had been working on one in March and April, but the effort was aborted for short-sighted political reasons, as revealed in “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof Into Thin Air,’” a blockbuster Vanity Fair piece by Katherine Eban. (550)
According to Eban, on March 31, the administration secretly
acquired one million COVID-19 tests for a task force headed by Jared Kushner,
part of “a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have
massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level.”
“…Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s
handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college
roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing
industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing
strategy.”
“…Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and
limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight
and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and
contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by
the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.”
“…The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some
of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to
President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. ‘I was
beyond optimistic,’ said one participant. ‘My understanding was that the final
document would make its way to the president over that weekend’ and would
result in a ‘significant announcement.’”
The turning point came when “the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at
the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had
been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about
it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and
right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection
prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case
counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s
coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior
staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the
virus would soon fade away.
“Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan
was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the
White House’s official coronavirus task force.
“Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of
Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a
national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. ‘The
political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to
Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an
effective political strategy.’”
All these months later, as red states were getting hit harder by COVID-19 than
blue states, the catastrophic miscalculation couldn’t be more obvious. Dr.
Rajiv Shah of the Rockefeller Foundation told Vanity Fair, “We know
what has to be done: broad and ubiquitous testing tied to broad and effective
contact tracing….It takes about five minutes for anyone to understand that is
the only path forward to reopening and recovering.” Without testing and
tracing, “Our country is going to be stuck facing a series of rebound epidemics
that are highly consequential in a really deleterious way.”
On Friday, July 31, the bills for the administration’s strategy to
let blue states suffer came due as it was reported that there had been 25,000 COVID-19 deaths in
July, a record number of monthly infections, and a record number of hospitalizations. Leading the way, as usual, was Florida, with a
record 257 deaths on
Friday.
Trump’s “economic miracle” continued to disintegrate, with economic contraction projected to be more severe this year than in 1932, during the lowest point of the Great Depression. The failures of the administration to control the pandemic had “[wiped] out five years of economic growth,” according to the New York Times (551), and Fitch Ratings “revised its outlook on the country’s credit score to negative from stable, citing a “deterioration in the U.S. public finances and the absence of a credible fiscal consolidation plan.”
Among the many, many victims of the economic collapse were small businesses who
were running up credit card debt just to stay alive (552) and medical non-profits who
were in the red because
donations had slowed down and they were unable to have the fundraisers they
normally relied on. (553)
Further nightmares were on the horizon. A graphic shared by the New
York Times showed that most of the Southern half of the United
States—and especially Trump’s bedrock of support, the Deep South—wasn’t ready to re-open schools, though the traditional start of K-12 classes was just
weeks away. And Pilar Melendez of the Daily Beast reported on
a summer camp in Georgia where “76 percent of campers who were tested came back
positive” after just one week, “despite the organizers following most state
guidelines set by the governor and the CDC.”
Another nightmare-to-come was the November election. Trump said we
were facing “the greatest election disaster in history” due to the avalanche of
mail-in ballots that would be cast. This was likely true, but the disaster was
directly tied to Trump’s policies, from underfunding the
post office (see #539) to blocking overtime for carriers (leading to delays in
service) to failing to fund state and local governments who would be severely
short of elections workers due to the reluctance of elderly volunteers to come
out in the middle of a pandemic. A lack of volunteers—and a lack of federal aid to make up for those lost
volunteers—was certain to lead to the relocation and reduction of polling
places, causing chaos and long lines at the polls, particularly in cities, just
as Republicans hoped. (554)
The folly of sending children back to school prematurely was revealed again
on Saturday, August 1. As reported in the
New York Times, “Just hours into the first day of classes… a call from the
county health department notified Greenfield Central Junior High School in
Indiana that a student who had walked the halls and sat in various classrooms
had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Administrators began an emergency protocol, isolating the student and ordering
everyone who had come into close contact with the person, including other
students, to quarantine for 14 days.”
A history teacher at Greenfield-Central High School told the Times,
“I most definitely felt like we were not ready….Really, our whole state’s not
ready. We don’t have the virus under control. It’s just kind of like pretending
like it’s not there.”
These feelings were mirrored by Jeff Gregorich, a superintendent of public
schools in Arizona for 20 years who was profiled by Eli Saslow for the Washington Post. Gregorich
oversees a district where 90% of the children receive free or reduced lunch; in
Gregorich’s words, “these kids need every dollar we can get.”
But infection rates in the community, and among staff, were so high that it
didn’t make sense to re-open, certainly not when they weren’t being provided
the resources to re-open safely—as just one example, Gregorich mentioned having
to rely on shower curtains because Plexiglass barriers hadn’t been received.
And Arizona’s Republican governor, Trump ally Doug Ducey, had effectively
ransomed Arizona’s public schools, telling them they would lose 5% of their
funding if they didn’t do in-person learning. As Gregorich told Saslow, “it
feels like there’s a gun to my head.” Gregorich desperately wanted to re-open,
but it wasn’t safe. Claims to the contrary were “a fantasy.”
In effect, Trump’s failure to contain the virus had created a lose-lose situation for parents of school-aged children (555). Keep kids
out of school and they would miss out on in-person instruction, school lunches,
and other resources, and one of their parents would have to stay home or send
them to daycare, draining the family income. Send the kids to school and risk
infection and death.
As much as many Americans wanted to go back to normal, as much as Trump wanted
to pretend that we could go back to normal, the pandemic wasn’t
cooperating. Over 450,000 new infections had been reported in the past
week and 37 states were projected to see an uptick in deaths.
And the spread was all over. Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine told
a Washington Post reporter, “There are fewer and fewer places
where anybody can assume the virus is not there….It's in our most rural
counties. It's in our smallest communities. And we just have to assume the monster is everywhere.”
A report from
the Association of American Medical Colleges said that “If the nation does not
change its course - and soon - deaths in the United States could be well into
the multiple hundreds of thousands.” (W33)
On Sunday, August 2, it was reported that
nine states had seen record single-day infection records in the week that ended
on July 31.
Following in the footsteps of their Republican brethren in Texas and Arizona,
who had relied on Donald Trump for public safety guidance, morgues in beet-red
Mississippi were at capacity, forcing the state to utilize public refrigeration
units (556). Other than Arizona, Mississippi had the highest per capita
COVID-19 death rate in the country. Due to a woeful lack of resources in
Mississippi—“just two medical examiners and a single tech statewide”—coroners would be certain
to miss COVID-related causes of death among many of the deceased.
In the middle of a pandemic that had exploded because of the administration’s
push to re-open the economy prematurely, Trump’s economic advisor Stephen Moore
again put short-term economic growth and political considerations over public
safety, telling a radio interviewer, “We’ve got to get America back up and running….No more
lockdowns. No more shutting down businesses.” (557)
Among the consequences of the administration’s focus on short-term economic
growth at the expense of public health was an increase in psychiatric
disorders. As reported on Monday, August 3, a study done
in Italy showed that “COVID-19 survivors suffer higher rates of psychiatric
disorders including post-traumatic stress (PTSD), anxiety, insomnia and
depression.” The numbers were grim: “physicians found PTSD in 28% of cases,
depression in 31%, anxiety in 42% of patients and insomnia in 40%, and finally
obsessive-compulsive symptoms in 20%.” (558-562)
Stress and anxiety were rational responses to a pandemic that continued to
rage. Even Trump toady Deborah Birx told CNN that
“What we are seeing today is different from March and April….It is
extraordinarily widespread. It's into the rural as equal urban areas.”
On cue, Trump took to Twitter to deride Birx for her flash of honesty, but his craven lies (563) and distortions were no match
for reality. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the dollar had lost 10% of its value (564) and Trump’s premature re-opening had only led to
more infections, which was causing the economy to stall. Neel Kashkari, a
self-described “free-market Republican” and president of the Minneapolis
Federal Reserve Bank, penned a New York Times op-ed which said
that the only way to revamp the economy, long term, was to do what public
health officials had long advocated: shut the economy down until the virus was under control. (W34)
Trump had no interest in long-term thinking. As reported by Alice Miranda
Ollstein, Trump reauthorized money for the National Guard to assist states with
COVID-19 responses, but he slashed aid by 25%, creating reductions in funding for “running testing sites,
assisting with contact tracing, building field hospitals, sanitizing nursing
homes and stocking food banks as the virus surges across more states.” (565)
Though Trump shortchanged 48 states of badly-needed assistance, he left full
funding in place for his political allies in Texas and Florida. The director of the Democratic Governors Association, Noam
Lee, told Politico, “While the coronavirus doesn't discriminate
between ‘red’ states or ‘blue’ states, it is disturbingly clear that our president
does.”
Trump’s soft spot for Florida came up again on Tuesday, August 4.
Though Trump (who votes by mail) had spent months attacking mail voting, months suing to
force Americans to vote in person during a pandemic, and was doing everything
in his power to ensure that the U.S. Postal Service would fail to get ballots
out to constituents or return them in time to be counted, on Tuesday he tweeted
“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election
system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True.” There was no concrete evidence that
Florida’s system was safer than any other, but the president and his political
hacks were concerned that his months of attacks on voting by mail had created
a big disparity in absentee ballot requests in Florida: Democrats had
requested 1.9 million ballots, while Republicans had requested just 1.3 million
ballots.
The incident showed how gullible many of Trump’s followers were and are, both
how willing they were to believe Trump's baseless claims that mail balloting was
somehow corrupt and that voting in person during a pandemic was perfectly safe
(566). This bedrock ignorance (see #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s
319-323. #325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440, #452, #534) and the denial of most
Republican voters about the extent of the coronavirus and Trump's role in it
were also reflected in a study done
by Gallup and the Knight Foundation which found that Trump had succeeded in
making the mere act of reporting the news hyper-partisan.
According to the study, “71% of Republicans have a ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’
unfavorable opinion of the news media, while 22% of Democrats feel the same
way.” The distrust of the media was rooted in conservatives’ belief that a
president who had lied over 20,000 times was more trustworthy than a press corps that is
consistently adversarial to presidents of both parties. It manifested in tens
of millions of conservatives flouting public safety measures and helping the
virus spread several months after the dangers of transmission had been obvious.
(567)
Emboldened by the fact that his base never held him accountable, Trump made a
number of misstatements in an interview with
Jonathan Swan of Axios. Asked about the wisdom of having held his
super-spreader rally in Tulsa during a spike in cases there (see #373), a rally
which was “likely” shown
to have made community spread worse in the area, Trump bragged about the
ratings the rally produced at Fox. Asked when Americans could have testing with
same-day results, as he had promised, Trump said, “there are those that say you
can test too much. You do know that.” (568) Asked about the state of the
pandemic in the U.S., Trump said it was under control; when Swan pointed out
that over a thousand Americans were dying daily, Trump said, “They are dying,
that’s true, it is what it is.”
In the real world, 23 states (18
of which had supported Trump in 2016) were in the red zone, Americans were
being hit with the steepest increase in grocery prices in decades (see #345), millions of
low-income Americans were unable to pay their energy bills (569), 40% of Americans were delaying medical care, and 200,000 or more medical workers—including one of every four nursing home employees—had
contracted the virus because of Trump’s failure to get a handle on the
pandemic. (570)
As much damage as he had already inflicted on his constituents, Trump was far
from done. His desire to force schools open (so the extent of the pandemic
wasn’t so obvious during the crucial final two months of the election) received
a failing grade when Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia sent 260 employees home in the first week because they had tested positive for
COVID-19 or been exposed to someone who had.
As reported by
Caitlin Owens at Axios, “The more we learn about kids and the
coronavirus, the riskier reopening schools for in-person learning appears to
be, at least in areas with high caseloads,” which is why Deborah Birx
herself had advocated for online education in communities with a “high
caseload and active community spread.”
Trump referred to
Birx’s comments as “pathetic” and continued to double down on dangerous lies.
On Wednesday, August 5, the Trump campaign posted claims that
children were “virtually immune” to the coronavirus on Facebook and Twitter.
Both posts were considered misinformation and forced down. (571)
That same day, Trump praised Arizona’s response to COVID-19 as a “model” approach though Arizona had “the fifth-highest number of
current hospitalizations in the country, the fifth-highest number of new cases
in the last week, and the fifth-highest rate of tests that come back positive”
and a “positivity rate of about 18 percent — far higher than the 5 percent that
the CDC says indicates sufficient testing and control of the virus.” (572)
Trump also told Fox News that the U.S. was in “very good shape” and that “This
thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away.” (573)
One state where COVID-19 wasn’t going away was Florida, which officially
passed half a million infections, more than any developed country outside the U.S. Elderly
nursing home residents were hit especially hard.
Republican stonewalling on the stimulus negotiations figured prominently in
news coverage on Thursday, August 6.
Having ignored the House Democrats’ stimulus bill from its passage on May 15
until well into July, thereby intentionally missing the deadlines for both the
eviction moratorium and the expiration of additional unemployment benefits
(574), Republicans were now severely low-balling necessary funding.
Sticking points included aid for strapped cities and states, money for
the struggling U.S. Postal Service, funding for childcare, and a resumption of
enhanced unemployment benefits that had died as a result of Republican
inaction. In all instances, Republicans were far less generous than Democrats
to Americans in need, even as the figures being discussed were a fraction of
the two trillion-dollar tax cut (which went overwhelmingly to millionaires) Republicans had passed two years earlier on a party-line vote.
Economic numbers only magnified the GOP’s moral leprosy in shortchanging
their constituents during a time of national desperation. More than a million
Americans had filed new unemployment claims for 20 straight weeks. Thirty-two
million Americans were receiving either state or federal unemployment, an
increase of eleven million from pre-pandemic levels. Several million Americans’
jobs had simply vanished, never to return; a study in May projected that 42% of the jobs lost would be gone permanently. Just 167,000 new jobs had been created in July, a fraction
of the expected rebound, and the U.S. leapt ahead of 25 other countries in the
annual Bloomberg Misery Index.
Mark Zandi, an economist for Moody’s Analytics, told Politico, “The
economy has largely gone sideways since mid-June, as the re-intensification of
the virus has forced about half the nation’s states to either backtrack or
pause their business re-openings….It is critical that lawmakers agree to
another substantial fiscal rescue package before Congress goes away on its
August recess for the fragile economy to avoid backsliding into recession.”
Unlikely to help the sluggish economy was news that the U.S. had recorded over 2,000 deaths in a day for the first time since May 7. As high as
these numbers were, as always, they were an undercount. Data was poor due to
state systems being overwhelmed, a lack of consistency in how the data was
collected and reported among states and local governments, insufficient testing
and contact tracing, slow test results, and the Trump administration’s decision
to hide the data from the public (see #493-497).
The lack of accurate real-time data was robbing public health officials,
schools, and businesses of the information they needed to drive sound policy
and contain the virus. As reported by
Brian Resnick of Vox, “The best data we have on community spread of
Covid-19 is weeks out of date when it arrives. And schools won’t necessarily be
able to monitor the consequences of their decisions in real time. With a virus
capable of exponential growth, these lags in data can result in catastrophe.” (575)
The lags in test data were one of the many factors looked at in a New
York Times deep dive by David Leonhardt titled “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus.” Drawing on a trove of data, Leonhardt explored why it was
that the U.S. was “the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe,
sustained outbreak for more than four months.”
The contrasts to the rest of the developed world were startling: “Over the past
month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus…That’s
more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea
and Australia, combined.” Spain’s 50,000 new infections were high by European
standards, yet Florida—with half of Spain’s population—had had 300,000
infections in the same time frame.
Despite America’s vast resources, “When it comes to the virus, the United
States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it
is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South
Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.” (576)
America’s failures were due in part to a national emphasis on individualism and
libertarian economic philosophies, the former leading to millions unwilling to
follow public health guidelines, the latter allowing for a healthcare system
that often fails people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, particularly
people of color who are impacted by COVID-19 at inordinate rates.
But the main reason the U.S. had vastly more deaths and infections than every
other developed country was Donald Trump’s failures of leadership (see
#1-#576): “In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries,
period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and
significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus
was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need
for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads;
and promoted medical disinformation.”
Trump’s tack had been mimicked by many of his Republican political allies
around the country, with devastating results, and the U.S. had never had a
federal plan to clean up the mess. Caitlin Rivers of the John Hopkins Center
for Health Security told the Times, “In many of the countries that
have been very successful they had a much crisper strategic direction and
really had a vision….I’m not sure we ever really had a plan or a strategy.”
The numbers told the story: “the American death toll is of a different order of
magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s
population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus
deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per
capita death rate about half as large. And these gaps may worsen in coming
weeks, given the lag between new cases and deaths.”
Not only were deaths significantly higher in the U.S., but “the normal
activities of life — family visits, social gatherings, restaurant meals,
sporting events — may be more difficult in the United States than in any other
affluent country” (577) and the U.S. had vastly more COVID-19 survivors,
leading to millions who would be subject to a whole host of physiological
problems (heart damage,
kidney damage, lung scarring, blood clots, strokes, chronic fatigue, hair loss)
and neurological problems
(brain fog,
headaches, insomnia, lack of mood regulation, loss of taste, loss of smell). (578)
Policy failures included loopholes in the China travel ban that had
allowed 40,000 people into the country in February and March, delays in
banning travel from Europe until March, after which travel was still allowed
from the U.K. (which had high infection rates, 579), and a lax approach to
quarantining people who entered the country (580). Australia, which had had
rigorous regulations around travel, had less than 300 official COVID-19
deaths—total—not much more than Florida had recently had in a single day.
The U.S. had insisted on developing its own tests, rather than use WHO tests
that were ready to go, but created flawed tests which had to be fixed, leaving
the U.S. with very limited testing well into March, creating the false
impression that infections were low and allowing the virus to spread.
Months later, a lack of federal investment was forcing many Americans to wait
in long lines to
be tested and wait up to two weeks for a test result. By contrast, “In Belgium
recently, test results have typically come back in 48 to 72 hours. In Germany
and Greece, it is two days. In France, the wait is often 24 hours.”
The failure of U.S. officials to advocate for masks early and often was also a
major contributor to the pandemic’s death grip on America. Due to the anti-mask
messaging of Trump, Fox, Sinclair Broadcasting, and many other anti-science
Republican politicians and media outlets, masks became just another victim of
political polarization: “Throughout much of the [Democratic] Northeast and the
West Coast, more than 80 percent of people wore masks when within six feet of
someone else. In more conservative areas, like the Southeast, the share was
closer to 50 percent.” (see #452)
Europe had waited until infection rates were low before re-opening their
economy, but most of the U.S. had barged ahead while the pandemic was still
active, largely at Trump’s urging. America had seen a brief uptick in job
growth, but ultimately this led to an upsurge in infections and an economy that
was little better than before the re-openings, with states that opened earliest
seeing the biggest spikes in new cases. Georgia, led by hard-right Republican
Brian Kemp, was one of the first states to re-open: “In June and July, Georgia
reported more than 125,000 new virus cases, turning it into one of the globe’s
new hot spots. That was more new cases than Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan and Australia combined during that time frame.”
By contrast, New York, which had been the COVID-19 epicenter early on, brought
infections way down through the aggressive mitigation efforts of Democratic
governor Andrew Cuomo. New York’s experience showed that America’s failures
were caused by a lack of leadership, not a lack of resources or know-how. Dr.
Thomas Frieden, who headed the CDC under Barack Obama, told the Times,
“This isn’t actually rocket science….We know what to do, and we’re not doing
it.”
The failures of Trump and his state-level Republican allies continued to drive
the pandemic on Friday, August 7. A 13% reduction in testing over the prior week had obscured infection numbers nationally,
but as reported by Caitlin Owens and Andrew Witherspoon of Axios,
“A cluster of states in the Midwest are seeing more of their coronavirus tests
coming back positive — potentially an early indicator of a growing outbreak.”
States outside of the Midwest continued to have high rates of positive tests
too, including Nevada and the Republican-run states of Alabama, Mississippi,
Arkansas, Arizona, and Florida.
Countrywide, the U.S. was projected to lose 300,000 citizens to
COVID-19 by December 1.
The following day, Saturday, August 8, the 300,000 projection—based
on the official death tally of 162,000—was shown to be an underestimate
as the New York Times reported that
“there have been 200,700 excess deaths in the United States during the
coronavirus pandemic, much higher than the current total of 161,000 confirmed
deaths.”
With stimulus negotiations stalled because of chief of staff Mark Meadows’ lack
of concern for tens of millions of Americans in need, Trump signed executive
orders. Trump’s action looked good to Republicans and other low-information
voters, but was insufficient to the moment and problematic on legal grounds, as Congress typically disburses funds. Trump low-balled unemployment extensions from the $600 of
additional weekly funding Democrats had proposed to $400 (581) and pawned 25%
of this benefit off onto states which were already deep in debt (582). Even if
the measures withstood court challenges, it could take months for state unemployment
systems to adjust to the funding reduction. Payroll taxes were set to be
deferred from September through December, but there was no guarantee that
employers would comply and if they did comply, revenue for Medicare and Social
Security would be cut.
The other issues Democrats had brought up in stimulus negotiations—money for
testing, election security, small businesses, the U.S. Postal Service, state
and local governments, childcare assistance, and public safety funds for
schools about to re-open—were left unaddressed. (583-589)
Trump’s abdication of duty was a consistent theme. Philip Rucker, Yasmeen
Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, and Robert Costa of the Washington Post looked
at the administration’s indifference to the human costs of the pandemic in “A lost summer: How Trump fell
short in confronting the virus.”
The administration had nothing to show for the month of June and had only acted
when they felt it was in their political interest to do so: “Under mounting
pressure to improve the president's reelection chances as his poll numbers
declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on
engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate
strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across
the country (590). A senior administration official said there was a desire to
focus on the economy in June.
“It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous,
Republican-leaning states - Arizona, Florida and Texas - and polls showed a
majority of Americans disapproving of Trump's handling of the pandemic, that
the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the
virus.”
Mark Meadows was in charge of coordinating the executive branch response to the
coronavirus. Meadows’ libertarian mindset had torpedoed the stimulus talks and
undermined public health experts inside the administration: “Meadows no longer
holds a daily 8 a.m. meeting that includes health professionals to discuss the
raging pandemic. Instead, aides said, he huddles in the mornings with a
half-dozen politically oriented aides - and when the virus comes up, their
focus is more on how to convince the public that President Donald Trump has the
crisis under control, rather than on methodically planning ways to contain it.”
(591)
The pandemic was not remotely under control, and administration projections
showed that things would only get worse, but they weren’t sharing this
information with the public: “the virus rages coast to coast, making the United
States the world leader, by far, in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases
and deaths. An internal model by Trump's Council on Economic Advisers predicts
a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in
August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere.” (592)
On Sunday, August 9, Trump hit his personal milestone of over five
million infections.
According to Nicole
Winfield and Lisa Marie Paine of the AP, “With confirmed coronavirus cases in
the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the
failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has
been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.”
The differences between the extent of the pandemic in America and Europe were
especially shocking considering the timing of initial infections and respective
resources: “…Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America
had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the
virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients
started filling intensive care units.
“Yet, more than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5
million mark, according to the running count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or
closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as
40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms.”
Dr. David Ho, from Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, summed up
America’s sorry state of affairs:
“There’s no national strategy, no national leadership, and there’s no urging
for the public to act in unison and carry out the measures together….That’s
what it takes, and we have completely abandoned that as a nation.” (593)
Another thing the administration had abandoned was federal aid to help schools
open safely (see#461), a consequence of the failed stimulus talks. And though
over 97,000 children had tested positive for coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, studies
showed that children were vectors of transmission, and polls reflected that a majority of Americans opposed full
in-person instruction, Trump continued to push schools to re-open.
17 out of 20 of the biggest K-12 school districts in the country were opening up with remote learning, and many of the schools that were re-opening were running into easily foreseeable problems. A high school in Georgia suspended two students after they took photos of hallways jam-packed with students, most of whom weren’t wearing masks; the school had to close down for a couple days after nine children were found to be infected.
Education Secretary Betsy Devos took to Fox to minimize the public safety threat (594), claiming that opposition to re-opening schools was a “coordinated effort and a campaign to sow fear.”
What was actually sowing fear was the pace of new COVID-19 infections. Though rates had come down from the astronomical numbers in July, on Monday, August 10, it was reported that five states (ND, WI, KY, MO, AL) had had a record number of cases in the prior week. All five states had supported Trump in 2016.
While other first world countries had daily death tolls in the single digits, the U.S. was experiencing over 1,000 COVID-19 deaths every day, and many of these people were dying lonely deaths. A study done by Northwestern University showed that “Patients with COVID-19 this year are 12 times more likely to die in a medical facility than patients dying of any cause in 2018” and “From Feb. 1 through May 23, a staggering 91 percent of all COVID-19 deaths occurred in a medical facility or nursing home.”
Due to the infectiousness of the coronavirus, record numbers of Americans were dying alone, which was horrible for patients (see #233) and family (595) alike. Dr. Sadiya Khan of Northwestern said, “A loved one dying alone takes a huge mental toll on families….It impairs the family’s ability to grieve and cope with the loss. For patients, we’ve all thought about how terrible it would be to have to die alone. This is the horror happening to thousands of people in medical facilities where no family member or loved one is able to be present with them during their final moments on earth.”
More consequences of the administration’s failures of governance were reported on Tuesday, August 11.
Business bankruptcies were at a 10-year high (596) and individuals—and families—were stuck with a long list of hardships, in no small part because Republicans had killed the stimulus talks (for the time being) by delaying their response to the Democratic house bill, then negotiating in bad faith.
As reported by Jennifer Kingson of Axios, unemployment rates were “alarmingly high,” complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were at record levels (597), homelessness was growing (598), and food bank usage was up 60% (599). Separate stories revealed a food line in Dallas which stretched for a mile, and that “almost 20% of Americans with kids at home couldn’t afford to give their children enough food.” (600)
Rising violence was another toll of the economic devastation caused by Trump’s failure to get the pandemic under control. As reported at the New York Times, “Across 20 major cities, the murder rate at the end of June was on average 37 percent higher than it was at the end of May.” (601)
Unsurprisingly, the unceasing horror show created by Trump and his appointees was wearing on the American psyche. A Washington Post piece by ace reporters Brady Dennis, Jeremy Duda, and Joel Achenbach captured this moment vividly:
“Parents lie awake, their minds racing with thoughts of how to balance work with their newfound role as home-schoolers. Frontline health workers are bone tired, their nerves frayed by endless shifts and constant encounters with the virus and its victims. Senior citizens have grown weary of isolation. Unemployed workers fret over jobs lost, benefits that are running out, rent payments that are overdue. Minority communities continue to shoulder the disproportionate burden of the contagion's impact, which in recent weeks has killed an average of about 1,000 people a day.
“The metaphor of a marathon doesn't capture the wearisome, confounding, terrifying and yet somehow dull and drab nature of this ordeal for many Americans, who have watched leaders fumble the pandemic response from the start. Marathons have a defined conclusion, but 2020 feels like an endless slog - uphill, in mud.
“Recent opinion polls hint at the deepening despair. A Gallup survey in mid-July showed 73% of adults viewed the pandemic as growing worse - the highest level of pessimism recorded since Gallup began tracking that assessment in early April. Another Gallup Poll, published Aug. 4, found only 13% of adults are satisfied with the way things are going overall in the country, the lowest in nine years.
“A July Kaiser Family Foundation poll echoed that, finding that a majority of adults think the worst is yet to come. Fifty-three percent said the crisis has harmed their mental health.”
Trump’s failures were being directly felt in Florida and Georgia, which posted a record number of COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, August 12 because their Republican governors had followed Trump’s lead by not taking the coronavirus seriously.
The loyalty was one-sided. Despite the position he’d put his red state allies in in terms of COVID-related deaths and infections and the concomitant economic decline, Trump continued to refuse to provide aid to states (and cities) who were deep in the red and unable to provide basic services, a move which was certain to hurt economic growth. (602)
The administration was also shortchanging states of important COVID-related data since having shifted the reporting of hospital data from the CDC to Health and Human Services (see #493-497). As explained by Caitlin Owens of Axios, “A month after the Trump administration changed how hospital data is reported, the public release of this data ‘has slowed to a crawl.’”
“…Testing and case data — which tell the story of where people are getting sick — have been a problem for the last six months. This latest fiasco blurs the picture of how many people are getting very sick at a given time, which until now has been a more reliable measure of the pandemic.”
For example, “important data, like the number of beds occupied by coronavirus patients, is lagging by a week or more.” Moreover, “The implications go beyond tracking the virus. Hospitalization data is also used by agencies to determine where to send remdesivir and personal protective equipment.”
Dr. Jeffrey Engel of the Council of State and Territorial
Epidemiologists called the hand-off from the CDC to Health and Human Services
“a disaster.”
Two data points the administration couldn’t hide were America’s COVID-19 death
toll and infection rates. On Thursday, August 13, it was reported
that the U.S. had had 1,500 deaths the day prior, the most since
the middle of May. Though down from recent highs of 75,000 cases per day,
infection totals of 50,000 per day were still higher than the number of cases
Switzerland, Greece, Ireland, Australia, Austria, and Denmark had had since the
pandemic had begun.
More grim data came from Trump’s own CDC, who had conducted a survey which
showed that one of every four adults aged 18 to 24 had “considered suicide in the
past month because of the pandemic.” (603) The same survey found that “more
than 40 percent of those surveyed [had] experienced a mental or behavioral
health condition connected to the Covid-19 emergency.” The psychological toll
of the pandemic disproportionately impacted essential workers, unpaid
caregivers, and people of color.
While the administration and the public discourse should have been focused on
ways to get the pandemic under control and heal the populace, much of the
oxygen in the room was being taken up by Trump’s moves to cheat in the fall
election by undermining the
U.S. postal service (USPS) as the country was expecting a record number of mail
ballots. Speaking to the Fox News Network, Trump said that
stonewalling the Democrats during stimulus negotiations (which had included
money for the USPS) would help his campaign:
“Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can
take all of these millions and millions of ballots….If they don’t get those two
items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not
equipped.”
This was just one of Trump’s tactics to block mail-in voting. In addition to
previous budget cuts and removal of collection boxes that could be used for absentee ballots (604), Trump’s
postmaster general, Louis DeJoy,
had limited overtime (605), even as thousands of employees were out due to
COVID-19, and instructed carriers to let mail pile up at distribution centers if they couldn’t get to it on
their regular shift (606). As reported by
Ryan Cooper:
“In cities like Baltimore, Minneapolis, Chicago,
and Philadelphia,
residents report that they have not gotten mail for weeks. People are not
getting checks, bills, medicines,
or other vital necessities, and it only seems to be getting worse.”
DeJoy was pushing another change that would directly hurt mail balloting. In
the past, mail ballots had been billed at non-profit bulk rates but treated
like first-class mail, with delivery times of 2-5 days. The USPS was now warning states
that they might have to use first-class postage—at three times’ the cost—to
guarantee that ballots would be mailed in the same time frame. Absent the
first-class postage and higher costs to states, ballots would be subject to the
same delivery times as marketing mail (3-10 days), potentially suppressing the
vote in 34 states (including the key swing states of MI, WI, PA, AZ, and NH)
that invalidate ballots received after election day.
Executive VP of the Postal Service, Thomas J. Marshall, said as much when he
penned letters to 46 states notifying them
that the USPS “cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November
election will arrive in time to be counted.” As reported by the
Washington Post, “The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of
millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people
follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery
may disqualify their votes.”
Trump’s assault on the USPS was a win-win proposition: it undermined mail-in
balloting and would neatly dovetail with his false narrative about the
fraudulence of mail voting (see #226) if the expected days-long mail ballot
counts after election day produced a victory for Joe Biden, a possibility given
the partisan split on mail-in balloting. Facebook executives were
discussing a “kill switch”
option in case Trump and his online troll army pushed this toxic and dangerous line of propaganda
during the mail count.
Hobbling the postal service was just one part of Trump’s strategy for cheating
in the 2020 election. Stalled stimulus negotiations had robbed local officials
around the country of billions of dollars in aid to help administer elections
and make up for certain shortfalls in elections volunteers. Running smooth
elections would seem to be an essential priority for any democracy, but the
administration treated it as a partisan issue. Asked about the money for
elections officials on CNBC, Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow dismissed the
aid as part of the “really liberal left wish list.” (607)
While doing what they could to guarantee election day chaos at the polls during
a pandemic, Trump’s lawyers were systematically attempting to disenfranchise
voters through the courts. In Pennsylvania, the GOP was trying to get absentee
ballot drop-off sights removed,
forcing voters to walk their ballots into (possibly crowded) voting precincts
(608). In Minnesota, the GOP was opposing a
relaxation of the requirement that each absentee ballot contain a witness
signature (609) and a measure to mail absentee ballots 30 days before the
election (to ensure they would be returned in time to be counted, 610).
In Nevada and New Jersey,
the GOP was trying to kill universal mail balloting outright. (611, 612)
The GOP’s utter lack of concern for public safety or the economic struggles of
tens of millions of Americans was laid plain on Friday, August 14.
Unwilling to negotiate a stimulus bill more than three weeks after enhanced
unemployment benefits had expired, Mitch McConnell adjourned the
Senate until after Labor Day. Also put on hold were aid for state and local
governments, money for food assistance, and funding for more testing.
House Democrats had included $75 billion for new testing in the stimulus bill
they had passed on May 15; Republicans had countered with a meager $16 billion during negotiations, but even that was held up now.
The administration’s lack of attention to this vital national priority got
another look on Saturday, August 15 in “‘We’re Clearly Not
Doing Enough’: Drop in Testing Hampers Coronavirus Response.”
The article stated
that an effective response to COVID-19 would require several million tests per
day. Because of the Trump administration’s unwillingness to create and fund a
national testing plan, the U.S. was falling far short of this goal—with just
750,000 tests/day on average—and testing was actually decreasing at the worst
possible time: “Now, the number of tests being given has slowed just as the
nation braces for the possibility of another surge as schools reopen and cooler
weather drives people indoors.” (613)
Until a vaccine was rolled out, testing was our only hope:
“Without a vaccine or a highly successful treatment, widespread testing is seen
as a cornerstone for fighting a pandemic in which as many as 40 percent of infected people do not show symptoms and may unknowingly spread the
virus. Testing a lot of people is crucial to seeing where the virus is going
and identifying hot spots before they get out of hand. Experts see extensive
testing as a key part of safely reopening schools, businesses and sports.”
The U.S. wasn’t conducting remotely enough tests, and up to 40% of the tests were of minimal value because of delays in processing
the results; in many cases the delays were so long that people had stopped
quarantining by the time they found out they were infected, having passed their
infection on to others. Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard told a reporter, “It’s really
clear that if tests take more than 48 hours, you’ve lost the window for contact
tracing….I think, basically, beyond 72 hours, the test is close to useless.”
(614)
Some states were turning tests around quickly, but others weren’t. The solution
to this problem was obvious, but not being acted on. According to Jha, “It
would take a national testing strategy to make sure that, if there’s excess
capacity in Massachusetts, but long lines in Florida, that Massachusetts could
help Florida out….Largely we have not had a national testing strategy. The
strategy out of the White House has been for every state to figure this out on
their own.”
What testing was being done highlighted the danger in forcing children back
into in-person learning. New CDC data showed that the number of children
infected with COVID-19 had been “steadily increasing” (615) and that Trump’s assurances about the minimal risk
to children was a lie: “the new CDC guidance notes children can develop severe
illness and complications, even if that risk is lower compared to adults. The
rate of hospitalizations among children is increasing, the guidance says, and
among those hospitalized, one in three children is admitted to intensive care
-- the same as adults.” (616)
This complicated the already-dicey situation of children attending school in
the middle of a pandemic. Because of the Trump administration’s failure to get
a handle on the coronavirus, the least-worst option for many children was
remote learning, which was insufficient for
America’s seven million high-needs students (617), inaccessible to
at-risk children with limited financial resources (618), and inferior in
educational quality. (619)
Kim Hart and Alyson Snyder looked at the long-term consequences of not being able to safely conduct in-personal
learning:
“As millions of students are about to start the school year virtually, at least
in part, experts fear students may fall off an educational cliff — missing key
academic milestones, falling behind grade level and in some cases dropping out
of the educational system altogether.”
Remote learning could stunt social development and hurt students’ future economic prospects: “McKinsey estimates the average K-12 student in the U.S. could lose
$61,000 to $82,000 in lifetime earnings — or the equivalent of a year of
full-time work, as a result of learning losses related to COVID-19.” (620)
Children of color would be inordinately impacted: “Losses are expected to be
even greater for Black, Hispanic and low-income students, widening the existing
achievement gaps by 15%-20%, per McKinsey.” (621)
Since Trump had failed America’s children, parents would have to pick up the slack. Keri Rodrigues of
the National Parents Union told Axios, “Now we have this continual
conversation about how this is going to devastate our children….That puts
everyone in the mindset that our children are broken. It is our job as the
adult to push on and persevere to figure this out for them.”
Stats reported at Axios on Sunday, August 16,
showed that six states had had their highest 7-day totals of infections. All
six states had voted for Trump in 2016.
Even
as national daily infections had come down from late July, the U.S. was still greatly underperforming all other developed world nations in its response to
COVID-19. From July 1 to August 13, the U.S. had recorded 2.5 million new
infections, 8X the rate of other first world countries, and 37,000 deaths, 6X
the rate of other first world countries.
August 17, 2020-November 3, 2020
Official cases come down to 40,000-50,000/day in late summer, more than the total number of infections many developed countries have experienced during the whole pandemic. The Republican Party engages in four days of collective amnesia at their convention, lauding Dear Leader’s management of the pandemic. Trump settles on a campaign strategy of pretending that tens of thousands of new cases and 1,000 deaths a day is hunky dory while trying to convince white swing state voters that their personal safety is threatened by sporadic looting in faraway cities. By election day, the U.S. records 100,000 new cases daily; Trump tells rallygoers we are “rounding the corner.”
The failures of the administration to act in January or February, before the
virus had spread across the country, had been deadly to America (see #254), but
the U.S. could have corrected its course, as every other industrialized country
had done. The possible reasons for the GOP's willful indifference to the
pandemic were examined by Ezra Klein on Monday, August 17 in “Why Republicans are failing to govern.”
Klein’s key takeaways were that the GOP’s collective failure to act at the
federal level was based on three things: 1) fear among congressional
Republicans of crossing a president who had 91% approval ratings among
Republican voters; 2) philosophical opposition to government intervention, no
matter the cost; and 3) concern that more stimulus money, no matter how
necessary to alleviate mass human suffering, would offend Tea Party extremists.
Resigned to allow the pandemic to ravage the country until a vaccine was rolled
out, all that the GOP had left was a strategy of vote suppression and
misinformation. As reported by
Nancy Cook of Politico, Trump was done with the bad—if
accurate—news presented by Dr. Fauci, and sometimes Deborah Birx. Stepping in
to become Trump’s top public health toady was Dr. Scott Atlas, an academic from
Stanford whom Trump had discovered on Fox News. (622)
According to Cook, Atlas had gotten the president’s ear by minimizing the
fierceness of the pandemic and the threat to children, advocating for the
re-opening of schools and sports, keeping his mouth shut about the need for
more testing, and opposing home saliva tests which could be easily accessible
to millions of Americans. His hands-off approach to the pandemic was perfectly
suited to Trump’s P.R. campaign to pretend that American life could go on as
usual:
“With the virus showing no sign of letting up — the U.S. has recorded roughly
5.4 million Covid-19 cases and 170,000 deaths — and with less than three months
to go in an uphill reelection battle, the president is betting that a telegenic
physician with a positive outlook, but no expertise in infectious diseases or
epidemiology, can change his fortunes.
“Atlas, upbeat and relentlessly on message that Americans should resume life as
much as they can, is the living embodiment of the president’s
Covid-is-not-that-big-of-a-deal approach. Where school superintendents and
football conference officials see a risk of the virus’ spread this fall, Atlas
cautions against too-strict measures. During Fox News appearances, he has
downplayed the need for students to wear face coverings or practice social
distancing if schools do reopen.” (623)
By telling Trump what he wanted to hear, rather than what he needed to hear,
Atlas had “become the president’s go-to Covid-19 doctor, the anti-Fauci, even
if he does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology.
Instead, his specialty lies in radiology and neuroradiology, subjects he taught
for many years as a professor and chief of neuroradiology at the Stanford
University Medical Center.”
Juliette Kayyem, who had been involved in the Obama administration’s H1N1
response while working for the Department of Homeland Security, told Politico that
Trump had “found someone who will take him back to 2019 who says, ‘Don’t wear
masks. Open the schools…We are going through this. We’re not going back.”
Kayyem added, “The strategy of see no evil may be working for Trump, but it is
not working for America. This is just more of the same.”
More of the same included Trump having another super-spreader campaign rally on Tuesday, August 18. The event took
place in Yuma County, AZ, one of the counties with the highest rate of
infections in one of the states with the highest rate of infections. The rally
had no social distancing and photos revealed that only a fraction of the
attendees wore masks. (624)
On Wednesday, August 19, it was reported that Trump had taken to
Twitter to respond to Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National
Convention. As he had done many times before, Trump took credit for
inheriting a growing economy from Obama: “My Administration and I built the
greatest economy in history, of any country, turned it off, saved millions of
lives, and now am building an even greater economy than it was before. Jobs are
flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the rest to follow. Sit back &
watch!”
The truth was quite different. The “greater economy” was nowhere in sight, and
Trump’s failure to get a handle on COVID-19 was crushing employers in a long
list of ways. As detailed in
“How this recession is different,” by Felix Salmon, productivity was down 5-10%
(625). As examples, Salmon mentioned that co-workers were collaborating (and
coming up with creative ideas) less often in remote settings, nursing aides had
to pay more attention to infections than caregiving, airlines still needed a
basic number of crew members no matter how many people were on the flight, and
teachers were distracted from instruction by having to put so much focus on
public safety guidelines.
According to Salmon, “Show me a business that involves individuals entering a
building, and I'll show you a business where leaders are being urged to put
significant new resources towards social distancing, ventilation, temperature
checks, health attestations, contact-tracing databases, ubiquitous hand
sanitizer stations, and myriad other COVID-related expenses.” (626)
Between the increased costs of safety precautions and the drop in productivity,
for-profit businesses were struggling, especially low-margin businesses like
restaurants.
Salmon’s key conclusion?
“So long as COVID-19 continues to spread at a rate of more than 50,000 new
cases per day, the virus will continue to act as a deadweight on the economy,
depressing productivity — and total economic output — to well below pre-crisis
levels.” (627)
Also in the news on Wednesday was the latest fallout from Trump’s attempts to
undermine the U.S. Postal Service and mail balloting. As reported by
Amy Gardner, Erin Cox, and Michelle Ye Hee Lee of the Washington Post,
“Election officials are racing to install more ballot drop boxes and secure
large venues for Election Day voting, part of an urgent push to reassure
Americans worried about trusting their ballots to a U.S. Postal Service
engulfed in a political storm.
“State and local election officials say they have been inundated with calls
from residents who say they no longer trust voting by mail, given widespread
reports of postal delays in recent weeks, as well as President Trump’s public
hostility to voting by mail.” (628)
Trump’s actions were sowing chaos in an already-challenging election season:
“…The upheaval comes after months of planning by election administrators, who
are expecting historic numbers of voters to cast their ballots by mail to avoid risking
exposure to the novel coronavirus. Now, officials are worried that legions of
voters won’t choose to vote by mail after all, forcing them to reexamine their
capacity to safely offer in-person voting and to provide other ways to drop off
ballots.” (629)
The administration had already stiffed election planners of money to adapt to
the pandemic (see #607). Now they were forcing local governments to raid
threadbare cupboards:
“The onslaught of anxiety has prompted officials to scour for funds to install
ballot drop boxes across their communities. Although states and local
governments had already adopted plans for hundreds of drop boxes this year,
those plans accelerated this week. (630)
“There are now efforts to install or expand drop boxes for the November
elections in Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Washington,
California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Idaho, Georgia, South
Carolina and more.”
Unfortunately, “One thing many states can’t do is change deadlines set by
statute for requesting a ballot. In the past month, the Postal Service has sent
letters to 46 states informing them that their deadlines do not give the agency
time to guarantee that completed ballots will arrive back with election
officials in time to be counted.
“Given that it’s too late in many states to consider changing those deadlines,
some officials are instead considering whether to tell voters not to rely on
the mail to return their ballots within two weeks of Nov. 3.”
Ultimately, Trump’s months of lies were convincing previously unforeseen
numbers of voters to risk their health by voting in person, making election
officials “[seek] new, larger venues for in-person voting on Election Day
in case an unexpectedly high volume of voters shows up.”
More post office shenanigans came to light on Thursday, August 20.
Despite Louis DeJoy’s statement earlier in the week that the USPS wouldn’t go
through with his planned “reforms,” Aaron Gordon of Vice.com reported that
the “USPS instructed all maintenance managers around the country not to
reconnect or reinstall any mail sorting machines they had already disconnected,
according to emails obtained by Motherboard.” (631)
While DeJoy did Trump’s dirty work and Trump trolled Biden by going to his home
state (where he “delivered a
wild monologue that involved unscripted musings about sharks, boxing,
dishwashers and the maintenance of forests”), a slew of coronavirus stories hit
the web.
Trump’s adopted home state of Florida, helmed by Trump protégé Ron
DeSantis, passed 10,000 official COVID-19 deaths.
Tori Marsh reported that
the administration’s refusal to set up a national testing plan was
shortchanging 67 million Americans who lived in “testing deserts,” contributing
to increases in infections in those communities. (632)
One study showed that despite the administration’s promises of assistance, one
in every five nursing homes had “severe shortages” of PPE, which was contributing to staff turnover and poor
patient care. (633)
Another study concluded that “Not only are children quite capable of ‘silently
spreading’ COVID-19, they appear to be significantly more contagious than infected adults,” certain to spread infections,
yet less than 40% of K-12 schools had a full-time nurse to handle medical
issues and no federal relief was on the horizon to close this gap. (634)
Louis DeJoy’s virtual appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee led news on Friday, August 21.
Though DeJoy’s policies had caused a clear decline in service, and the USPS had warned states that they
might not be able to get ballots through the mail in time to be counted—just as
Trump wanted—DeJoy said the narrative that he was doing Trump’s bidding was an
“outrageous claim.” He promised to put his “reforms” on hold until after the
election, but refused to reverse his limits on overtime, or return the
mailboxes and sorting machines the USPS had decommissioned, and said, with
unintended irony, that “Managing the Postal Service in an efficient and
effective manner cannot succeed if everything is politicized.”
Not willing to take DeJoy at his word, attorneys general in 20 different
states filed suit to
stop the changes.
Jordan Weissman and Aaron Mak of Slate took a close look at
the state of the USPS since DeJoy had come in in July. Among the results of
DeJoy’s changes were vets not receiving their medications on time (635) and big
delays nationally (636):
“In the Eastern region, the share of first class letters and so-called flat mail,
such as catalogs, delivered on time fell from over 91 percent to 79 percent. In
subareas like Northern Ohio, it dropped as far as 68 percent.
The on-time rate also fell significantly in the Pacific region, though not quite as steeply.”
The USPS also had chosen an odd time—an election year—to increase the number of
sorting machines removed many times over: “In 2018, the agency decommissioned
125 machines, which accounted for around 3 percent of the total. In 2019, it
decommissioned 186 machines, around 5 percent. This year’s 671 machines account
for about 13 percent.”
Appearing before the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Thursday, Mark
Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, “said the timing
of such a move seemed particularly ill-advised. Even though USPS should have
the capacity to handle a flurry of ballots, taking away the machines would
still limit its flexibility in an emergency.”
An internal “Service Performance Measure” report from
the USPS released by Carolyn Maloney (the chair of the House Oversight
Committee) on Saturday, August 22 provided more damning data
about the decline in service since DeJoy’s takeover.
The documentation also put the lie to the Republican talking point that the
Democrats’ concerns were overblown. As the House was getting ready to vote on a
stand-alone bill to provide the USPS with $25 billion in aid, Maloney told the
press, “To those who still claim there are ‘no delays’ and that these reports
are just ‘conspiracy theories,’ I hope this new data causes them to re-think
their position and support our urgent legislation today. We have all seen the
headlines from every corner of our country, we have read the stories and seen
pictures, we have heard directly from our constituents, and these new documents
show that the delays are far worse than we were told.”
While his ally worked to dismantle a cherished American institution on the sly
and lied about doing so, Trump continued to try to shine the public on. As over
40,000 new cases were reported and Midwestern states got slammed with
infections—with seven-day increases in “the Dakotas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas,
Minnesota, Oklahoma and Wyoming”—Trump fell back on misinformation.
Borrowing from the “embers strategy” plank of distracting the public from the
horrors of the present by selling false hope with medical “fixes” that weren’t
realistic now or any time soon (see #507), Trump Tweeted support, yet again,
for hydroxychloroquine, which his own FDA had ruled was
ineffective and risky (637), and made a completely unfounded claim that “The
deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies
to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they
are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd.”
Eric Topol, described as
“a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute,”
told the Washington Post, “This is really taking it to an
unprecedented level….Every aspect of covid-19 — whether it’s diagnostic,
therapeutic — every single aspect, through and through, is being overtaken by
Trump….The whole idea is to promote human health and safety….and this is all
steps to compromise that.” (638)
Trump’s continual lies and misinformation during the public health crisis were
disgraceful and destructive, as they helped convince millions of Americans to
behave recklessly and spread the virus. At the same time, Trump’s lies were banal
and predictable, given his obvious human limitations. As Saturday night wound
to a close, the world got an up-close view of the twisted psychology of the
leader of the free world when audio recordings of Trump’s older sister Maryanne were leaked.
The woman who had observed Trump since he had come out of the womb, who had
babysat Trump as a toddler, who arguably knew Trump better than any living
being, told her niece that her younger brother, “Has no principles. None.” She
also referred to “His goddamned tweet and lying” and added, “I’m talking too
freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The
lying. Holy shit.”
While Trump was coasting on Barack Obama’s extended
economic boom, these character defects were easy
for millions to overlook, but in a time of national emergency they were at the
root of a mass human tragedy projected to kill 310,000 Americans by December 1.
Knowing that the death toll on election day would be impossible to hide, Trump
continued his effort to convince Americans that we were on the verge of a major
medical breakthrough. On Sunday, August 23, Trump promised a big
announcement.
In what Trump’s press secretary had billed as “a major therapeutic
breakthrough,” the FDA “authorized the
use of blood plasma from patients who have recovered from Covid-19 as a
treatment for the disease.” At a press conference announcing the EAU (emergency
use authorization), Trump claimed that “Today’s action will dramatically expand
access to this treatment” (639) and that “convalescent plasma has been proven
to reduce mortality by 35%.” (640)
As ever with Trump, it was a case of overselling and underdelivering.
Trump’s own staff at the National Institutes of Health had tried to block the
authorization because test data on the treatment was insufficient, and as
Nicholas Florko of statnews.com pointed out, the mortality numbers cited were questionable. Eric Topol
of the Scripps Research Translational Institute tweeted that the FDA’s action
was “outrageous” and “There’s no evidence to support any survival benefit. 2
days ago FDA’s website stated there was no evidence for an EUA.”
Shilling magic plasma was Trump’s feeble attempt to convince the public that
the administration was making progress against the coronavirus. In reality,
COVID was still in control of the country, with reported cases in the tens of thousands daily and deaths over a thousand per day because of Trump’s
failure to do his job.
Anyone with basic powers of observation could see that things weren’t going so
well in the U.S., that we were far worse off than we’d been when Trump took
office, that we were far worse off than most developed countries, and that
Trump’s failures of governance (see #1-#640) had played a major hand in
bringing us to this low point. Yet polling on the eve of the Republican
National Convention once again showed the effectiveness of Trump’s pattern of
consistent, pathological dishonesty (641) and the breathtaking stupidity and
selfishness of most Republican voters. (See #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s
319-323. #325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440, #452, #534, #566-567)
According to CBS news, 57% of Republicans found the deaths of
176,000 Americans due to COVID-19 “acceptable.” 73% of Republicans thought
Trump’s handling of the coronavirus was “going well.” 64% of Republicans
believed that the official number of deaths was an overcount; only 18% grasped
that the total was a significant undercount, according to Trump’s own CDC. 75% of Republicans believed America was
better off than it had been four years prior, when there had been no pandemic,
no mass protests, and a roaring economy. 67% of Republicans considered the
worst economy since the Great Depression to be “good.”
While Republicans turned reality on its head, Jacob Blake, an African-American
from Kenosha, Wisconsin lay in a hospital bed after having been shot seven times in the
back by a white police officer as his
three young sons sat in his car.
The ability of Republican voters to stick their heads in the sand was again on display on Monday, August 24.
Florida, a state under full GOP control since 1999 which had largely ignored public health guidelines, passed 600,000 official COVID-19 infections. The efforts of Trump ally,
governor Ron DeSantis, to force school districts into re-opening for in-person
instruction were blocked by a judge who said that the order “arbitrarily
[disregarded] safety.”
The opening night of the Republican Convention would have none of these harsh
realities. The day started off with Trump lying about mail-in balloting (642) and followed up later
with a St. Louis couple who played to primal and irrational
white grievances and fear (643). The star
attraction of the evening was Donald Trump, Jr., who attacked teachers’ unions for wanting to keep kids and school
staff safe (644), dog-whistled to white Republicans by blaming “the Chinese Communist
Party” for the coronavirus’s transmission from bat to human (645), and against all evidence—including the fact the GOP was hosting a virtual convention
due to public health concerns—presented his daddy as a president who had
“marshaled resources, forcefully responded to the deadly threat, and ‘moved
mountains’ to save American lives” from COVID-19.
COVID-19 re-asserted its prominence in the reality-based world on Tuesday, August 25.
Universities which had opened too soon were getting slammed with new infections (646), medical bills were mounting for Americans who weren’t recovering fully from
COVID-19 (647), and mortgage delinquency rates continued to climb. (648)
The administration had no public plans to address these issues, but they were
proactive in trying to reduce official infection rates—by signaling to
asymptomatic Americans that they didn’t need to get tested, even if they had
been exposed to people who had tested positive. (649)
As reported by Katherine Wu of the New York Times, the
CDC’s sudden policy change directly contradicted an initiative put out just
weeks earlier by the National Institutes of Health which was focused on
“[detecting] people who are asymptomatic.”
The change was bound to cause confusion for state and local public health
officials (650), as it was a radical shift from previous CDC policy:
“Prior iterations of the C.D.C.’s testing guidelines struck a markedly different tone, explicitly stating that ‘testing is recommended for all close contacts’ of people infected with the coronavirus, regardless of symptoms. The agency also specifically emphasized ‘the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission’ as an important factor in the spread of the virus.”
The administration directive to ignore the 40% of infected people who manifest
no symptoms was baffling to the medical community. Susan Butler-Wu, a
microbiologist from the University of Southern California, told the
Times, “Wow, that is a walk-back….We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and
that’s a really big change.” She added that “If people are getting exposed, and
they’re not getting tested, and they’re not isolating, that’s a huge
problem.”
That same day, following “an outcry from medical experts, Food and Drug
Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn…apologized for overstating the
life-saving benefits of treating COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma.”
(see #639-640)
As reported by Matthew Perrone and Deb Riechmann of the Associated
Press, “Hahn had echoed Trump in saying that 35 more people out of 100 would
survive the coronavirus if they were treated with the plasma. That claim vastly
overstated preliminary findings of Mayo Clinic observations.”
Dr. Jesse Goodman from Georgetown mentioned that Hahn’s distortions had not only provided false hope, but did damage to the credibility of the FDA (651), which could hinder America’s future efforts to get citizens to take the COVID-19 vaccine:
“I think the constant pressure, the name-calling, the perception that decisions
are made under pressure is damaging….We need the American people to have full
confidence that medicines and vaccines are safe.”
This disconnect from reality showed up in night two of the
Republican National Convention. As reported by Aaron Rupar for Vox, speakers gave
viewers a false sense of security by referring to the coronavirus in the
past tense (652), even though jobless claims were increasing, over
36,000 new infections and 1,100 deaths were tallied that day, the fall flu
season could easily lead to an uptick in cases, and the administration had no
concrete plans to combat the pandemic anytime soon.
As one example of many, Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow said, “It was
awful….Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were
everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an
extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the Covid
virus.”
Try as they might to normalize a pandemic, the GOP couldn’t stop legitimate news organizations from reporting the numerous ways the coronavirus was impacting Americans or the key role the administration had had (and was continuing to have) in enabling the pandemic’s spread.
On Wednesday, August 26, more information came out about Trump’s latest attempt to reduce the number of tests administered in order to try to win a second term by keeping public infection totals artificially low.
David Lim and Adam Cancryn of Politico detailed the administration’s inexplicable decision earlier in
the week to give state and local governments the green light to reduce testing
(see #649) in “Trump officials pressured CDC to change virus testing
guidelines.”
The opening paragraph cut to the heart of the matter:
“Top Trump administration officials involved with the White House coronavirus
task force ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Protection to stop
promoting coronavirus testing for most people who have been exposed to the
virus but aren't showing symptoms, according to two people with knowledge of
the process.”
The administration had tried to sneak the new guidelines past the eyes of the
press and the public, and was abdicating responsibility to states and local
governments, as they had done all along:
“The revised testing guidelines, which CDC released late Monday with no public
notice (653), say it is up to state and local
public health officials and health providers to decide whether people without
symptoms or underlying risk factors need a test after high-risk situations —
such as coming into contact with an infected person for more than 15 minutes.
“The agency also now says it is up to local public health experts to decide
whether testing is needed for people who attend a public or private gathering
of more than 10 individuals when masks are not worn and social-distancing
guidelines are not followed.” (654)
Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, told Politico,
“Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to
COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community
spread and more spikes in coronavirus.”
Reducing the number of tests and official infections appeared to be directly tied to reducing Trump’s culpability at election time for America’s first-in-the-world infection rates. Another stunningly cynical tactic Trump was engaged in was his two-step on mail balloting; even as he voted by mail, and his son Don Jr.’s voice was used in robocalls to swing states advocating mail voting, Trump continued to peddle the lie that voting by mail was rife with fraud. One of his claims, that foreign powers would manipulate mail voting from abroad, was disputed by “a top official” in Trump’s own Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (655)
What little the administration was trying to do to combat the pandemic was dubious on policy grounds. As part of the CARES Act passed in March, the administration’s Education Department had been given $16 billion in aid to disburse to K-12 schools. Education Secretary Betsy Devos (who is married to a billionaire) took it upon herself to “rewrite the statutory formula” for school aid (656) as an excuse to divert taxpayer money from public schools to private schools without regard for the economic need of the students, in effect shortchanging at-risk children across the country (657). Devos’ efforts to favor children of privilege was blocked in court on Wednesday, the second time this had happened in the prior week.
Against a hellscape largely of Trump’s creation, Republicans did what they do
best at the convention that night: lie about the coronavirus, paint lifetime centrist Joe Biden as a radical leftist, and play to conservative
white Americans’ denial about race.
Lee Zeldin, a representative from New York, said, “The administration delivered
public, private and semi-automated lab testing approvals at blinding speed,”
though the U.S. in actuality had failed to get tests out on any scale for over
two months. Mike Pence gushed about the administration’s “seamless partnership”
with governors, though many governors had begged for PPE they never received,
and once again wheeled out the myth that Trump’s move to limit flights from
China had been decisive and unprecedented, though 38 countries had done
something similar and 40,000 people had come into the country from China after
the ban had gone into effect.
Manipulating lizard brain fear about localized events happening thousands of
miles away, and ignoring the fact that a right-wing vigilante in Kenosha
had gunned two people down the night before, multiple speakers took the occasion
of the looting and violence following Jacob Blake’s shooting to claim that Joe
Biden would undermine law enforcement officials, who were not funded or
overseen by the federal government. Mike Pence even claimed that “you won’t be
safe in Biden’s America.”
New Yorker writer Susan Glasser summed up the evening’s staggering
ironies with a tweet:
“So America right now has: deadly pandemic, massive unemployment and recession,
schools unable to open, protests over racial injustice, a killer hurricane
bearing down on the South...
And I am watching Mike Pence talk about how bad things would be in Joe Biden’s
America.”
Pence and Trump’s failures of governance were looked at on Thursday, August 27 in a Pew Research study of 14 developed countries. Because of Trump’s hyper-politicization of the pandemic, America finished “dead last” in its ability to maintain unity throughout the pandemic (658). The U.S. also finished last—tied with the U.K., another developed country under conservative rule—in how well its government had handled the pandemic. 78% of Republicans in the survey believed that “the economic situation is good and the government is handling the crisis well.”
In the real world, the economic situation was not good, as in excess of a
million Americans had filed for unemployment benefits in the prior week (659),
roughly 5X the rate people had been filing at before the pandemic, and the
Commerce Department reported that America’s GDP had fallen by 31.7% in the
second quarter of 2020. (660)
House Democrats had passed the HEROES Act on May 15 to pump stimulus into the economy, help state and local governments which were deep in debt, and ensure that tens of millions of Americans struggling with unemployment would continue to receive enhanced benefits, but the GOP had sandbagged the negotiations. Asked about this poorly-timed concern with fiscal discipline by Ben White of Politico, Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who had been a key advocate for Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut which had gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy, claimed that “At least a third, if not more” of the Democrats’ proposals were not “smart spending.” Cited as an example of unnecessary spending was the Democrats’ request for $25 billion for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
As Julie Zauzmer of the Washington Post reported, Kudlow’s talking point belied the experience of numerous
USPS customers around the country who were receiving messages telling them that
their packages were “being held at a post office ‘at the request of the
customer.’” The message was leading to confusion—and potentially risky visits
to the post office (661)—because in many cases the packages simply didn’t go
out on time. (see #636)
According to Zauzmer, “The packages are delayed because of broad changes Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has implemented to the nation’s mail delivery operations, including policies that slow down package delivery. When a mail carrier cannot deliver a package on the day it was scheduled because their shift is ending, postal workers say, the system sometimes generates a misleading ‘held at the request of the customer’ message.”
When pressed by Congress, DeJoy had refused to “reverse his ban on extra trips
to deliver more mail,” leading to continued delays in delivery (662), a worrisome
sign right before an election certain to have record amounts of mail ballots.
But late mail was for little people. The big event of the day was Trump’s nomination speech at the Republican National Convention, which flagrantly violated the COVID-19 safety standards set by Trump’s own CDC. There were reportedly no pre-screenings for temperature and other symptoms of COVID-19 and few of the people were pre-tested (663). The crowd flouted regulations about public meetings, with 1,500 people crammed into a small space—the South Lawn of the White House (664). There was no social distancing; attendees sat right next to each other on folding chairs (665). Masks were few and far between (666). There was a distinct likelihood that Trump’s speech could become yet another one of his super-spreader events. (667)
The lies came so fast and furious during Trump’s speech that MSNBC host Rachel
Maddow performed real-time fact-checking at “auctioneer speed.” Despite the death of over 200,000 Americans from COVID-19, millions infected, six million jobs lost,
and seven trillion dollars added to the national debt, Trump spoke of the
“extraordinary progress” made under his presidency.
Though African-Americans had been disproportionately
impacted by both the pandemic he’d failed to
control and the resulting economic collapse (668), Trump claimed to have “done more for the African American community than
any president since Abraham Lincoln.”
As ever, his main focus was on triggering white Republicans’
amygdalas. Though Trump couldn’t bring himself
to acknowledge Jacob Blake by name, he used the unrest that took place in
downtown Kenosha, which had zero impact on 99.99999% of Americans, as a
platform to float dog whistle statements about “law and order” and claim the
Democrats would give “free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and
criminals.”
When it came to the pandemic, Trump again played the race card by blaming China
for his own failures (669) and advocated re-opening the economy further, though
we weren’t ready to do so safely (670). He also claimed that Biden’s science-first, long-term plan was “a surrender
to the virus,” (671) while in fact it was his largely hands-off, see-no-evil
governance which had been the true surrender to the virus.
The next morning, Friday, August 28, German Lopez wrote about CNN reporter Daniel Dale’s 3-minute fact check of Trump’s speech, which covered 21 false claims. As Zack Beauchamp of Vox put it, the Republicans had “weaponized exhaustion,” telling more lies on the first night of their convention than the Democrats had told in all four nights of their convention combined.
They got away with it because most Republican voters were mis- or ill-informed (see #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323. #325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440, #452, #534, #s 566-567, #641) and because the Republicans “have become so disdainful of the essentials of political practice in a democratic society — a baseline attachment to the rule of law and honesty in political discourse — that they mock the very idea of accountability on these questions. They count on the sheer volume of misinformation — ‘flooding the zone with shit,’ in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase — to overwhelm our political institutions’ ability to check their misbehavior.” (672)
Far less easy for Republicans to control than their sheep-like supporters were real world events. Consumer spending, already low, was slowing down and likely to decrease even more due to the GOP’s abandonment of stimulus talks. (673)
In Friday’s coronavirus news, a man in Nevada was re-infected with COVID-19, the first reported instance in the U.S. America continued to lead the world with over 178,000 official COVID-19 deaths and 5.8 million infections, both major undercounts. Colleges which had opened prematurely continued to see huge spikes in infections.
And national health organizations were in an uproar over the CDC’s tacit push to reduce testing. The National Association of County and City Health Officials and Big Cities Health Coalition sent a letter to the CDC which said, “Changing testing guidelines to suggest that close contacts to confirmed positives without symptoms do not need to be tested is inconsistent with the science and the data” and “these changes in testing guidelines may have broad impacts on our ability to fight covid-19.” (674) The American Academy of Pediatrics said the CDC’s new policy was a “dangerous step backward in our efforts to control this deadly virus.”
After months of terrible decisions which had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, it was clear the administration didn’t much care about sound public health policy. The single and only goal was to confuse an electoral college majority’s worth of gullible (mostly white) voters into believing that the administration was on top of the crisis.
In service to this goal, the administration dumped Emily Miller, who had been the FDA spokesperson for a grand total of two weeks. According to Dan Diamond and Adam Cancryn of Politico, while the FDA spokesperson slot had generally been filled by “a career civil servant” who knew what they were talking about, the administration had chosen an extreme-right pseudo journalist with “no prior medical or science experience.” (675) A health official told Politico that Miller “couldn't even pronounce convalescent plasma.” Her sin in the administration’s eyes was not a lack of qualifications for her job or craven dishonesty about important public health matters, but making the president look bad during election season.
More administration blunders came out on Saturday, August 29. In “Trump Program to Cover Uninsured Covid-19 Patients Falls Short of Promise,” Abby Goodnough of the New York Times reported on the cracks in America’s coronavirus safety net.
In April, Trump had blocked a proposal to expand the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to cover Americans who were losing their coverage due to mass layoffs; he had also opposed the expansion of Medicaid. As reported by Politico at the time, the administration instead had opted to pay “providers directly for coronavirus treatment,” rather than go through the ACA. According to the Politico article, “The uninsured will be able to seek treatment immediately, without worrying about first purchasing insurance coverage, [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar said. And hospitals will be reimbursed swiftly for their expenses, on the additional condition that they not stick their patients with surprise bills.
“‘In many respects, it’s better for those uninsured individuals,’” Azar had said. “‘What President Trump is doing here with this money is an unprecedented disease-specific support of care for individuals to make sure that people get treatment.’”
Time showed that Azar had made a false promise:
“…a review by The New York Times of payments made through [the administration’s program], as well as interviews with hospital executives, patients and health policy researchers who have examined the payments, suggest the quickly concocted plan has not lived up to its promise. It has caused confusion at participating hospitals, which in some cases have mistakenly billed patients…who should be covered by it (676). Few patients seem to know the program exists, so they don’t question the charges (677). And some hospitals and other medical providers have chosen not to participate in the program, which bars them from seeking any payment from patients whose bills they submit to it. (678)
“Large numbers of patients have also been disqualified because Covid-19 has to be the primary diagnosis for a case to be covered (unless the patient is pregnant). (679) Since hospitalized Covid patients often have other serious medical conditions, many have other primary diagnoses. At Jackson Health in Miami, for example, only 60 percent of uninsured Covid-19 patients had decisively met the requirements to have their charges covered under the program as of late July, a spokeswoman said.”
The failures of the administration showed that “Mr. Trump and his party have no vision for improving health coverage, and instead promote piecemeal solutions, even in a national health crisis. Mr. Trump had promised a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act by the beginning of August, but none has been announced and he and other Republicans barely mentioned health policy in their national convention last week.”
As with all of the administration’s efforts, the program wasn’t remotely up to the scale necessary:
“Health care providers in all 50 states had been reimbursed a total of $851 million from the fund as of last week — $267 million for testing and $584 million for treatment— with hospitals in Texas and New Jersey receiving the most.
“But the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization, has estimated that hospital costs alone for uninsured coronavirus patients could reach between $13.9 billion and $41.8 billion, far more than what the program has paid out so far.” (680)
Sara Rosenbaum, a professor at George Washington University, told the Times, “This is not the way you deal with uninsured people during a public health emergency.”
Contrary to the rosy picture Republicans had painted all week, America’s public health emergency was far from over. A CNBC analysis showed that cases were rising by 5% or more in 21 states and the District of Columbia. Infection rates were especially high in “Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio and South Dakota.” Other than Minnesota, all of these states had supported Trump in 2016.
While the pandemic spread through the Midwest, Trump’s years of extreme polarization bore fruit in Portland that night after the far-right Patriot Prayer group trolled Black Lives Matter protesters. In the melee that followed, a member of Patriot Prayer lost his life.
The Washington Post broke the big story on Sunday, August 30, “How Trump politicized another federal agency’s response to the pandemic.”
The long read gave a fly-on-the-wall view of the administration’s snake
oil sale of convalescent plasma a week earlier (see #s 639-640). The FDA hadn’t
been ready to advocate for the treatment because the research data was
inconclusive, but the White House fast-tracked the emergency use authorization
anyway to boost Trump in the lead-in to his convention (681). The night before
the announcement, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had tweeted that
there was a “major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus.” Trump’s FDA
head Stephen Hahn had rushed from his home in Colorado to be at the president’s
side for the announcement.
Hahn knew Trump was grossly exaggerating at the press conference when he cited false data and called convalescent plasma a “very historic breakthrough,” but decided to lie to reporters rather than contradict his temperamental boss. (682)
According to the Post, “The misrepresentations became a debacle for the FDA, shaking its professional staff to the core (683) and undermining its credibility as it approaches one of the most important and fraught decisions in its history (684) amid a divisive presidential election – deciding when a covid-19 vaccine is safe and effective. Yet again, the president had harnessed the machinery of government to advance his political agenda – with potentially corrosive effects on public trust in government scientists’ handling of the pandemic.”
Hahn had backtracked from the claims he’d made on Monday, but “demoralized [FDA] employees felt he had allowed the agency to become a prop in the president’s re-election campaign – a bit player in a reality TV show scripted by political operatives, not scientists.”
“…What rankled agency insiders was the way a defensible FDA decision to authorize an incremental advance for a disease with few treatments was being described as a huge leap forward in an over-the-top White House rollout. How, they wondered, would the FDA have any credibility on a vaccine decision if it bungled something much simpler?”
Hahn’s poor judgment was of a piece with the FDA’s earlier back-and-forth on whether to regulate hydroxychloroquine, its decision not to regulate covid-19 antibodies (see #433), and the CDC’s recent moves to reduce testing. Hahn’s lack of government experience was also hobbling the agency:
“The FDA’s situation is further complicated by an inexperienced commissioner who former agency leaders say failed at a critical task: to clearly explain the complicated ‘risk-benefit’ calculation that goes into every drug authorization or approval.” (685)
Adding to the confusion, Trump’s Health and Human Services Department (HHS) had been more concerned about public perceptions than public health reality, thus they were “angry that Hahn had publicly apologized for misstating plasma’s potential benefits without clearing that with HHS communications staff. Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, argued that it muddled Trump’s and the administration’s message on the treatment, according to one former and one current official.”
These type of politically-driven policy decisions were out of the norm for previous administrations:
“HHS officials are ‘making clear what their expectations are in a way that is not traditional,’ said another individual familiar with the situation. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s illegal or wrong. … Generally speaking, you don’t have HHS leadership weigh in on specific drug approvals, an (emergency use authorization), or those sorts of things.’ The FDA does have ‘less and less autonomy.’” (686)
Jerome Avorn of Harvard Medical School told the Post, “I’ve been following health regulatory decisions for decades and have never seen this amount of White House arm twisting to force agencies like FDA and CDC to make decisions based on political pressure, rather than the best science.”
Trump’s indifference to science and public health was reviewed again on Monday, August 31 by reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey in “New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials.”
According to Abutaleb and Dawsey, Trump’s new favorite public health adviser, Scott Atlas (see #s 622-623) was “urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations. (687)
“The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.”
Atlas had pointed to Sweden as an example of herd immunity “success,” but “Sweden's handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless - the country has among the highest infection and death rates in the world. It also hasn't escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic.”
Public health experts in the U.S. were scratching their heads, again:
“That this approach is even being discussed inside the White House is drawing concern from experts inside and outside the government who note that a herd immunity strategy could lead to the country suffering hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lost lives.”
Atlas, “who does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology,” had claimed that “an increased case count will move the nation more quickly to herd immunity and won't lead to more deaths if the vulnerable are protected. But infectious-disease experts strongly dispute that, noting that more than 25,000 people younger than 65 have died of the virus in the United States. In addition, the United States has a higher number of vulnerable people of all ages because of high rates of heart and lung disease and obesity, and millions of vulnerable people live outside nursing homes - many in the same households with children, whom Atlas believes should return to school.”
Though the administration wouldn’t admit it publicly, in practice they were moving the U.S. in the direction of herd immunity by pushing schools to re-open, reducing testing guidelines, and not funding testing and tracing at anywhere near the level necessary, which was allowing infections to spread far and wide and often undetected.
That same day, Atlas made an appearance in Florida, where he appeared with Republican governor Ron DeSantis, the poster boy for coronavirus mismanagement. Atlas parroted the administration talking point that healthy people didn’t need to be tested (688), suggested that college athletes should put their health on the line for the sake of other peoples’ entertainment, and dismissed the safety of Florida’s schoolchildren, telling reporters, “There is no need to fear at this point….We are the only country of our peer nations in the western world who are this hysterical about opening schools.” (689)
But there was a reason many schools around the country weren’t open to in-person instruction: because the U.S. had by far the most infections in the world. That day, Trump’s America passed 6,000,000 official infections, more than 10X the total of any other developed country—and yet still a significant undercount.
And daily infections were rising across much of the country. Will Feuer of CNBC.com reported that the new 7-day averages showed increases in 26 states. Included in those totals were an increase in cases among children, whose official infection numbers had gone up 720% from May 21 to August 20. (690)
Misinformation coming from the White House had almost certainly played a role in that startling three-month increase among children. As reported by Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, the administration had danced a perilous two-step during that time, issuing warnings to state public health officials in private while minimizing the pandemic publicly. (691)
According to eight weeks’ worth of documents (from Trump’s coronavirus task force) released by The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “Senior Trump administration officials in June privately warned seven states about dangerous coronavirus outbreaks that put them in the highest risk ‘red zone’ while publicly dismissing concerns about a second wave of Covid-19.”
Despite the clear public health threat to millions of Americans, the administration stood idly by while state officials dithered:
“…several states have failed to implement public health recommendations the task force made more than two months ago — including mask mandates, closing bars and banning large gatherings” but “the administration has made little effort to enforce its guidance or make the same recommendations publicly.” (692)
Public dismissals had come straight from the top:
“In mid-June, documents showed the task force confidentially alerted seven states where spikes in cases had put them in the ‘red zone’ of highest virus spread, just after Vice President Mike Pence, who led the task force, wrote an op-ed dismissing fears of a ‘second wave’ of the virus as ‘overblown.’ (see #388)
“By late June, documents revealed 10 states were in the red zone, and that cases had surged in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. But Pence at the time continued to say that ‘all 50 states are opening up safely and responsibly.’ (693)
“By mid-July, 19 states were in the ‘red zone’ and the task force was pleading with them to increase testing. However, Trump repeatedly insisted that the country was testing too much and claimed without evidence that the virus would soon ‘disappear.’
“By early August, the task force document listed 23 states in the red zone — right around the time Trump in an Axios interview brushed off concerns of more than 1,000 people dying per day, saying, ‘It is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.’”
Jim Clyburn, head of the subcommittee, told Politico, “Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem, the president and his enablers kept these alarming reports private….As a result of the president’s failures, more than 58,000 additional Americans have died since the Task Force first started issuing private warnings, and many of the Task Force’s recommendations still have not been implemented.”
The 58,000 who had died since the task force warnings began were just a subset of the Americans whose lives could have been saved with a competent federal response. On Tuesday, September 1, in “America’s death gap,” journalist David Leonhardt compared the U.S. response to the performance of other developed countries with similar resources.
Leonhardt’s key conclusion?
“If the United States had done merely an average job of fighting the coronavirus — if the U.S. accounted for the same share of virus deaths as it did global population — how many fewer Americans would have died?
“The answer: about 145,000.
“That’s a large majority of the country’s 183,000 confirmed coronavirus-related deaths.
“No other country looks as bad by this measure. The U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population, and for 22 percent of confirmed Covid-19 deaths. It is one of the many signs that the Trump administration has done a poorer job of controlling the virus than dozens of other governments around the world.”
Results of this first-in-the-world failure were being felt in real time. Polling by Gallup showed just how dire the healthcare situation was for tens of millions of Americans due to a combination of the pandemic’s impact on the economy and the administration’s refusal to expand the Affordable Care Act (see #217) or Medicaid (see #285) for people who had lost their coverage.
Fifty percent of Americans feared going bankrupt over a “major health event,” including 64% of Americans of color. 28% of Americans in households earning less than $40,000/year were carrying long-term medical debt, and 26% of Americans said they would have to borrow money to pay a $500 medical bill. 14% of people with “likely COVID-19 symptoms” were foregoing medical care due to the costs. (694)
Trump’s failure to get the pandemic under control was also having a devastating economic impact on child care centers (695)—50% of which would close without federal aid—and businesses that relied on college students for their revenue (696). Data from Yelp showed that “Businesses in college towns are 24% more likely to shutter permanently than their counterparts in other towns,” guaranteeing further drags on the economy until colleges could re-open safely.
For all of Trump’s claims that the worst recession since the Great Depression was on the mend due to his ill-defined “management of the economy,” the reality was that things were likely to get much worse. On Wednesday, September 2, Dion Rabouin of Axios reviewed our near-term economic future in “Here comes the real recession.”
According to Rabouin, “Economists are warning that the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic is now creating another recession: mass job losses, business failures and declines in spending even in industries not directly impacted by the virus.” (697)
This “recession within a recession” was “likely to permanently push millions out of the labor force, lower wages and leave long-lasting scars on the economy.”
Within these broader trends were a growing number of layoffs which had “gone from classified as temporary to classified as permanent” and an increase in long-term unemployment, both of which pointed to a recession settling in, rather than easing.
Constance Hunter, president of “the historically right-leaning National Association for Business Economics” told Axios that premature re-openings, pushed by Trump, had brought us to this point:
“We had an uneven shutdown around the country and what that allowed the virus to do is really take hold and remain a force for economic outcomes.”
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt had addressed Americans’ economic anxieties with a steady stream of progressive legislation aimed at countering the downturn and messages of hope (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”). Key to Roosevelt’s messaging were 30 “fireside chats”—radio announcements explaining what he was doing and why which calmed the American public and helped him win four landslides.
By contrast, Trump was doing everything in his power to exacerbate the horrible human suffering and anxiety caused by his mishandling of the pandemic by inflaming cultural and racial divisions (698). Convinced that a divide-and-conquer strategy was his route to a second term, Trump had played to his white supporters’ ignorance about institutional racism (and the reasons for the protests) for months by “[calling] the Black Lives Matter movement a ‘symbol of hate,’ ‘discriminatory,’ ‘Marxist’ and ‘bad for Black people.’”
Since Jacob Blake had been shot by the police and paralyzed from the waist down Trump had gone into overdrive. In “Trump, Unbound,” New York Times columnist David Leonhardt gave a sampling of the president’s divisive statements over just the past few days.
He had refused to “condemn the killings of two protesters in Kenosha, [Wisconsin],” “defended the 17-year-old charged in the shootings — a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse — saying he was acting in self-defense,” and “promoted a Twitter post that called Rittenhouse ‘a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.’”
He had “defended violence committed by his supporters in Portland, Ore., who fired paintballs and pepper spray at Black Lives Matter protesters.”
He had said “Democrats were trying to ‘destroy’ suburbs with ‘low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime’ and “added that Cory Booker — one of the highest-profile Black Democrats — would be ‘in charge of it.’”
He had “said that protests against police brutality were actually a secret ‘coup attempt’ by anarchists ‘trying to take down the President.’”
He had “said that Biden, at the Democratic National Convention, ‘didn’t even discuss law enforcement, the police. Those words weren’t mentioned.’ In fact, Biden held a discussion at the convention on policing, with a police chief.”
Gallup polls showed that Trump’s racist rhetoric had taken a huge toll on national unity at a trying time. Americans’ feelings about the state of race relations in the country were at a 20-year low. Views that Black-white relations were “very” or “somewhat good” had dropped 25% since 2014, when Barack Obama was president. (699)
Deep social discord was the inevitable result of Trump’s scorched-earth war on democratic norms and consistent appeals to the worst elements of humanity. His continued reliance on this strategy guaranteed that the weeks leading up to the election would be filled with distraction, division, violence, and a lethal lack of focus on the pandemic which ravaged America.
As of the six-month mark, “only about a half-dozen [blue] states in the Northeast [had] contained the virus, with consistently low positive-test ratios of around 1 percent” as cases continued to spread in the South and Midwest. According to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the U.S. could face 3,000 deaths/day if public health measures were rolled back.
Trump’s failure to get a handle on the pandemic was leaving parents of children who weren’t in school with nothing but bad choices in regards to childcare (700), as explored in “‘The most crushing, anxious parenting choice’: To return to day care or not?” by Caitlin Gibson of the Washington Post. Parents who sent their children to daycare in order to work put their family’s health at risk. Parents who kept their children home to avoid community spread would have to juggle remote work and child-rearing or not go to work, straining the family finances. And millions of Americans with lesser means lived in a “daycare desert,” locations where childcare wasn’t even available.
Melissa Boteach of the National
Women’s Law Center told the Post, “There were
child-care deserts before. Now we’re talking about the Sahara of child-care
deserts….For low-income families, for families of color, and families in rural
areas as well — in places where there is not a sufficient supply of affordable
and high-quality child care — what it adds up to is that parents face bad
choices. And providers face bad choices. This is disproportionately Black and
Brown women and immigrant women. They’ve spent their entire lives caring for
children, building up women- and minority-owned businesses, and they’re
disappearing in the flash of an eye. Parents are seeing the house of cards fall
down. There are a lot of tears.”
On Thursday, September 3, it came out that one in every eight Americans did not have
enough to eat, and that the psychological undertow of
the coronavirus had spawned a public health crisis (“Coronasomnia”)
within a public health crisis which was “creating a massive new population of
chronic insomniacs grappling with declines in productivity
(701), shorter fuses
(702) and increased risks of hypertension (703), depression and other health
problems.” Alon Avidan of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center told the
Washington Post, “Patients who used to have insomnia, patients who used to
have difficulty falling asleep because of anxiety, are having more problems.
Patients who were having nightmares have more nightmares (704)….With covid-19,
we recognize that there is now an epidemic of sleep problems.”
As the relative success of every other developed
country showed, there were policies aplenty to address what ailed us,
but the administration had abdicated its duties. Renuka Rayasam of Politico took stock
of the state of the coronavirus on the six-month anniversary of the first
reported death in the U.S. America’s 1,000 official daily deaths was down from
April, but still “dangerous[ly] high.” The University of Washington’s Institute
for Health Metrics and Evaluation was projecting that the U.S. would be back up
to 2,000 deaths/day by November if current infection rates held. Eric Toner of
the John Hopkins Center for Health Security told Politico “We have become
used to this level of disease that is really pretty awful.”
More human fallout from Trump’s failure to get the
virus under control was reported on Friday, September 4.
Due to infection spread among students, 180 colleges
had had to change their plans; 78 had backtracked to remote learning. More than half
of young adults in the U.S. were living with their parents, which hadn’t
happened since the Great Depression (705). Rates of depression had tripled
since before the pandemic, leading to big increases in suicide. An alarming
number of American hotels were sliding into bankruptcy, jeopardizing up to two million jobs;
research showed that “the American hotel industry is projected to shrink by 45%
in 2020.” (706)
Because of the administration’s lack of long-term
thinking, all of these trends were guaranteed to continue. Trump had rolled the
dice with American lives by re-opening the country too quickly and the
short-term economic boost he’d gotten was petering out. Temporary census
employees had helped to bring August unemployment numbers down, but “an
increasing number of people…had lost their jobs permanently,”
(707) a more telling metric. No relief was in sight, as the GOP had sabotaged
stimulus talks and failed to renew the Paycheck Protection Program (see #536) to
bolster struggling businesses.
Absent control of the virus, no sustained economic
recovery would be possible. And the U.S. was nowhere near
to containing the virus. In fact, the U.S. was on target to lose 410,000 citizens
by the beginning of 2021. A whole summer had gone by where the administration
had done next to nothing, leading to a quadrupling of cases
(708), and fall—and a potentially deadly flu season—was
coming up.
More human consequences of Trump’s failure to get the
coronavirus under control were reported on Monday, September 7. Due to
the state of the economy and the GOP’s unwillingness to bargain in good faith
on stimulus talks, “worker malaise”
was increasing (709) and charities around the country were cutting staff (710) and
services. (711)
The continued high rate of infection was also creating
a lose-lose situation in the upcoming election. In order to avoid contracting
the virus, a record number of Americans were planning to vote by mail, but up
to 1/3rd of swing state voters using mail ballots would potentially
be disenfranchised
(712), not least because of Trump’s assault on the U.S. Postal Service, which was
likely to make many ballot submissions late (713). People of color (Democrats)
would be disproportionately impacted, exactly as the administration hoped.
The administration’s coronavirus mitigation strategy,
such as it was, was limited to bringing down deaths in nursing homes by
shipping out antigen tests known to produce false negatives
(714). By contrast, keeping children safe was not a major concern. On Tuesday,
September 8, Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times
reported
that even as Trump had badgered schools into re-opening, the administration was
doing nothing to counteract the limits on testing of children. (715)
This was a big problem. As reported on Wednesday,
September 9, over 513,000 children had tested positive for coronavirus,
with the numbers increasing 16% in the final week of
August/beginning of September. Despite the clear and present danger to American
children and those who lived and interacted with them, Dr. Paul Alexander, a
key adviser at Trump’s National Institutes of Health was trying to handcuff Dr. Fauci
by suggesting that he shouldn’t propose that children wear masks or get tested regularly
in an interview with MSNBC. (716)
The administration’s effort to convince an electoral
college majority’s worth of gullible, low-information voters that COVID-19 was
under control also manifested in an announcement that enhanced screening of
international passengers would no longer be required at American airports, which
jeopardized public safety (717)
and robbed public health officials of crucial contact tracing data (718).
The big story of the day were the revelations of
veteran reporter Bob Woodward, who had interviewed Trump 18 times for his new
book, Rage. As reported by
Robert Costa and Phillip Rucker of the Washington Post, on February 7,
even as he was publicly downplaying the virus—claiming it was little different
than seasonal flu—and holding big, crowded super-spreader rallies, Trump had
told Woodward that the coronavirus was “deadly stuff” and that it was
significantly “more deadly than even your strenuous flu.” On March 19, Trump
had admitted to Woodward that young people could be impacted by COVID-19, in
direct contradiction to his public stance, and said that “I always wanted to
play [the pandemic] down.” Dr. Fauci, the one honest public official connected
to the administration, had at various times said Trump was “on a separate
channel,” that his “attention span is like a minus number,” that his leadership
during the pandemic was “rudderless,” that “his sole purpose is to get
re-elected.”
The gap between what Trump knew to be true and what he
was saying publicly had contributed to big portions of Americans not taking the
virus seriously (719), which ultimately had led to the States doing “seven times worse than the median
developed country” at containing the coronavirus. A study
by Our World in Data showed that 109,000 fewer Americans would have died
if the U.S. had been as effective as Canada at fighting the virus.
News on Thursday, September 10, showed that the
U.S. was seeing 37,000 infections/day,
though testing was going down (720). Included in these deaths were teachers (721)
and front-line medical workers who still had
inadequate resources more than eight months after the
administration had been notified of the virus (722). Not surprisingly, public trust in Trump’s CDC had plummeted.
The distrust was fully earned. On Friday, September
11, Dan Diamond of Politico reported
that “politically appointed
communications aides” from Trump’s Health and Human Services Department (HHS)
had “demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the
coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to
intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health
professionals. (723)
“In some cases, emails
from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior
officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President
Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak…”
Though the reports had
not been politicized in the past, and were “the main vehicle for the agency to
inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is
spreading and who is at risk,” the CDC had “increasingly agreed to allow the
political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on
the wording.”
The manipulations of
important public information had become especially aggressive since May, after
the arrival of Michael Caputo, “a former Trump campaign official with no medical
or scientific background (724)” had become the spokesman for HHS. (After being
outed by Politico, Caputo would accuse CDC scientists of
“sedition” for undermining Trump’s
talking points and suggest reporters should
be tear-gassed before
deleting his Twitter account and taking a leave of absence from his post.)
One administration official who hadn’t drank the
Kool-Aid was National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Asked that
night at a CNN town hall what he thought about Trump’s rally in Michigan, which
had featured thousands of people, no social distancing, and few masks (725),
Collins said, “How did we get here? Imagine you were an alien who landed
on planet Earth, and you saw that our planet was afflicted by an infectious
disease and that masks were an effective way to prevent the spread…”
“…And yet, when you went around, you saw some people not wearing
them and some people wearing them. And you tried to figure out why, and it
turned out it was their political party. And you would scratch your head and
think, ‘This is just not a planet that has much promise for the future, if
something that is so straightforward can somehow get twisted into
decision-making that really makes no sense.’”
Trump could care less about the health of his
sheep-like followers or the people they interacted with. On Saturday,
September 12, he had another outdoor super-spreader rally,
this time in Nevada, a state with an increasing infection rate and an
exceptionally high positive test rate of 9.5%. World Health Organization
guidance suggested that locations which had positivity rates of 5% and higher
close down, but the rally followed no public health guidelines, violating state
laws on crowd sizes and mask mandates (726). Speaking to reporters at the
event, Trump said the U.S. was “rounding a corner.”
Data that came out on Sunday, September 13,
showed otherwise. Eleven states were showing case increases of 5% and higher.
Dr. Fauci called the trend “disturbing,” as the administration had clearly failed
to get a handle on the virus and was refusing to allocate the resources
necessary, even as the fall flu season was approaching.
Trump consigned
more Americans to infection and/or death by ignoring public health regulations
in Nevada with a second rally, this one indoors, which featured no social distancing and few masks—other than the
people sitting behind Trump, who were required to wear masks to give a false
impression for the news cameras (727). Against all evidence, Trump said the
U.S. was “making the last turn” against the virus.
That evening, Bob Woodward (see #719) appeared on “60 Minutes.” Woodward revealed that Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger had warned Trump on January 28 that “This [pandemic] is going to be like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in this country.” Two days later at a public speech Trump had 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 us. So that I can assure you.” (see #36).
Despite the clear connection between Trump’s lies and
inactions and America’s first-in-the-world totals in deaths and infections,
Trump had told Woodward “Nothing more could have been done.”
One of the things that could have been done was a second
stimulus package. House Democrats had passed the Heroes Act
on May 15, 2020, but Senate Republicans had ignored the bill for three months,
then sabotaged negotiations by
low-balling the amount of aid to businesses, citizens, states, and schools. As
reported on Monday, September 14, people of color—whose unemployment
rates were in double digits—had been disproportionately impacted
by the GOP’s tactics. Nationally, thirty million Americans were on unemployment
and one million were applying each week. Three out of ten Americans had been
forced to deplete their retirement accounts
just to make ends meet. (728)
Trump’s failures to contain the virus had also taken a
steep toll on America’s image abroad. A Pew poll of 13 developed countries
reported on Tuesday, September 15 showed that only “15 percent of
respondents said the United States had handled the pandemic well, while 85 percent said the country had responded
poorly” and America’s reputation had fallen to a “new low.”
Trump had the lowest marks of any of the leaders, falling below President Xi of
China and Vladimir Putin, with only 16% of international respondents expressing
confidence in his leadership.
Fortunately for Trump, tens of millions of
Americans—Republican voters in particular (see #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323. #325, #330,
#339, #347, #387, #440, #452, #534, #s 566-567, #641)—failed
to grasp what was obvious to the vast majority of adults overseas. First and
foremost, they failed to grasp how badly Trump had played them for suckers.
Audio recordings released by Bob Woodward revealed a vast gulf
between what Trump had told Woodward on the phone on April 13 (“this thing is a
killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.”)
and the false assurances he had given to his 86 million Twitter followers (729)
just three days earlier (“The Invisible Enemy is in full retreat!”). Four days
after the conversation with Woodward, Trump had cheered on right-wing
protesters in Minnesota, Virginia, and Michigan who were opposed to public
health guidelines. (see #249)
Months had gone by since the grim days of April, but
the lies continued. In an interview with Michael Caputo (see #723-#724) for a
taxpayer-funded Health and Human Services Department podcast, Elinore McCance-Katz (the
head of Trump’s Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration) parroted administration
talking points. Though the
U.S. hadn’t done remotely enough to stop the virus, she claimed that the U.S.
“had used a sledgehammer when [we we] needed a scalpel.” (730) McCance-Katz
seconded Caputo’s ridiculous claim that the media—who had tried to hold the
administration accountable—didn’t care about public health information. She also
doubled down on the administration’s effort to push schoolchildren into harm’s
way (731). Regina LaBelle, who had worked for Barack Obama at the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy, told a reporter “It’s so blatantly
political and cynical, and it breaks my heart to see this….Families are
suffering and they deserve to be treated with respect by their government.”
Trump’s appearance at an
ABC town hall that evening, on a day in which over 1,000 Americans died from
COVID-19, showed that treating American families with respect was very low on
the administration’s list of priorities. While Americans needed straight talk
in the face of a pandemic, a steep recession, and levels of anxiety
unparalleled in the modern era, Trump gave them lie after lie for 90 minutes.
Among other things, Trump
blamed Democrats for not imposing a national mask mandate (though they lacked
the power to do so), claimed that “a lot of people think that masks are not
good,” falsely claimed our first-in-the-world numbers in death and
infections were driven by our relatively high amount of testing, minimized
America’s mortality rates, and denied downplaying the pandemic, even as he had
admitted to Bob Woodward that he had purposely downplayed the pandemic.
The lies continued on Wednesday, September 16, a day in
which the U.S. had 40,000 new reported infections, the highest totals in the past month, and it came out that
the already-high official death toll failed to account for tens of thousands of COVID-related
dementia deaths. After allowing CDC head Robert Redfield to
speak before the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee earlier
in the day (while blocking FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn from testifying before a
Democratic-led House committee, 732), Trump contradicted Redfield at a press conference. Redfield had told the
committee that wearing a face mask could do a better job of protecting an
individual than the vaccine; Trump said Redfield had “made a mistake.” (733) Trump
also said that Redfield had been “confused” when he’d said that vaccines
wouldn’t be rolled out until the summer or fall of 2021.
The administration’s months of mixed messaging, which had confused the public and led to higher infection and death rates (734), was an inevitable result of the disregard for science at the top. Nowhere was this better exemplified than the recent flameout of Michael Caputo, the Health and Human Services spokesman. (see #723-724, #730-731)
As reported by Dan Diamond, Adam Cancryn, and Sarah Overmohle of Politico, Caputo had been hired to conceal the work of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department from the American public:
“Trump’s calculation seemed clear: If he couldn’t easily move aside the health professionals who led the agencies, he could dramatically alter what the public learned about their work on the coronavirus.
“Caputo immediately began supplanting career public affairs staff with his own loyalists and Trump veterans — political appointees who often knew little or nothing about health care.” (735)
Caputo “also plucked an unpaid, part-time professor from obscurity inside a Canadian university to be his science adviser — and used him to challenge and intimidate the scores of highly credentialed scientists in the CDC and other government agencies.” (736)
Caputo was on leave for the time being, but morale was low at HHS:
“Interviews with more than 30 current and former health officials painted a picture of a health department laid low by its own press spokesman in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. (737) They recounted how Caputo succeeded in installing his own loyalists in positions even outside the communications realm, ordered a $250 million, taxpayer-funded PR campaign that he himself promised would counter grim official predictions about the coronavirus threat, and sought to stifle experts from the FDA to CDC to the National Institutes of Health.”
Speaking about Caputo’s role in the administration’s pandemic response, one HHS official told Politico, “It didn’t add, it didn’t subtract….It just created a public relations nightmare.”
No amount of public relations could cover up the human impact of Trump’s failures to contain the coronavirus. On Thursday, September 17, it was reported that infections had increased in 17 states over the prior week even as testing had gone down 6%. A leaked FEMA memo showed that COVID-19 deaths had increased 17% over the past week. Helped along by the GOP’s unwillingness to negotiate a stimulus deal in good faith, the job market was stalling, leading to the “26th-straight week of record-level unemployment claims.” (738)
The administration didn’t let reality intrude on their daily messaging. Trump told a crowded and near-maskless campaign rally in rural Wisconsin that “we are doing an incredible job on the virus.” Speaking at Hilldale College the same day, Attorney General Bill Barr fed the ignorance and recklessness of Trump supporters (739) by likening the lockdowns which had kept hundreds of thousands of Americans from contracting COVID-19 to slavery and saying politicians should make public health decisions, not scientists: “The person in the white coat is not the ‘grand seer’ who can come up with a right decision for society. A free people makes its decision through its elected representative.”
The administration’s focus on propaganda, in place of sound public health policy, convinced Olivia Troye—a lifelong Republican who had been Mike Pence’s top staffer on the coronavirus task force—to very publicly endorse Joe Biden. According to Troye:
“Towards the middle of February, we knew it wasn't a matter of if Covid would become a big pandemic here, it was a matter of when….But the President didn't want to hear that, because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year, and how was this going to affect what he considered to be his record of success?”
In a two-minute video that accompanied her endorsement, Troye said, “When we were in a task-force meeting, the president said, ‘Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing — I don't like shaking hands with people. I don't have to shake hands with these disgusting people’….Those disgusting people are the same people he claims to care about. These are the people who are still going to his rallies today, who have complete faith in who he is.”
Troye told the Washington Post that Trump’s
pandemic response reflected a “flat-out disregard for human life” and that his
“rhetoric and his own attacks against people in
his administration trying to do the work, as well as the promulgation of false
narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made this ongoing
response a failure.”
One of the results of that failure was an increase in
medical debt (740). As reported by Jessica Menton of USA Today on Friday,
September 18, “Medical debt has been growing further
during the pandemic,
rising 7% from the end of last year and just over 3% from when the pandemic
started” and “Experts expect it to continue to rise in the coming months.”
Another result of that failure was that over 50,000
U.S. Postal Service employees had been forced to take time off, because of
COVID-related illness to themselves or their family members. As reported by
Maryam Jameel and Ryan McCarthy of ProPublica, “The total number of
postal workers testing positive has more than tripled from about 3,100 cases in
June to 9,600 in September, and at least 83 postal workers have died from complications
of COVID-19, according to USPS (741). Moreover, internal USPS data shows that
about 52,700 of the agency’s 630,000 employees, or more than 8%, have taken
time off at some point during the pandemic because they were sick, or had to
quarantine or care for family members.” (742)
In conjunction with Trump donor/Postmaster General
Louis DeJoy’s service cuts (see #539), significant reductions in staff could
lead to many votes—especially Democrats, who were voting by mail in larger
numbers—not being counted:
“High rates of absence could slow ballot delivery in
key states, especially if there’s a second wave of the coronavirus, as some
epidemiologists predict. Twenty-eight
states, including
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, require mail-in ballots to arrive by
Election Day to be counted.”
On Saturday, September 19, NBC reported that Trump had reached his milestone of
200,000 official COVID-19 deaths, more than 5X the total
of any other developed country. As high as the number was, it was a significant
undercount from the real total, which was in excess of 260,000 and climbing.
A competent president with any concern for his
constituents would have tried to soften the blow of the pandemic, but the Trump
administration was making matters worse with needless last-minute changes to
the Pandemic-EBT program which had been set up to help struggling parents feed
their children. As reported
by Helena Bottemiller Evich of Politico, “Millions of low-income children are likely to miss out on
special benefits that help their families buy groceries this month because the
Trump administration has imposed eligibility requirements that prevent some
states from getting the payments out before the money expires.” (743)
Monday, September 21
brought news that yet another administration official tasked with protecting
public health had been aggressively undermining public health.
As reported by Lachlan Markay at the Daily Beast, William B. Crews, a
press officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had been
anonymously posting disinformation about the coronavirus for months on
RedState, a right-wing website. (744)
While
technically working under Dr. Fauci, Crews had referred to Fauci as a “mask
Nazi,” made reference to the “attention-grubbing and media-whoring Anthony
Fauci,” and “[intimated] that government officials responsible for
the pandemic response should be executed.”
In June, a month in which tens of thousands of
Americans died from COVID-19, Crews had written that “I think we’re at the point where it
is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or less than
a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by ‘experts’ who were
determined to fundamentally change the way the country lives and is organized
and governed.”
Many
of Crews’ posts went live during business hours, indicating that he was using
taxpayer money to spread dangerous propaganda.
Another
person using taxpayer money to spread dangerous propaganda was Donald Trump. At
a super-spreader rally (745), in Swanton, Ohio, Trump repeated the myth that the coronavirus
“[affected] virtually nobody” other than “elderly people with heart problems and other
problems,” (746) despite what he’d told reporter Bob
Woodward
on March 19:
“It’s turning out it’s not just old people….Just today
and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old—older. Young
people, too. Plenty of young people.”
Back
in the real world, infections had gone up
more than 15% over the prior ten days.
As
reported on Tuesday,
September 22 by Joel Achenbach and Karen Brulliard of the Washington
Post, “Twenty-seven states and Puerto Rico have shown an increase in the
seven-day average of new confirmed cases since the final week of August” and “Minnesota,
Montana, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Puerto Rico set record highs
Monday for seven-day averages.”
The
spike was widespread:
“Disease
trackers are watching the virus’ reproductive number — the amount of people
infected, on average, by each infected person. When that number goes over one,
exponential viral spread results. Columbia University epidemiologist Jeffrey
Shaman said Monday that his team’s coronavirus model showed that 579 counties
in the United States, many of them in the Midwest and the Mississippi Valley,
had a reproductive number over one as of Sunday.”
The
increase in infections was especially concerning in light of the surge of cases
expected with the fall flu season. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University
of Minnesota, told the Post: “I think we’re just in the
beginning of what’s going to be a marked increase in cases in the fall. And it
won’t be just a testing artifact, either. This is real.”
So undeniably real to even minimally-observant
Americans that Trump knew he would have no chance of winning a free and fair
election. His only route to victory was the mass disenfranchisement of
Democratic voters. To this end, his legal team was advancing lawsuits all
across the country. As reported by David Leonhardt of the New York Times
on Wednesday, September 23, a lawsuit in Pennsylvania—the state most
likely to decide the election—produced a gratuitous but potentially fateful court
decision that absentee ballots which weren’t inside a “secrecy
envelope,” within the regular envelope, would be tossed out. An
elections official estimated that this could disenfranchise over 100,000
voters, most of them Democrats, more than twice Trump’s margin of victory in
2016.
If refusals to give elections officials the resources
they needed to run safe, efficient elections, months of bogus attacks on mail
balloting, assaults on the U.S. Postal service’s delivery times, lawsuits, tens
of thousands of “election security” thugs harassing
voters, the insidious vote suppression efforts of his
Republican state allies, and mass technical challenges to mail-in ballots after
election day weren’t enough for Trump to cheat his way to an illegitimate,
razor-thin electoral college win, the administration had a plan to bypass the
voters altogether.
As detailed by Barton Gellman in “The Election That Could Break America,”
the U.S. could face a constitutional crisis of Trump’s making if Biden didn’t
win overwhelmingly and quickly. Given the volume of mail ballots cast because
of Trump’s failure to get the coronavirus under control, there was a
possibility that it would take several days, maybe even weeks, to determine the
winners in crucial states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which don’t count
absentee ballots until election day.
This lag time would play into Trump’s false narrative
about the fraudulence of mail ballots and give him public cover to file
lawsuits challenging vote totals in swing states. If Trump were to succeed in
tying up the courts until December 8—the date states were expected to choose
their electors—Republican
legislators in Pennsylvania (and other vital swing states, all of which are
Republican-controlled) could legally ignore the will of the voters and give
Trump their state’s electoral college votes—and a second term.
GOP efforts to undermine mail balloting were in the
news again on Thursday, September 24. As reported by Eric Larson for
Bloomberg News, when ordered by a judge to reverse the harmful changes he had
made to U.S. Postal Service operations, Trump donor and Postmaster General
Louis DeJoy claimed that the mail-sorting machines he’d decommissioned couldn’t
be reassembled. Not surprisingly, 72% of the machines pulled out of service
just happened to be in districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Between DeJoy’s efforts to sabotage mail voting,
aggressive Republican challenges to accepting mail ballots before and after the
election, the far higher number of Democrats opting to use mail ballots, and
the fact that mail ballots are rejected in higher numbers
than in-person ballots—especially mail ballots submitted by young voters and
voters of color—some Democratic officials and organizations were starting to
suggest to voters that they cast ballots in person.
This was risky, but Trump had put voters in a lose-lose situation by failing to
contain the coronavirus: vote in person and risk your health, or vote by mail
and have a greater chance of a Republican lawyer stealing your franchise over a
technicality. (747)
With the fall flu season coming up, this decision was
bound to get more fraught with time. Most world leaders would have tried to do
something to counteract the combination of COVID-19 and the annual flu season,
but Trump had no strategy other than to let his constituents suffer until a
vaccine was developed and distributed (748). Unfortunately, Trump was screwing
that up too.
As reported
by Adam Cancryn, while speaking to a Senate panel on Wednesday, FDA
Commissioner Stephen Hahn had promised not to rush a vaccine, saying “science
will guide our decisions” and the “FDA
will not permit any pressure from anyone to change that.”
Waiting until a safe vaccine was developed didn’t sync
with Trump’s desire to wheel any vaccine out—no matter how safe or effective—in
time for election day. According to Cancryn, “Hours [after Hahn’s testimony], President Donald Trump sought
to do just that. Incensed over the prospect the new guidelines could slow the
process, Trump blew up the FDA’s carefully laid plans – vowing to have final
say over his administration’s procedures for authorizing a long-sought Covid-19
vaccine. The White House has since demanded that Hahn submit a fuller
justification of his bid to set stricter standards, two administration
officials said, a directive that could halt the proposal indefinitely. (749)
“The move put health
officials in a torturous but familiar position – reeling from a presidential
statement undermining their work, while senior officials try to pretend nothing
is amiss.”
Trump’s political
interference and lack of credibility on all things related to the coronavirus
was causing public confidence in a vaccine to plunge, which would undermine the
public health response when a vaccine did come:
“Just over half of
Americans now say they would take a vaccine if it were available today, polling shows, a 21-point drop from earlier this
year. That’s alarming from a public health point of view, since having fewer
people take the vaccine dilutes its effectiveness.” (750)
An official in Trump’s
Health and Human Services Department told Politico “People’s short-term
political agendas have incredibly long-lasting potential negative impacts….We
need science to be the place of trust.”
The pitched battle between Trump’s short-term political interests
and the sworn duties of public health officials to keep Americans safe was
discussed again by Jeremy Diamond, Nick Valencia, and Sara
Murray
of CNN.com on Friday,
September 25.
The opening paragraph
showed that once again, Trump saw science as an
obstacle, rather than a signpost:
“President Donald Trump has lost
patience with the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
Dr. Robert Redfield, as well as with the other public health experts on his
coronavirus team because their sober messaging on the future of the pandemic
clashes with his rosy assessments.”
Tired
of waiting for a magic scientific breakthrough that could get him out of the
political jam he’d created for himself, Trump was taking his frustrations out
on Redfield. Trump’s antics were also impacting the people who worked under
Redfield:
“…Trump's
public undermining of the CDC chief and Redfield's tendency to fold to the
White House are taking a toll on CDC staff, from top to bottom, employees say.
Some have questioned whether their work is making a difference and others have
even considered resigning -- and whether the sagging spirits may be hampering
pandemic response.
“Eight current and
former public health officials described for CNN a crushing environment at the
agencies charged with the coronavirus response brought on by a President intent
on contradicting critical public health messaging and downplaying the threat of
the virus, politically motivated pressure from the White House and baseless
allegations from political appointees that government scientists are part of a
disloyal ‘deep state.’
“‘The morale is as low
as I've ever seen it (751) and we have no confidence in our leadership,’ (752) a
CDC official said. ‘People are miserable and it's a shame because this pandemic
is still flying away and we still need a robust public health response.’”
According to CNN, the
CDC’s “unforced errors, undermining by the White House and what some referred
to as Redfield's ‘ineffective’ leadership are taking a practical toll, making
some CDC officials reluctant to rotate into the agency's incident management
structure for the coronavirus response -- previously a coveted rotation --
because of concerns about how the response is being handled and a sense of
futility…” (753)
As one CDC official put
it, “Why spend a lot of time trying to do something that the government isn't
going to listen to or pay attention to.”
While Trump and his
political operatives dismantled and demoralized the one government agency most
able to mitigate damage from the coronavirus, the U.S. passed seven million official
infections,
a significant undercount from the actual totals. America was just one of four
countries with over a million cases; the other three—India, Russia, and
Brazil—were governed by authoritarian allies of Donald Trump.
Within those numbers,
23 states had seen increases over the prior week, as America’s daily average
increased 9% to 43,000 reported infections/day—more cases than Austria,
Ireland, Australia, Denmark, Greece, Norway, South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong,
Iceland, or New Zealand had had in total, since the pandemic had begun.
Unwilling to take the
elementary public health steps that had helped the leaders of Austria, Ireland,
Australia, Denmark, Greece, Norway, South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Iceland,
and New Zealand keep the vast majority of their citizens safe, the
administration fell back on their favored strategy whenever they were backed
into a corner: misinformation and distraction.
At a super-spreader,
masks-optional rally in Jacksonville, Florida (754) the day before, Trump had
played to his audience’s ignorance
and wishful thinking with words of reminiscence: “Normal life. O! I love normal life. We want to get back to
normal life.” On Friday, Trump protégé Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who
had already sent more than 14,000 of his constituents—vulnerable elderly
Floridians in particular—to an early death by re-opening the economy
prematurely, granted Trump his wish.
As reported by Marc Caputo of Politico, DeSantis
“[cancelled] all state coronavirus restrictions Friday without warning,
catching local governments and epidemiologists off-guard amid their own
strategies to keep the coronavirus contained.”
The executive order nullified fines used to enforce a very
necessary mask mandate in Miami-Dade County:
“…Florida slowly began the process of reopening earlier this month, but
DeSantis’ decision Friday accelerated it at warp speed. It also blindsided
Republican allies like Carlos Gimenez, a congressional candidate and mayor of
Miami-Dade, the state’s most-populous county, and home to the most coronavirus
cases in the state.”
The sudden, consequential actions made no sense on public
health grounds, as the state was not seeing a decline in cases and the flu
season was right around the corner; Florida had 120 deaths and 2,847 new
infections that day alone, both more than New Zealand had had in total
since the beginning of the pandemic.
DeSantis’ decision to make guinea pigs of his constituents appeared to be taken
solely for the purpose of boosting Trump’s flagging campaign (755):
“DeSantis’ unilateral action capped
a week of headline-grabbing announcements – from a crackdown on rioters to protections for college kids partying during a pandemic – that aligned neatly with
president’s campaign messaging around putting the coronavirus behind us. The
burst of activity, including the Jacksonville MAGA rally DeSantis attended with
Trump on Thursday, coincided with the first batch of domestic absentee ballots
being mailed out to Florida voters.”
Terry Rizzo, the chairwoman of
Florida’s Democratic Party, told Politico “We all desperately want
things to return back to normal, but that can't happen when DeSantis and Trump
have no plan to get us out of this public health crisis.”
Trump was hoping the crisis would
just go away, like a miracle, but infections were on the rise. On
Sunday, September 27, Lisa Shumaker of Reuters reported that positive
rates had increased up to 25% in
the Midwest.
Remarkably, this wasn’t the worst
news Trump would get on Sunday. Trump’s years-long effort to be the only modern
president to hide his tax returns from his constituents came to an end with a
bombshell scoop from the New York Times:
“Long-concealed records show Trump’s chronic losses and years of tax
avoidance.”
While
millions of Americans struggled to feed their families, pay their utility
bills, or keep a roof over their heads, it came out that Trump had paid no
federal taxes in 11 of the 18 years examined and taken a $75,000 tax write-off
for hair care. In 2017, his first year as president, Trump had paid only $750
in federal taxes, roughly the same amount a single filer with no children and
an annual income of $18,000 would’ve paid. Contrary to the claim Trump had
staked his candidacy on—that he could transfer his financial
savvy to the White House—records showed that Trump’s businesses had
lost $174 million in the period audited and that he personally owed
up to $421 million over the next few years to the IRS
and undisclosed creditors. As the Times put it, “Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business
mogul than being one in real life.”
On Monday,
September 28, as news of Trump’s tax-dodging exploded across the web, more
stories about the administration’s interference with public health officials
popped up. Monica Alba of NBC News reported on a
candid conversation Trump’s CDC head (Robert Redfield) had had on a commercial
flight.
According
to Alba, “The director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has grown increasingly concerned that President Donald
Trump, pushed by a new member of his coronavirus task force, is sharing
incorrect information about the pandemic with the public.”
The new member of the task force was Scott Atlas (see
#622-623, #687-689), “a neuroradiologist with no background in
infectious diseases or public health” whom Trump had plucked from Fox News. In
the overheard conversation, Redfield had “suggested…that Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with
misleading data about a range of issues, including questioning the efficacy of masks, whether young people are susceptible to the virus and the
potential benefits of herd immunity.”
As one example, “when Redfield
testified last week that 90 percent of Americans remain susceptible to the
coronavirus, Atlas directly contradicted him and claimed that he had ‘misstated’
that fact under oath. Atlas argued that Redfield was using ‘old’ data, even
though Redfield cited information from July and August when answering
lawmakers' questions on Capitol Hill.” (756)
With cases having increased by 22%
over the prior two weeks, Trump had made an unqualified quack doctor his top
public health official, likely because Atlas told him what he wanted to hear.
(757) Referring to Atlas on the flight, Redfield said, “Everything he says is
false.”
Mark
Mazzetti, Noah Weiland, and Sharon LaFraniere of the New
York Times looked at another instance of the administration’s manipulation
of data and betrayal of the public trust in “Behind the White House
Effort to Pressure the C.D.C. on School Openings.”
According to the opening paragraph, “Top White House
officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer
to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly
political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of
the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with current and former
government officials.” (758)
The administration’s dangerous propaganda offensive “included
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, and
officials working for Vice President Mike Pence, who led the task force. It
left officials at the C.D.C., long considered the world’s premier public health
agency, alarmed at the degree of pressure from the White House.”
Since sound data showed that opening schools was potentially
very risky, “White House officials…tried to circumvent the C.D.C. in a search
for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little
danger to children.”
“…The White House seized on a bar chart the C.D.C.
distributed…to other agencies, which showed that 60 percent of coronavirus
deaths were people over the age of 75. Officials asked the C.D.C. to provide a
new chart to show people 18 and under as a separate group — rather than
including them as normal in an under-25 category — in an effort to demonstrate
that the risk for school-age children was relatively low.”
Birx also tried to “push the C.D.C. to incorporate work from
a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services, the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA],” into
official CDC guidance, even though “C.D.C. scientists pointed out numerous
errors in the document and raised concerns that it appeared to minimize the
risk of the coronavirus to school-age children.”
Ultimately, the disinformation from SAMHSA minimizing the
risks to school staff, school children, and their parents was included in the
official CDC guidance, over the wishes of CDC staff.
Olivia Troye, a former aide to Mike Pence who had witnessed
the manipulations of public health information, told the Times, “You’re
impacting people’s lives for whatever political agenda. You’re exchanging votes
for lives, and I have a serious problem with that.”
The state of the union was perilous on Tuesday, September 29. A record
number of retail stores were going under.
(759) Disney announced that it would be laying off 28,000 employees.
(760) Infections were on the way up, in the neighborhood of 50,000 daily.
Against this backdrop, it came out that the White House
had overruled Robert Redfield’s
proposal to extend a ban on cruise ships into next year (likely
because the industry is vital to Florida’s economy, 761) and a bi-partisan
group of seven former FDA commissioners published an op-ed discussing the destructive impact of the
administration’s interference with the FDA’s public health mission.
Naturally, Trump had no intention of addressing his
constant assaults on public health officials in the name of short-term
political interests, his catastrophic failure to control the coronavirus (see
#1-#761), or the grim economic situation this failure had put tens of millions
of Americans in during that night’s presidential debate.
So Trump chose distraction and disruption instead.
He boorishly interrupted Biden or moderator
Chris Wallace 71 times to try to force a handful of fallacious
right-wing talking points into the debate. He levelled multiple attacks on
Biden’s son Hunter. He lied repeatedly and flagrantly,
about how much he had paid in taxes, about Biden’s stance on law and order,
about his healthcare policy, about mail ballots. He also lied numerous times
about COVID-19-related items, claiming his packed and largely mask-less rallies
weren’t spreading infection and that a coronavirus vaccine would soon be
available. Not surprisingly, many members of his entourage refused to wear masks
at the debate, despite the rules of laid out in advance, a selfish ideological
gesture with consequences for others.
Rather than advocate for mask usage during a pandemic, as
any responsible president would have done, he mocked it (762). In one exchange
that would become particularly ironic by the end of the week, Trump said, “I
think masks are OK. You have to understand, if you look — I mean, I have a mask
right here. I put a mask on when I think I need it. Tonight, as an example, everybody’s
had a test, and you’ve had social distancing and all of the things that you
have to….When needed, I wear masks. I don’t wear masks like [Joe Biden]….Every
time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from
them, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”
On Wednesday, September 30 the impact of the
administration’s lack of concern for public safety in K-12 schools got another
look in “Children have become acceptable
carnage.” A team of journalists at Politico reviewed four of
the country’s biggest school systems—New York, L.A., Chicago, and Miami-Dade
County.
Among the challenges school administrators had to deal
with: “Children can spread the
virus, rapidly, even if they may suffer less if they have it themselves. One in
three U.S. public school teachers is 50 or older, putting them at
greater risk of developing a severe form of the illness.”
While struggling to keep students socially distanced and
staff safe, administrators “lack clear guidance they can
trust from the federal government to help them make decisions on
reopening schools.” (763) Dan Domenech, head of the School Superintendents
Association, told Politico that schools were “‘on their own’…because the
credibility of CDC guidance is in question amid allegations of White House
meddling.” Domenech added that “It's ridiculous that, with something as serious
and as vital as what we're facing right now, that children have become
acceptable carnage.”
The CDC was
also dropping the ball on collecting data about infection rates among children,
which could “track the spread of Covid-19 in schools and help researchers
develop best safety practices to successfully continue reopening schools for
in-person classes.” To date, the CDC had left tracking to local school
districts, guaranteeing that much less information and guidance would be shared
from district to district. (764)
Randi
Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers told reporters that CDC
guidelines were a “patchwork mess” with “no consistent message.”
Leading the charge to force children into harm’s way was
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida (see #434, #689). DeSantis threatened to
withhold funding to Miami-Dade schools if they didn’t open on his—and
Trump’s—preferred/accelerated timeline, though Miami-Dade had the highest
numbers of infections in the state which had been the world epicenter this
summer. Of DeSantis’ forced death march, Dan Domenech said “it’s like the kids are the pawns in this
whole process….You know, let’s just throw ‘em out, just like cannon fodder. No
regard to their safety. No regard to their welfare. It’s just to make sure that
schools are open and parents can go to work.”
The lack of
guidance from the CDC came up again on Thursday, October 1. Even as
cases were surging again, with 25 states showing
increases, the CDC had
failed to release any new coronavirus information for a whole week (765). As reported by Dr. Mark Abdelmalek, Dr. Jay Bhatt,
and John Santucci for abcnews.com, “The type of information that has
been withheld has previously been vital to hospitals, health officials and
local leaders on the front lines providing updated guidance on how to treat,
test and slow the spread of the illness, which has claimed over 200,000 American lives. A source told ABC
News that includes additional ‘guidance on who should be tested and when,’
adding, ‘That stuff won't get updated.’”
According to ABC News, a source said that “‘We know we
have new science, but updates based on new and emerging science are not updated
or able to be shared,’ including CDC ‘recommendations on best practices and
guidance on how to protect yourself and others from getting and spreading
COVID.’”
Dr. Richard Besser, who headed the CDC under Barack
Obama, told ABC, “[the CDC’s] leadership
has been prevented from communicating directly with the American people….Without
this direct communication, it is impossible to develop and maintain trust. As a
result, thousands of American lives have been lost -- particularly in
communities of color, which have been hit the hardest -- and trust in our
nation's scientific and public health institutions has eroded.”
While the number of lives lost was shocking considering
the unparalleled amount of resources at Trump’s disposal, tens of millions of
living-and-breathing Americans were silently struggling because of Trump’s
failure to get a handle on the coronavirus. Thanks to the state of the economy
and the long-term consequences of permanent job losses, up to half of Americans
55 and over could face poverty when they retired
(766). The GOP’s sabotaging of stimulus talks was putting up to 179,000,000
Americans at risk of losing access to water
or power (767). Americans with diabetes were suffering at inordinate rates
(768), and many who survived COVID-19 would experience damage to their lungs,
kidneys, gastrointestinal tracts, or hearts while also being more susceptible
to strokes, brain hemorrhages, and memory loss. (769)
That night, speaking virtually to
the Al Smith dinner, Trump said, “I
just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight, and next year will
be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.”
At 12:54 a.m. on Friday, October 2, Trump announced to the world
that he had contracted COVID-19.
News of Trump’s infection revealed that Trump had likely
exposed numerous people to COVID-19 because of his unwillingness to socially
distance, wear a mask, or require those around him to wear masks (770). He
could have infected Chris Wallace and Joe Biden at the Tuesday presidential
debate, supporters at a rally he attended in Minnesota on Wednesday, and people
who’d been exposed to him at a fundraiser early Thursday.
The fundraiser happened after Trump had found out that close
aide Hope Hicks had been infected. Unconcerned that he might spread
infection, Trump wore no mask and concealed this information at a
meet-and-greet with dozens of supporters; New Jersey officials feared that Trump had
unleashed yet another super-spreader event (771). Trump’s spokeswoman, Kayleigh
McEnany, neglected to tell reporters about Hicks’ infection at that day’s press
conference, which potentially exposed the press to infection, as McEnany had
spent time with Hicks in the past couple days. (772)
Then there were secret service personnel, Air Force
personnel, members of Congress and their aides, reporters, and hordes of fan
boys and girls in half a dozen states he’d held rallies in. Depending on when
he had contracted the virus, Trump could have passed the coronavirus on to
hundreds if not thousands of people, creating a contact tracing nightmare.
Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Politico, “They’re way behind the curve in trying to catch all the folks that the president has been around….The fact that he’s been around so many people and that he doesn’t wear a mask, he could be a superspreader, we just don’t know yet.”
Making tracing even harder, it was impossible to know
when Trump had gotten infected because of the lax culture around the White
House. Former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye
described the atmosphere as a “petri dish” and told the
Washington Post “The fact of
the matter was, 75 percent did not walk around with masks. Maybe 85 percent…It
was a very small percentage of people who wore the masks all the time.” (773)
Despite Trump’s illness, and the clear connection
between Trump’s infection and the reactionary, anti-science mindset that
spawned it, an administration official said that face coverings would still not
be mandatory at the White House, as masks were “a personal choice.”
(774).
On Saturday, October 3, it was reported that
the U.S. had had over 54,000 new infections on Friday. 33 states were now
showing increases in cases.
The White House hadn’t bothered
to initiate contact tracing to protect the thousands of people who could have
gotten COVID from Trump and other administration officials, but one of the key
super-spreader events was coming to light. As reported
by Andrew Joseph of statnews.com, the official Rose Garden announcement of the
nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court one week prior appeared to
have set off a wave of infections.
In
a karmic boomerang for the ages, a celebration of the extreme right’s imminent
control of the Supreme Court for decades to come, a move certain to lead to
mass human suffering for everyday Americans—from the loss of healthcare for
tens of millions to assaults on unions to the gutting of environmental
protections to the desecration of voting rights for people of color to further
corporate corrosion of our political system—had triggered a ripple of
infections. A number of privileged (white) elite who had gloated in the misery
they were about to inflict while shaking hands, not social distancing, and not
wearing masks had contracted the virus, including right-wing senators Thom
Tillis and Mike Lee, the president’s former aide Kellyanne Conway, and Chris
Christie, the president’s designated propagandist on Sunday morning talk shows.
While
sociopaths got their comeuppance, the administration delivered yet more mixed
messages,
this time about the state of Trump’s health. Early in the day, Trump’s
physician (Dr. Sean Conley) had addressed reporters assembled outside of the
Walter Reed Medical Center, where Trump was getting care. Conley put on a happy
face, dodged media questions about Trump’s use of oxygen, and claimed (while
citing little relevant data) that Trump was “doing very well.” Conley also said
that Trump had been diagnosed 72 hours earlier, which indicated that
Trump had been aware of his infection on Wednesday, not Thursday, as the White
House had originally said, and had knowingly infected many more people than
previously known. (The administration later claimed that Conley had misspoken).
Just
minutes after Conley’s presentation, once the official event was over, Trump’s
chief of staff Mark Meadows painted a radically different picture, telling
reporters that “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very
concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care” and
“We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.” It also came out that
Trump had needed oxygen Friday, contrary to the statement from Dr. Conley.
Saturday evening, Trump
released a video on Twitter which contradicted Meadows. In the video, Trump
minimized his transfer to Walter Reed, dubiously claiming he could just as easily have convalesced at the
White House, but hadn’t wanted to be isolated:
“I just didn’t want to
stay in the White House. I was given that alternative….Stay in the White House,
lock yourself in, don’t ever leave, don’t even go to the Oval Office, just stay
upstairs and enjoy it. Don’t see people, don’t talk to people and just be done
with it, and I can’t do that.”
Scott Jennings, an official
in the W. Bush administration, told Politico, “The world has to know
whether the president of the United States is in good health….You cannot have
inconsistent reports about the president’s health.”
Inconsistent reports
were exactly what the public was getting. On Sunday, October 4, Trump
left Walter Reed hospital to be chauffeured around in an SUV, giving the
impression that he was mobile and doing ok, yet he was taking steroids intended
for severe COVID patients and medical information indicated that he’d had a
high fever on Friday and that his blood oxygen levels had fallen off twice
since he had been publicly diagnosed. Of Trump’s photo op, Dr. James Phillips,
a physician at Walter Reed, tweeted “Every single person in the vehicle during
that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be
quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political
theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is
insanity.” (775)
As Trump’s illness held center stage in the national
political drama, more came out about the spreading trail of infection left in
Trump’s wake due to his callous disregard for public health guidelines. Trump had routinely shown no concern for
the safety of his aides and could have infected
Joe Biden at the Tuesday debate. Trump’s Wednesday rally in Duluth, Minnesota
had been a cautionary tale of “worst pandemic practices”
which would result in multiple infections (776).
Trump covered up a positive rapid test earlier in the day on Thursday when he
went to a fundraiser in New Jersey, potentially infecting 206 people (777).
Trump also covered up his rapid test result when speaking to Sean Hannity
Thursday night and asked an adviser
not to tell the press of his infections or any of the other infections plaguing
White House staff. (778)
The co-chair of the right-wing super PAC Great America
told the Washington Post that the slew of infections to Trump, his
allies, and his aides showed the GOP to be “the stupid party,”
but the Trump campaign wasn’t letting reality get in the way of their messaging.
Appearing on “This Week” Sunday morning, Trump’s adviser Jason Miller lied about the lack of
precautions around the White House and accused Joe Biden of wearing a mask as
“a prop.” (779)
One of the White
House officials who didn’t much care for “props” was Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s
spokeswoman. On Monday, October 5, it came out that McEnany’s cavalier attitude about masks had given her
the coronavirus.
McEnany was one of 20 people who’d been at the super-spreader
announcement of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court nine days
earlier, yet the administration
had yet to initiate any contact tracing of the event (780). This
attempt to pretend the coronavirus didn’t exist was one with the
administration’s catastrophic non-response nationally and the cover up of infections among housekeepers at the White
House a few weeks earlier. (781)
No one demonstrated the administration’s denial more blatantly than Donald Trump. Though the state of his physical condition was questionable, he announced that he would be returning to the White House Monday evening. Of the virus that had killed 270,000 Americans and infected millions, Trump told his constituents “Don’t be afraid of Covid” and “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
In the real world, COVID-19 was dominating Americans’ lives because Trump had failed to contain the virus, or even try to contain the virus. The country was logging over 40,000 new infections daily; thirty-four states had seen an increase in 7-day averages from a month earlier.
As detailed by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Dan Goldberg of Politico, the Midwest was getting slammed: Nebraska had recently had a 7-day record, Iowa was recording more than 1,000 new cases/day, North Dakota’s infection rates had doubled in September, and Wisconsin was logging more than 2,000 infections/day while its hospitals were near capacity, forcing the state to build a field hospital in Milwaukee.
Despite the ravages of the pandemic, Republican office holders in the Midwest were doubling down on Trumpian ignorance. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds had loosened quarantine rules, allowed student bars to re-open, and refused to issue a statewide mask mandate. Wisconsin Republicans had supported a lawsuit to overturn the Democratic governor’s mask mandate, though the state was one of the world’s pandemic epicenters. North Dakota’s Republican governor “bowed to public pressure and rescinded an order that required close contacts of infected patients to quarantine.”
Dr. Ashish Jha (from Brown University’s School of Public Health) told Politico, “We can’t seem to learn our lesson….We touch the stove, it’s hot, we burn ourselves, but we think if we touch it again, we’ll be fine.”
More Trump-related infections were reported on Tuesday, October 6. A growing number of Trump loyalists, including adviser Stephen Miller, had contracted COVID-19. “At least one” of the military aides who followed Trump around with the nuclear briefcase had caught COVID-19. Several White House reporters caught the disease (as did, potentially, their family members). (782)
Not content with the damage they had already done, the Trump administration stayed stuck on stupid. Trump tweeted a lie that had been one of his favorite talking points in February and March:
“Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” (783)
Trump also sent the markets into freefall by unilaterally announcing via tweet that he was ending stimulus negotiations, leaving cities, states, small businesses, and millions of Americans in the lurch.
In a much less public but potentially devastating move, Alex Azar (head of Trump’s Health and Human Services) and Scott Atlas (see #622-623, #687-689, #756-757) “met Monday with a trio of scientists who back the controversial theory that the United States can quickly and safely achieve widespread immunity to the coronavirus by allowing it to spread unfettered among healthy people.”
As reported by Sarah Overmohle and David Lim of Politico, the doctors Azar and Atlas were meeting with were outliers in the scientific community who “[favored] moving aggressively to reopen the economy while sidelining broad testing and other fundamental public health measures.”
The known results of this strategy were grim:
“Mainstream medical and public health experts say that seeking widespread, or herd, immunity in the manner the scientists prescribe could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions more U.S. residents.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, who had managed disaster preparedness in the Obama administration, told Politico, “They are putting out a half-baked policy proposal that is not grounded in science, but aligns very well with the political direction that the administration wants to take and that the president wants to take and that he sees as being most consistent with his reelection prospects.”
Not surprisingly, 70% of Americans said they trusted Trump either “not at all” (54%) or “not very much” (16%) when it came to the coronavirus.
The news on Wednesday, October 7 was unlikely to increase public trust in Trump.
Updated information showed that 34 people with connections to the White House were infected with the coronavirus.
A Daily Beast scoop revealed that the administration had “quietly informed” a veteran’s group that Gold Star families who had been at the White House on September 27 could have been infected. The indoor event had lacked social distancing and very few attendees had worn masks. (784)
Due to the economic collapse tied to Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus, long-term unemployment surged to a modern record. As reported by Niv Ellis of the Hill, “According to the Labor Department, the number of people out of work for more than 27 weeks increased to 2.4 million in September, an increase of 32.5 percent from the previous month. There are 4.9 million people who have been unemployed between 15 and 26 weeks.”
Worse yet, “Workers who have been separated from their jobs for more than 6 months typically have a more difficult time getting back to work even once the economy improves.” (785)
Thanks to Trump’s sabotaging of the stimulus negotiations, the pain was likely to spread to even more Americans: “The number of long-term unemployed workers is expected to rise in the months ahead, something likely to be exacerbated by President Trump’s decision to scrap talks with Democrats on a COVID-19 economic relief bill before the elections.”
Sam Baker of Axios highlighted another way Trump’s abandonment of the stimulus talks could exacerbate the coronavirus:
“Heading into the winter months without a new round of stimulus in place will leave vulnerable workers without a financial safety net if they get sick — and because of that, experts say, it will likely make the pandemic itself worse.
“The reasons are simple: If you
can’t afford to miss work, and if there’s no temporary aid to make it feasible
for you to miss work, then you’ll keep going to work — even if you’re infected.
Those workers will infect others, and the virus will spread from there.”
Also negatively impacted by Trump’s
abandonment of stimulus talks were election workers—and ultimately,
voters—around the country. As detailed by journalist Sam Brodey, elections workers were dealing
with budget cut shortfalls due to the state of the economy, “Yet there’s more work than ever for
elections officials to do. They’re funding awareness campaigns to inform people
how to vote, finding new spaces for in-person voting, expanding mail voting and
tracking down personal protective equipment for election workers.” (786)
The Democratic House of
Representatives had passed a stimulus bill on May 15 which had included $3.6
billion for elections workers, but the funding had died with the GOP’s bad
faith stance in the negotiations. One state elections director told Brodey, “I
feel like I’ve got democracy in a boat….and my staff is bailing water out while
people are drilling holes in it.”
The big event of the day
was the vice-presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. Like his
boss, Pence violated the agreed-upon rules, interrupting Harris and going over
his allotted time frequently, and lied constantly. Pence’s lies about the
administration’s coronavirus response were brazen, especially considering they were
delivered while he and Harris were separated by Plexiglass dividers.
As administration
figures had done many times, Pence made a big deal of Trump’s decision to limit
travel from China, though it had come after airlines were already cancelling
flights to and from China and Trump would take another six weeks to ban travel
from Europe, allowing thousands of infected travelers to flood the U.S. Pence
mischaracterized Harris’s attacks on the administration’s coronavirus failures
(see #1-#786) as attacks on the American public who had been victimized by
those failures (“When
you say what the American people have done over these last eight months hasn't
worked, that's a great disservice to the sacrifices that the American people
have made.”) Pence
minimized the undeniable impact of Amy Coney Barrett’s super-spreader event by
mentioning that some of the people had been tested beforehand and the event was
outside—while neglecting to mention that there was no social distancing and
virtually no masks. Pence claimed that Biden’s plan to combat COVID was just a carbon
copy of Trump’s, while in reality Biden’s plan was far more aggressive,
better-funded, more reliant on science, and certain to be far more effective. (787)
Pence had no option but
to lie because Team Trump’s failures were producing consistently bad news for
the administration. On Thursday, October 8, nine months after the
administration had first been notified of the coronavirus, medical providers still lacked
adequate PPE, forcing them to re-use
limited supplies or go without (788). Coronavirus was now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and cases were up 6%
from the week before: only four states had had a reduction in cases over
the prior week. Hospitalizations were up, with six states that supported
Trump in 2016—Montana, Nebraska,
North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming—setting records. The CDC was
projecting that the official death toll could reach 233,000 by the end of the
month. As staggering and tragic as the first-in-the-world number was, it was a
major undercount from Trump’s actual death total.
The administration
wasn’t doing anything to inspire confidence that things would get better. Trump
was trampling on science again by pushing the FDA to fast track another miracle “cure” and refusing to participate in a presidential debate which had to be virtual because he’d
failed to follow public safety guidelines. After it came out that right-wing extremists had plotted to kidnap and overthrow the
Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, Whitmer pointed out that
Trump’s public attacks on her lockdowns earlier in the year, and his refusal to
condemn white supremacists at the presidential debate, had served as a
“rallying cry” for extremists. Trump’s response was to attack Whitmer again for the necessary lockdowns
in her state which had saved countless lives. (789)
Because of Trump’s
months of dangerously dishonest messaging and other colossal failures, Joe
Biden became the first presidential candidate to be endorsed by the New
England Journal of Medicine. In a column titled “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum,” the editors said that “The
magnitude of this failure is astonishing,” pointing out that America had more
cases and deaths than China, a country with 4X the population of the U.S., had
50X the death rate of Japan, and 2000X the death rate of Vietnam, considered a
“lower-middle-income” nation.
America had come “into
this crisis with enormous advantages,” yet the U.S. had “failed at almost
every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were
incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic
personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public.
And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute
numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the
number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the
international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia,
countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing
capacity that we have. (790) Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing
capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the
results useless for disease control. (791)
“Although we tend to focus on technology, most of the
interventions that have large effects are not complicated. The United States
instituted quarantine and isolation measures late and inconsistently, often
without any effort to enforce them, after the disease had spread substantially
in many communities. Our rules on social distancing have in many places been
lackadaisical at best, with loosening of restrictions long before adequate
disease control had been achieved. And in much of the country, people simply
don’t wear masks, largely because our [Republican] leaders have stated outright
that masks are political tools rather than effective infection control
measures.”
The conclusion:
“Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money
in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely
claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to
render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many
political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor
conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis
of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are
dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of
thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”
More evidence of the administration’s enabling of infections
and deaths was revealed
on Friday, October 9. As reported by Sheila Kaplan for the New York
Times, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drafted a sweeping
order last month requiring all passengers and employees to wear masks on all
forms of public and commercial transportation in the United States, but it was
blocked by the White House.”
The measure, which “would have required face coverings
on airplanes (792), trains (793), buses (794) and subways (795), and in transit
hubs such as airports (796), train stations (797) and bus depots (798),” was
supported by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, but killed by Mike
Pence, head of the Coronavirus Task Force.
Peter DeFazio, the Oregon Democrat who heads the House
of Representatives committee on transportation and infrastructure, told the
Times the administration’s moves were “especially outrageous because the
science is so clear: masks save lives….The millions of Americans who work in
and use our transportation systems every day — from bus drivers, train
conductors and flight attendants, to the frontline workers who rely on public
transit — deserve to know their president is relying on experts’ best advice
and doing everything possible to keep them safe.”
Indifferent to science, reason, or experts, Trump continued
to follow his narrow self-interest as he saw it. On Saturday, October 10,
it was reported that Trump had received a sign-off from his doctor to do
campaign events again, though he had yet to test negative for COVID-19. Trump’s
first rally was held outside the White House with no social distancing
and few masks (799). In addition to the usual lies
about Joe Biden wanting to defund the police and take peoples’ guns, Trump
claimed that the coronavirus was “disappearing” and that we would have a
vaccine “very, very soon.”
In the real world, cases in the U.S. were increasing rapidly. 58,000 new infections—the highest daily total in two months—had been tabulated on Friday, hospitalizations in the Midwest were at record levels for a fifth consecutive day, and ten states had recorded their highest one-day increase on Friday.
As the pandemic surged across the U.S. due to Trump’s failures of governance, the New York Times posted “The Swamp That Trump Built,” an exhaustive accounting of the ways
Trump had used his presidency to enrich himself and his
family, primarily by “turning his own hotels
and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business
mix and special interests reign.”
The Times “found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration.” Conducting private business on public time, Trump had spent one of every four days away from the White House, raking in over $12 million alone in just the first two years of his presidency.
As of Sunday, October 11, CDC estimates showed that the U.S. could be back up to 1,000 deaths/day by the end of the month.
Eager to bury this news, the administration blocked Dr. Fauci (800)
and everyone else on their public health team (801) from appearing on ABC’s “This
Week.” Speaking to the cameras, the show's host (George Karl) said, “We had
hoped to talk to Dr. Fauci about both the outbreak at the White House and
across the country. He was more than willing to join us, but the White House
wouldn’t allow you to hear from the nation’s leading expert on coronavirus. In
fact, they wouldn’t allow any of the medical experts on the president’s own
coronavirus task force to appear on this show.”
An administration official who was allowed to
appear on the Sunday talk shows was senior economic adviser Larry Kudlow, one
of Trump’s top snake oil salesmen (see #70, #374, #607, #652, #661). True to
form, Kudlow minimized the economic desperation of tens of millions of
Americans and claimed that “We are learning to deal with the virus in a targeted,
safe, prevented way.” Kudlow’s statement was so patently ridiculous that CNN
host Jake Tapper laughed and replied
“We are not learning to live with the virus, Larry. We had four days in a row
of 50,000 infections and the death rate is the highest in the world.”
One public health official who couldn’t be censored
was Republican Scott Gottlieb, who had led the FDA in the first two years of Trump’s
presidency before returning to the private sector. Trump had recently raved
about an antibody drug he’d been given after getting COVID-19, and claimed he
would get it distributed to hospitals free of charge, but this was nowhere near
to becoming a reality. As Gottlieb told host Margaret Brennan on “Face the
Nation,” the administration had been advised to “ramp up” manufacturing of
therapeutic drugs numerous times in February and March, but had dropped the
ball. Even without accounting for likely increases in infection rates, the U.S.
needed between 300,000-400,000 doses of the antibody per month; at present, the
manufacturer had 50,000 doses total. As with so many other vital aspects
of their pandemic response, the administration had in Gottlieb’s words “definitely missed the window.”
(802)
Bad
news continued on Monday, October 12. According to Lisa Shumaker of
Reuters, infections had risen 11% in the past week, “Twenty-nine out of 50
states have seen cases rise for at least two weeks in a row, up from 21 states
in the prior week,” and “The percentage of tests that came back
positive for the virus rose to 5.0% from 4.6% the prior week.” Shumaker added
that “The World Health Organization considers rates above 5% concerning because
it suggests there are more cases in the community that have not yet been
uncovered.”
The five states with the biggest increases had supported Trump
in 2016. Some of the states at the very heart of Trump’s pandemic would soon
host a Trump campaign rally. As Dr. Fauci told CNN,
“We know that that is asking for trouble when you do that. We’ve seen that when
you have situations of congregant settings where there are a lot of people
without masks, the data speak for themselves.”
Though the Trump campaign was only too happy to use
Fauci’s words—and his integrity—out of context, for misleading campaign ads
that the non-partisan Fauci wanted pulled off the air,
they continued to show no concern for his public health advice. Major news
organizations were refusing
to send reporters on Trump’s campaign planes for fear that they would get
infected, an unprecedented pass on what had historically been a highly-coveted
assignment.
Trump’s first major super-spreader rally since he’d
contracted COVID-19 was held before thousands of tightly-packed and mostly mask-less (803)
fans in Sanford, Florida. Even as the virus was surging due to his
administration having led the most incompetent pandemic response in the
developed world (see #1-#803), Trump told the crowd, “Under my leadership,
we’re delivering a safe vaccine and a rapid recovery like no one can even
believe.” He even had the chutzpah to say, “If you look at our upward path, no
country in the world has recovered the way we have recovered.”
The United States had “recovered” its way into a third major spike in
cases. As of Tuesday, October 13,
30 states had seen increases in the past week, 13 states (12 of whom had
supported Trump in 2016) were seeing positive test rates of 10% and higher,
child infections had increased 13% over the prior two weeks, and 10 states had
reported record numbers of hospitalizations on Monday.
The U.S. was also failing in terms of its coronavirus death rate. Early in the pandemic, other developed countries had had higher death rates—at least in part due to having higher concentrations of elderly residents—but those countries had learned from their mistakes and gotten the virus under control. By contrast, the States had continued to post high death rates months into the pandemic. Since June 7, the U.S. had had 3X the death rate of the next-worst developed nations and up to 27X the rate of some developed countries. (804)
Thanks to the Trump campaign, those numbers were unlikely to improve anytime soon. On Tuesday, Mike Pence spoke in Wisconsin, which was experiencing record numbers of infections, while Trump campaigned in Pennsylvania. Neither rally featured social distancing or mandatory mask usage (805, 806). A study done by Zach Nayer for statnews.com showed that at least half of Trump’s coronavirus-era rallies had led to community outbreaks.
The super-spreader rallies continued on Wednesday, October 14, as Trump campaigned in Iowa, a Republican state where the virus was “out of control,” with record numbers of hospitalizations and a positive test rate of 9.5%. (807)
While death rates were climbing back toward 1000/day nationally and many U.S. hospitals were facing bankruptcy (808) in the near future due to Trump’s failure to contain the virus, the depth of the administration’s dishonesty was reinforced yet again by Mark Mazzetti and Kate Kelly of the New York Times.
Mirroring Bob Woodward’s discovery (see #719, #729) that the administration had lied to the American people about the danger of the coronavirus in February, Mazzetti and Kelly reported on curious happenings from February 24 and February 25. On February 24, Trump tweeted that the virus was “very much under control” and on February 25, Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow (see #70, #374, #607, #652, #661) claimed on CNBC that control of the virus was “pretty close to airtight.” While covering up the known threat from the public, Trump economic officials—including Kudlow—had disclosed the true state of the pandemic to board members from the Hoover Institution (a right-wing think tank run out of Stanford University) on those same days. (809)
This private information “quickly spread through parts of the investment world. U.S. stocks were already spiraling because of a warning from a federal public health official that the virus was likely to spread, but traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.”
Information from the meetings “provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.”
Despite the blatantly contradictory nature of his public and private statements in February, Kudlow told the Times “There was never any intent on my part to misinform.”
Eight months after Kudlow’s deliberate attempt to deceive the public on CNBC, the lid on the coronavirus was anything but airtight. On Thursday, October 15, the U.S. reported over 63,000 infections, the most since July 31. Total infections in the States were up 17%. 44 states were showing increasing case numbers and 30 states were seeing rising COVID-related deaths. Trump’s failure to contain the virus was so pronounced that even our friendly neighbors to the north, Canada, announced that they would likely keep the shared U.S.-Canada border closed.
As the coronavirus ravaged America, a new jobs report indicated that the economic rebound Trump had promised was a mirage. New unemployment filings hit their highest numbers in two months (810) as the U.S. was 11 million jobs short of its pre-pandemic employment rates. Between the administration’s failure to contain the virus—which was the one thing which could allow the economy to fully re-open—and their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith with House Democrats on further stimulus, six-eight million Americans had fallen below the poverty line since May. (811)
Trump had an opportunity to address constituent concerns at an NBC town hall Thursday evening, but chose to lie instead. Asked by host Savannah Guthrie when his last negative test had been before he tested positive, and if he had been tested the day he debated Joe Biden, Trump claimed he couldn’t remember. Asked about masks, Trump mistakenly claimed that 85% of people who wore masks got the coronavirus (812); the data he was referring to showed that people who dined out were much more likely to get coronavirus, even when wearing masks, presumably because they had to remove their masks to eat and drink. When Guthrie mentioned the high death rate in the States (see #804), Trump cut her off with the nonsensical statement “Excess mortality! Excess mortality, we’re a winner.” He later claimed the U.S. was “rounding the corner” in handling the virus. Expectations were so low that his stumbling performance was considered a victory among members of his campaign team. One adviser told the Daily Beast, “He didn’t spend the whole time yelling, he didn’t piss himself…so this was as best as we could have hoped for.”
Numbers reported on Friday, October 16 showed
that the U.S. wasn’t even closer to “rounding the corner.” For the second day
in a row, America had over 60,000 new
infections. Forty-four states
had higher caseloads than a month earlier; 17 had record highs. Trump reached his personal milestone of over
eight million official infections, the most in the world, and yet still a major undercount from
the true number.
The pandemic was so severe in the Midwest that eight Kansas City hospitals “had to temporarily
stop accepting ambulances Wednesday night.” (813)
As reported by Dan Goldberg of Politico,
hospitals all around the country were in dire straits because of the
administration’s failure to contain the virus and unwillingness to provide
necessary resources to state and local governments.
According to Goldberg, the ICU at the
University of Utah Health System was 95% full (814). Indiana had “critical ICU
bed shortages along with personnel shortages” (815) which was forcing the state
to “put out a call for volunteers to help fill staffing shortages in hard-hit
facilities near the Michigan and Kentucky borders.” Julie Willems Van Dijk, a
deputy secretary in Wisconsin’s state health department, told Politico,
“Many of our ICUs are strained….Every region of our state has one or more
hospitals reporting current and imminent staff shortages (816).” Texas Governor
Greg Abbott had to send 75 medical professionals to the El Paso area, as the
city of 700,000 was down to 10 ICU beds (817). In Albuquerque, New Mexico, “two
out of three major hospitals…are at, or exceeding, capacity (818).” Hospitals
in Missouri were “reaching capacity,” (819) while Integris, referred to as
“Oklahoma’s largest health system,” had just one ICU bed left (820). Bismarck,
the state capital of North Dakota, also had only one ICU bed left. (821)
Since the administration had no interest in
ameliorating the mass misery it had allowed to occur, the next best option was
to cover up their dereliction of duty by censoring unflattering information.
Jason Dearen, Mike Stobbe, and Richard Lardner of the AP looked at one branch of the
administration’s COVID propaganda mill in “White House puts ‘politicals’ at CDC to try to control
info.”
According to the opening paragraph, “The Trump White House has installed two political operatives at the nation’s top public health agency to try to control the information it releases about the coronavirus pandemic as the administration seeks to paint a positive outlook, sometimes at odds with the scientific evidence.
“The two appointees assigned to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters in June have no public health background (822, 823). They have instead been tasked with keeping an eye on Dr. Robert Redfield, the agency director, as well as scientists…”
Sources told the AP that “When the two
appointees showed up in Atlanta, their roles were a mystery to senior CDC
staff…They had not even been assigned offices. Eventually one, Nina Witkofsky,
became acting chief of staff, an influential role as Redfield’s right hand. The
other, her deputy Chester ‘Trey’ Moeller, also began sitting in on scientific
meetings…”
Witkofsky had no qualifications for the job:
“Witkofsky seemed a particularly strange fit
for the nation’s top public health agency. She studied finance and business
administration in college and graduate school, and at one point worked as a
publicist and talent booker for Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network. Her
political work included being an events director during the George W. Bush 2000
presidential campaign. As a State Department official, she developed an
international engagement program for U.S. athletes and coaches.
“Her lack of familiarity with the CDC, and how
it worked, quickly became clear in meetings, according to multiple agency
officials. At one, Witkofsky expressed surprise that the CDC had a supporting
foundation, one agency official recalled.” (824)
Witkofsky had worked closely with Michael
Caputo (see #s 723-724, #s730-731, #s 735-737), the extreme-right political
operative installed at Health and Human Services who had had a spectacular
public meltdown after his efforts to
manipulate the CDC’s MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) had been outed
by Politico.
The Democratic-led House Select Subcommittee
on the Coronavirus Crisis was “seeking to interview [Witkofsky and Moeller] as
part of a probe…into allegations the Trump administration blocked the CDC from
publishing accurate scientific reports during the pandemic.
“The subcommittee’s investigators want to know
more about Witkofsky and Moeller’s roles in reported attempts by Caputo and
administration officials to gain editorial control over the MMWR and other CDC
publications. The investigators are also interested in whether Witkofsky and
Moeller were
involved in making changes to CDC COVID-19 guidance for schools, as well as
agency information that has been changed multiple times on how the virus
spreads through the air.” (825)
Dr. Rick Bright (see #26, #s29-30, #50, #s260-261, W16, W18, W23), a whistleblower
who’d been demoted because of a lack of enthusiasm for Trump’s quack drug
hydroxychloroquine, then left the administration, told the AP that the
administration’s interference was “absolutely frightening….(It) leads to the
mixed signals to the public. And I think that is increasing the magnitude and
duration of this entire pandemic.” (826)
Bright was hardly alone in his concerns.
An open letter attacking the administration’s rampant
politicization (and dismantling) of the CDC and advocating for a competent
national pandemic response had amassed signatures from over one thousand
current and former CDC epidemic intelligence officers. Pre-Trump, the CDC had
been tailor made for the coronavirus:
“In previous public health crises, CDC provided the best available information and straightforward recommendations directly to the public. It was widely respected for effectively synthesizing and applying scientific evidence from epidemiologists and biomedical researchers at CDC and worldwide.”
But the Trump administration had gutted the
agency, leaving it ineffective and unable to rise to the occasion:
“[CDC’s] historic credibility was based on
incomparable expertise and 70+ years of institutional memory. That focus and
organization is hardly recognizable today.” (827)
Referring to the Trump administration’s
mishandling of the coronavirus (see #1-#827), the letter said “The absence of
national leadership on COVID-19 is unprecedented and dangerous.”
The absence of national leadership was again evident the following day, Saturday, October 17, as Trump headlined a large, packed rally in the swing state of Wisconsin. In his speech, Trump attacked Wisconsin’s Democratic governor for trying to protect public safety (828) and repeated his line about the U.S. “rounding the corner,” even though the state was experiencing record numbers of new cases and had among the highest infection rates in the country. According to press reports, attendees had to go the rally in “crowded shuttle buses” and once there, only 1/3rd wore masks. (829)
With infections rising rapidly and Trump doing his
level best to escalate that trend, the pandemic was guaranteed to get worse.
Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, October 18, infectious disease
expert Michael Osterholm called Trump advisor Scott Atlas’s belief that the U.S. could attain herd
immunity before vaccines were administered “pixie dust”
and predicted that America would “blow right through” the high totals from
Friday, with the upcoming 6 to 12 weeks likely to be the
“darkest of the entire
pandemic.”
Data released on Monday, October 19 bolstered
Osterholm’s pessimism. Case averages had increased 13% from a week earlier. Hospitalizations were growing 5% or more
per week in 37 states and ten states (all of which had
supported Trump in 2016) were experiencing record numbers. In an interview
which had aired on “60 Minutes” the day prior, Dr. Fauci had told it like it
was, saying, “When you have a million deaths and over 30 million infections
globally, you cannot say that we're on the road to essentially getting out of
this.”
Angered by Fauci’s matter-of-fact statement, Trump
again undermined his public health staff’s messaging by referring to Fauci is an “idiot” and a
“disaster” (830) on a call with campaign staff which was open to
reporters. Trump also said that U.S. public was “tired of hearing” about the
virus which had officially killed 220,000 Americans, sent millions to the
unemployment line, caused hunger for millions more, and completely upended
American life.
Trump carried his dangerous dishonesty out on the
trail again on Tuesday, October 20. Campaigning in Arizona, he claimed
that the Republican-led state was “in great shape,”
though Arizona had the 8th highest infection totals in the country
and had seen a 58% increase in infections over the prior two weeks.
The truth was that Trump wasn’t paying
attention to the state of the pandemic because he had no interest in governing.
All that mattered was winning the presidential election. As Francis Collins
(Trump’s National Institutes of Health Director) told a reporter from NPR,
Trump hadn’t met his own coronavirus task force
in “quite some time.” Trump was getting virus
information from Mike Pence, a non-scientist, and quack doctor Scott Atlas, an
advocate for herd immunity, a strategy which was failing Sweden. Letting Trump down easy for failing to fulfill a crucial part
of his job—ensuring public health and safety—Collins added that “Obviously,
it's a bit of a chaotic time with the election….There's not a direct connection
between the task force members and the president as there was a few months ago
(831), but this seems to be a different time with different priorities.”
Saving lives was
clearly a low priority, particularly when those lives weren’t a part of the
main #MAGA demographic. A study done by Trump’s CDC showed that excess deaths
(the number of deaths above what the U.S. had had during a similar period of
time in 2015-2019) in 2020 had reached 300,000, yet more evidence that the
official COVID death count of 220,000 was a significant undercount.
Statnews.com reporter Andrew Joseph noted that the burden fell
disproportionately on people of color:
“Deaths among white people in 2020 were just 11.9%
higher than average years, a much lower increase than deaths among Latinx
people (53.6% higher than average), Asian people (36.6% higher), Black people
(32.9% higher), and American Indians and Alaska Natives (28.9% higher).”
Further analysis
of these excess deaths on Wednesday, October 21 showed
that “at least 130,000 deaths and perhaps as many as 210,000 could have
been avoided with earlier policy interventions and more robust federal
coordination and leadership.”
The key culprits for Trump’s failures were a lack of
preparation, an unwillingness to adjust as new realities came to light, and an
indifference to human suffering with ominous signs for the near future:
“Particularly, it is the inability or unwillingness of
U.S. officials to adapt or improve the federal response over the course of the pandemic
that has strongly contributed to the nation's uniquely high COVID-19 fatality
rate.” (832)
Dr.
Ali Khan, an epidemiologist and the dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center's
College of Public Health, told CNN, "There's no doubt, this is the worst
case of public health malpractice we've ever seen in this nation."
The impact of the administration’s malpractice continued to be felt on Thursday, October 22.
As reported
by Sam Baker and Andrew Witherspoon, “Every available piece of data proves it:
The coronavirus pandemic is getting worse again, all across America.” Positive
tests were up. New cases were now going up by 15% per week, part of a six-week
trend of increases. Hospitalizations were increasing; 16 states had record
hospitalization rates.
One day after Robert
Redfield had cited the “distressing trend” of the pandemic, Trump did what he does best
at Thursday’s presidential debate—lie with abandon
and mislead the public about the seriousness of the pandemic. (833)
Addressing
a TV viewership of 63 million Americans, Trump claimed the surging coronavirus
would “go away,” that we were “rounding the corner,” that “more and more people
are getting better,” that “we’re not going to have a dark winter,” that people
“were learning to live with” the pandemic, even that he’d “been
congratulated by the heads of many countries on what we've been able
to do.”
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt perfectly summed up this surreal
moment:
“…the debate wasn’t normal by the standards of nearly all
of American history. It wasn’t normal because one of the nominees — the sitting
president — told one lie after another. He did so about the virus, North Korea,
China, Russia, climate change, his own health care policy, Joe Biden’s health
care policy, Biden’s finances and the immigrant children who were separated
from their parents….it’s impossible to analyze a debate filled with untruths
without first acknowledging them. They undermine an event meant to highlight
differences between candidates. They undermine democracy. To ignore them is to
miss the biggest story: a president trying to construct his own reality.”
One day after Trump said America was learning to live with the virus, on Friday, October 23, it was reported that the U.S. had had over 70,000 new infections Thursday, the most since July 24. On Friday, the U.S. would have 80,000+ new infections, a record.
A new study published by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation found that a universal mask mandate could
save the lives of 130,000 Americans by February, but admitting the
obvious and advocating for public health would undermine Trump’s false
narrative that he had successfully handled the pandemic. Trump instead doubled
down on misinformation and had a dizzying schedule of crowded, mostly
mask-less rallies, many of them in COVID hotspots.
Trump’s strategy was to sacrifice as many people as
possible in the short term, including tens or hundreds of thousands of
Americans who hadn’t attended his campaign events, leaving vaccines to save the
day. But he was even screwing that up. As reported by Carl
Zimmer, “Purely
by chance, thousands of vaccinated people will have heart attacks, strokes and
other illnesses shortly after the injections. Sorting out whether the vaccines
had anything to do with their ailments will be a thorny problem, requiring a
vast, coordinated effort by state and federal agencies, hospitals, drug makers
and insurers to discern patterns in a flood of data. Findings will need to be
clearly communicated to a distrustful public swamped with disinformation.
“For now, Operation Warp Speed,
created by the Trump administration to spearhead development of coronavirus
vaccines and treatments, is focused on getting vaccines through clinical trials
in record time and manufacturing them quickly.
“The next job will be to monitor
the safety of vaccines once they’re in widespread use. But the administration
last year quietly disbanded the office with the expertise for exactly this job,
merging it into an office focused on infectious diseases. Its elimination has
left that long-term safety effort for coronavirus vaccines fragmented among
federal agencies, with no central leadership, experts say.” (834)
Daniel Salmon, who handled vaccine
coordination during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, told the Times, “We’re
behind the eight ball….we don’t even know who’s in charge.”
The reality was that no one was in charge. Trump had
stifled his public health team and was focused on campaigning to the exclusion
of all else, leaving the pandemic to run rampant. On
Sunday, October 25, it was reported that the U.S.
had had a record number of cases
again on Saturday, almost 90,000, even as Trump had told a North Carolina
audience, “We're rounding
the turn, our numbers are incredible.” (835)
The recklessness of the Trump campaign was coming home to roost, as it was reported that Marc Short (Mike Pence’s chief of staff) and four other White House staffers had contracted COVID-19. Pence had no plans to stop his busy schedule of risky rallies to quarantine; over the last six weeks of the campaign, Pence would have 34 rallies which featured none of the safeguards the Democratic candidates were following—little or no social distancing, masks optional (836-869). Throwing up their hands even as they continually claimed victory over the virus on the campaign trail, one White House official told a reporter “we’re not going to control the pandemic.”
This comment proved true.
As of Monday, October 26, nine states were reporting record hospitalizations.
Against this backdrop of chaos and death, the
administration continued to fall back on cruelty. As reported by Helena
Bottemiller Evich of Politico, Trump’s Agriculture Department was blocking emergency food assistance
for 40% of the families eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program (SNAP). A federal judge had called the move an “egregious disobedience”
of federal law. Despite the clear intent of the law, despite the ruling of the
judge, the administration was continuing to push for starvation, appealing the
ruling. (870)
Out on the trail, Trump kept up a breakneck pace of super-spreader
rallies. In one of his three appearances in Pennsylvania
Monday, Trump continued to implant a false sense of security by pushing his favorite
campaign-friendly fairytale:
“it’s not going to be a dark winter. It’s going to be a great winter.” (871)
Trump did his part to guarantee a dark winter by
holding a jam-packed rally in Wisconsin
on Tuesday, October 27, the same day the state set a record for new infections
and deaths (872). As he’d done before, Trump attacked Wisconsin’s Democratic
governor for the limited public health measures he’d been able to get through a
Republican-controlled state Supreme Court and spoke of “turning the corner.”
Opposite Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who were doing
only small events and drive-ins with social distancing, the Trump-Pence
super-spreader events gave the GOP ticket a big competitive advantage, rallying
the base in the crucial days before the election to drive turnout. Another
competitive advantage the GOP had was that Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis
DeJoy, had dismantled the postal service, in the process undermining mail
balloting, which hurt Democrats across the country. Court orders demanding
reversals of DeJoy’s destructive changes were too little, too late; the Postal
Service was so hobbled by DeJoy’s actions that
voters were being told to turn their absentee ballots in in person or risk
their health and stand in line to vote in person. (873)
On Wednesday, October 28, 1,025 more Americans died, largely
because of Trump’s gross negligence and states continued to struggle
with severe revenue shortfalls and service cuts due to the GOP’s unwillingness
to bargain in good faith on another federal stimulus bill.
The U.S. “rounded the corner” again on Thursday,
October 29, crushing its previous record
with 91,000 new cases as eight states posted record highs and 42 saw an
increase from the week prior. Beet-red North Dakota led the pack with 5% of its
population testing positive for COVID-19.
Despite the surging pandemic, Mike Pence had been AWOL
from one of his key task force duties: taking part in a weekly call to all 50
of America’s governors to coordinate public health responses. According to
Adam Cancryn and Dan Goldberg of Politico, Pence’s vanishing act (874)
was “a prolonged absence that
represents just the latest sign of the task force’s diminished role in the face
of the worsening public health crisis it was originally created to combat.
“Once
a driving force behind the White House’s coronavirus messaging, the group
hasn’t held a collective press briefing in months (875). Inside the West Wing,
task force members’ growing alarm over the virus’ resurgence has gone largely
ignored (876). And among health officials on the front lines, there is mounting
consensus that the federal government has little new aid to offer – leaving
states to face the pandemic’s third and potentially worst wave increasingly on
their own. (877)
“‘There’s
not any acknowledgment or appreciation of the severity of the surge,’ said an
official in one governor’s office long frustrated with the federal response. ‘The
stark reality that we’re facing is the White House – from top to bottom – has
stopped governing and is only campaigning.’”
Another administration official who had failed to
protect public health was Seema Verma, Trump’s head of the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS). Despite some tough talk before the cameras about
holding nursing homes accountable, Verma’s CMS had too often let the industry regulate
itself, levying only token fines when patients’ safety was violated.
According to a Washington Post investigation, the lax approach
was part of “a three-year push at CMS to ease rules long considered burdensome
to the nursing home industry, whose lobbyists and leaders include former
politicians and government insiders. Even before the coronavirus crisis, the
agency took steps to limit the use of some fines and strike an Obama-era
mandate requiring nursing homes to bring on at least part-time infection
preventionists.” (878)
Despite the clear threat to nursing home residents’
health and life posed by the coronavirus, “the
government inspectors deployed by CMS during the first six months of the crisis
cleared nearly 8 in 10 nursing homes of any infection-control violations…”
“…Those
cleared included homes with mounting coronavirus outbreaks before or during the
inspections (879), as well as those that saw cases and deaths spiral upward
after inspectors reported no violations had been found, in some cases multiple
times (880). All told, homes that received a clean bill of health earlier this
year had about 290,000 coronavirus cases and 43,000 deaths among residents and
staff, state and federal data shows.”
Charlene Harrington, described as “a
sociology and nursing professor at the University of California at San
Francisco who has studied the [nursing home] industry for more than 30 years,”
told the Post, “I can’t think of one decision that CMS made
properly….They just rolled over, whatever the nursing homes wanted. CMS made it
so much worse than it could have been if they had just kept their oversight in
place.”
On Friday, October 30, Trump reached his milestone of over 100,000 new daily infections, smashing both the world record and his personal best. Trump also passed nine million official infections, a major undercount but still #1 in the world.
As part of his victory lap, Trump held another public
safety-optional, super-spreader campaign event in Wisconsin, a world hotspot
which had had a record number of daily infections
on Tuesday (881). Up in front of his adoring fans, Trump bragged about the
crowd size, attacked Biden for focusing on the pandemic, and repeated the lie
that cases were up because testing had increased. Emergency medical physician
Dr. Jeff Pothof of the University of Wisconsin Health told a reporter for the
Daily Beast “it just seems unfathomable that in a country like the United States
where we have a public health crisis, where hospitals are at capacity, where
there's a field hospital open in the state, that any group would consider
having an event that would cause people to gather in large numbers, not spaced
and not masked.” Pothof likened the super-spreader rallies to “throwing
gasoline on the fire at the same time our healthcare workers are exhausted.
They have given it their all and our hospitals are about to bust.”
A Stanford study reported on Saturday, October 31
revealed that Trump’s rallies had led to a minimum of 30,000+
infections and 700 deaths. The study only looked at the span
between June 20 and September 22, when Trump wasn’t doing many campaign stops.
That day, Trump had four rallies, with five scheduled on Sunday and another
five on Monday. In total, Trump had dozens of super-spreader
rallies (47 of which haven’t been accounted for in this
timeline, until now—882-929).
Commenting on the study, Biden spokesman Andrew Bates
said, “The worst part is that this doesn’t even capture Trump’s many super-spreader
events on White House grounds or the last five weeks of events across the
country. How many more lives have been upended in that time? How many more
empty seats are there at kitchen tables across America because of Donald
Trump’s ego?”
Cause-and-effect, valid data, and horrible human
consequences for others were of no concern to the administration. Appearing on
“This Week” with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, November 1, Trump
adviser Jason Miller refused to back down
from a flagrant lie
Trump was using in his stump speeches—that doctors were over-diagnosing
COVID-19 for profit (930). In reality, there was no evidence that doctors had
been willing to commit fraud for higher reimbursements and the official COVID death totals were greatly understated—not
overstated, as Trump implied—because tens of thousands of Americans had died
from the virus before being diagnosed.
In stark contrast to Miller, Anthony Fauci used
straight talk in an interview with the Washington Post. Fauci revealed
that Trump hadn’t spoken to him since early October (931), and then only
because Trump had contracted the coronavirus. Fauci said that “the public
health aspect of the task force has diminished greatly” and said of Trump’s
favorite advisor, Scott Atlas (see #622-623, #687-689, #756-757), “He’s a smart
guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight
or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you
dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.” Of the state of
the pandemic in the U.S., he said, “All the stars are aligned in the wrong
place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at
home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Another rare administration official willing to
acknowledge reality was Deborah Birx, who had been handpicked by Trump to lead
the coronavirus response. As revealed in the Washington Post on Monday,
November 2, an internal report authored by Birx
directly contradicted many of Trump’s COVID-19 talking points.
The increase in cases had nothing to do with the
volume of testing, as testing in many high-infection areas was “flat or
declining,” and Trump and Pence’s rallies were exactly what the country didn’t
need: “There
is an absolute necessity of the Administration to use this moment to ask the American
people to wear masks, physical distance and avoid gatherings in both public and
private spaces.”
Trump’s framing that the only two choices were doing
next to nothing to stop the virus (his strategy) or a full lockdown (what he
claimed was Joe Biden’s strategy) was a false dichotomy:
“This is not about lockdowns - It hasn't been about
lockdowns since March or April. It's about an aggressive balanced approach that
is not being implemented.” (932)
Birx’s main point: “essential
at this time point” was “consistent messaging about uniform use of masks, physical
distancing and hand washing with profound limitation on indoor gatherings, especially with family
and friends.”
As Birx’s concerns
spread across the Internet, Trump’s handlers planned an indoor election night
party at the White House for several hundred
guests with few precautions.
The state of the union could hardly be worse on Tuesday,
November 3, election day 2020.
Coronavirus cases were surging to over 100,000 daily—including
more than 61,000 children in just the
past week—the economy was in the tank, race relations were at a modern low,
and thanks to Trump’s ceaseless hyper-partisan demagoguery and threats to the
democratic process, 55% of Americans felt that this would be
the most stressful day of their lives. (933)
November 4, 2020-January 20, 2021
Despite a massive and unprecedented GOP vote
suppression effort, Joe Biden wins the 2020 election with 306 electoral college
votes and a commanding seven million-ballot popular vote victory, the second
highest margin in the past 20 years of presidential races. Ignoring the
pandemic as it surges to 300,000 new daily
infections, over 4,000 daily deaths, and 130,000 hospitalizations, Trump tries
to overturn the election with frivolous lawsuits, pressure on state and county
elections officials and state legislators, and a
flagrantly unconstitutional effort to get Mike Pence to reject
Democratic electors. Trump’s attempt to dispense with a 232 year-tradition of
democratic elections ends when an insurrection he
incited fails to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win.
By early evening on Wednesday, November 4, it was clear that Trump had lost, even though he had demonstrated a cult-like grip on under- and dis-informed Republican voters. With Biden having already won the swing state of Arizona and Nebraska’s 2nd district, AP calls for Biden in Wisconsin and Michigan gave the Democrat 270 electoral votes, enough to clinch the presidency. There was a possibility that Arizona had been called prematurely, but Pennsylvania was almost certain to go Biden’s way, based on the vote margin and the districts that had yet to be counted, and Georgia was trending toward Biden.
Election stories dominated news on Thursday,
November 5, but COVID-19 continued to have an outsized impact. The U.S.
logged over 121,000 new cases,
the highest total to date, and state unemployment filings increased
more than expected due to Trump’s failure to get control of the pandemic.
Rather than fulfill the most important duty on his job
description—to keep Americans safe—Trump focused 100% of his energy on clogging
the courts with frivolous lawsuits and making easily-debunked claims about
election fraud.
Friday, November 6
saw new cases jump to over 128,000.
Not surprisingly, 93% of the counties with the highest
infection rates had supported Trump on Tuesday. Even as
their communities were being devastated by COVID-19, the bulk of Republican
voters continued to be played for suckers by Trump and his dangerous and
dishonest rhetoric (934): AP polls found that
36% of Trump voters felt the pandemic was “completely” or “mostly” under
control, while a separate 47% believed the pandemic was “somewhat” under
control.
The correct answer, known by 82% of Biden supporters,
was that the pandemic was “not at all” under control. Cases set another record
on Saturday, November 7, increasing to 134,000. Fittingly,
Pennsylvania—and the election—were officially called for Joe Biden
that afternoon.
By contrast to our acting president, who ignored a
crisis which was killing over 1,000 Americans/day to rage-Tweet and stir up his
primitive fanbase with ludicrous and math-challenged conspiracy theories, the
president-elect snapped into action pronto,
announcing that he would name his coronavirus task force Monday.
On Monday, November 9, the need for Biden’s
swift action was reinforced
by Dan Goldberg and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico. The U.S.
healthcare system, already overwhelmed, was likely to be further strained as
the country was on course to see one million new infections weekly by the end
of the year. The holes Biden had to fill were many: a lack of sufficient PPE
(935) and testing (936), cities and states deep in the red due to Trump’s
recession (937), collaborative relationships to repair with the World Health
Organization and international allies (938). Cyrus Shahpar (a former CDC
official in charge of the Covid Exit Strategy) told Politico, “If you want to have a better 2021, then
maybe the rest of 2020 needs to be an investment in driving the virus down.”
Unfortunately, the Trump administration was making no
such investment, even as HUD secretary Ben Carson and other administration
figures came down with the virus after attending Trump’s crowded election-night “victory
party.”
What was the president up to in the middle of
the worst public health crisis in 100 years?
Fundraising.
Capitalizing on grievance-peddling,
Trump’s allies were tapping his supporters for funds to support the campaign’s
litigation assaults on democracy. Big portions of the money would be used to
pay off campaign debt, and some of it was going straight into Trump’s pocket,
but there was no need to mention that in the fundraising emails.
While Trump used his office and the faith placed in
him by tens of millions of gullible Americans to serve his own interests, again, the virus he’d
unleashed grew in intensity. On Tuesday, November 10, the U.S. had over 130,000 infections
(the 7th straight day
with over 100,000 new cases) and a record number of hospitalizations. In total,
America had over 10,000,000 official cases, a dramatic undercount
of the real numbers and yet still vastly higher than any other country.
Daily cases climbed even higher on Wednesday,
November 11, all the way up to 145,000,
an increase from 104,000 just a week earlier, with 49 states seeing daily
increases. Wednesday’s death totals
were almost 1,900, the highest since May.
As almost two thousand of his constituents died each
day because of his incompetence and indifference, Trump whined about the “medical deep state,” claiming that Big Pharm
behemoth Pfizer was secretly a left-wing organization which had withheld the announcement of successful late-stage
clinical trials until after the election in order to hurt him politically.
With the totals shooting up again on Thursday,
November 12, to over 152,000 infections and 66,000
hospitalizations, it would have been a good time for the
administration to aggressively counter the virus, or, at the very least, to have
the president speak to the country to calm his constituents’ nerves.
Instead of doing what any responsible leader would
have done, Trump continued to ghost the American public, “hate-watching” cable TV,
hiding behind his Twitter account and not speaking publicly (939), while
plotting to create a digital propaganda network
for people who find far-right Fox to be “too liberal.”
While Trump licked his self-inflicted wounds and
inflamed his white supporters’ false sense of victimhood, millions of Americans
suffered. As of Friday, November 13, 100,000 small businesses had gone under
due to the GOP’s unwillingness to negotiate a stimulus deal in good faith, which
had allowed the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. Healthcare
workers were being pushed to the brink (see
#379) and schools were starting to close again
(940), something that wasn’t having to be done in Europe.
Ten states had just posted a record number of infections and weekly numbers
were increasing 2-3X over in many parts of the country. Dr. Gregory Poland (the
leader of Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group) told a reporter from Yahoo, “We are now exponential.
You cannot control exponentiality. We blew it; we’re past that.”
On Saturday, November 14, it was reported that the number of infections was increasing
in all 50 states for the first time.
In other news, it came out that Trump hadn’t been to a
coronavirus task force meeting in five months.
(see #833)
Not only was Trump refusing to leverage the formidable
resources of the U.S. federal government to mitigate the disaster he’d played a
central role in creating, but he was blocking the incoming administration from
being able to respond to the pandemic effectively.
As reported
on Sunday, November 15, Trump’s General Services Administration
appointee, Emily Murphy, was holding up the presidential transition, though
Biden had won a clear victory at the ballot box with 306 electoral college
votes (the same as Trump in 2016) and a popular vote margin projected to reach
seven million ballots, the second highest margin since the 1996 election.
Murphy’s hyper-partisan loyalty to Trump’s bruised ego
was keeping Biden’s team from collaborating with public health agencies,
robbing them of crucial public health data (941) and potentially jeopardizing
the rollout of vaccines (942), distribution of PPE (943), and national testing
strategies (944). Even Trump’s own testing czar, Brett Giroir, told ABC’s “This Week”
that Murphy should stop playing games: “This is an issue of public health and saving American lives. There’s
nothing more important than that.”
Trump reached his personal milestone of over 11,000,000 Americans (officially)
infected on Monday, November 16, just a week after
reaching his personal milestone of 10,000,00 Americans (officially) infected.
Included in the 11,000,000 were a small subset of
people who denied that they had the coronavirus—while dying from the
coronavirus. As reported on Tuesday, November 17, the denial
implanted by Trump, which had trickled down to his state-level Republican
allies, had made its way down to the right-wing hoi polloi in South
Dakota, the state with the highest per-capita rate of infection. According to Jodi
Doering, a South Dakota nurse, “I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on
my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few
days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is
real….They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you
names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t
have COVID because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens.” (945)
An Axios-Ipsos poll shared by reporter Sam Baker
showed that this extreme trend was part of a national cult of Republican ignorance
about COVID-19 (see #145, #204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323.
#325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440, #452, #534, #s 566-567, #641, #739, #942,
#945).
Despite eight months of mass death, infection, and
increasingly clear data available to anyone with Internet access, only 52% of
Republicans (as opposed to 87% of Democrats) knew that “attending in-person
gatherings outside your household” held a large/moderate risk of infection,
only 45% of Republicans (as opposed to 87% of Democrats) understood that restaurant
dining held a large/moderate risk of infection, and only 51% of Republicans (as
opposed to 92% of Democrats) grasped that holiday traveling held a large/moderate
risk of infection, a cluelessness which contributed to infection-spreading
behavior. (946)
This disconnect from reality carried over to the
election itself, as 73% of Republicans
questioned the validity of Biden’s win, despite the clear margin of victory and
the fact that months of polls had pointed to a highly likely Biden victory. In
the interest of keeping his followers in the dark, Trump fired Christopher
Krebs, a Republican who Trump had appointed to lead the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs had committed multiple sins. From the
early post-election days Krebs had publicly debunked right-wing
disinformation about election fraud, as his agency was supposed to do. On
November 12, his agency had said in a joint statement that “The November 3rd
election was the most secure in American history” and “There is no evidence
that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way
compromised.” State elections officials from both parties had mirrored Krebs’
statements about the security of our election machinery and the lack of
fraud,
but they didn’t work for Trump, so he couldn’t fire them.
As of Wednesday, November 18, 83% of counties around the U.S. had seen
an increase in infections over the prior two weeks, with average increases
of 156%. Twenty-two percent of hospitals around the country were understaffed
and eight states expected to see 1/3rd of their hospitals
understaffed in the coming week.
That day, the U.S. passed 250,000 official deaths
from COVID-19, an undercount
from the actual number but still far higher than any other country in the
world.
A headline at Axios.com on Thursday, November 19,
summed up the state of the virus in the United States: “The pandemic is as bad as it’s ever been.”
As reported by Sam Baker and Andrew Witherspoon, “This
is bad as the pandemic has ever been — the most cases, the most explosive
growth and the greatest strain on hospitals. If businesses were closed right
now, it would not be safe to reopen them. And holiday travel will be risky no
matter where you’re coming from or where you’re going.”
Infection numbers were up 30% from the week before,
which had had a 40% increase from the week before that, and “No state in
America could clear the threshold right now to safely allow indoor gatherings.”
(947)
Exacerbating the raging state of the pandemic were
insufficient testing resources around the country—still!—leading to long lines and long waits
for test results, which rendered the tests virtually useless. (948)
But Trump had no time for such trifles. He had more
important things to attend to.
Namely, stealing the election from the rightful
victor, Joe Biden. After failing to get Georgia’s
conservative Republican secretary of state to invalidate Democratic votes, he
was inviting Republican state
legislators from Michigan to the White House in an effort to get them to toss
out Biden’s 154,000-vote win and choose the state’s electors.
The U.S. broke records
for new infections (193,000) and hospitalizations (82,000) again on Friday,
November 20. Half of America’s counties were in the “red zone.”
Due to increased hospitalizations, 1,000 U.S. hospitals were considered “critically short”
of necessary staff; Trump-loving North Dakota
led the way, with 51% of their hospitals short-staffed.
That afternoon, Trump had a rare opportunity to
collaborate with G20 allies at a meeting on pandemic preparedness. In
attendance would be leaders from Germany and South Korea who had handled the
virus infinitely better than Trump and presumably had a lot of good advice to
offer.
He went golfing instead.
(949)
On Monday, November 23, Trump’s General
Services Administration head, Emily Murphy, finally allowed the presidential
transition to move forward after stonewalling the president-elect for more than two weeks after he’d been
declared the winner. Trump announced the decision via Tweet
while saying that his frivolous lawsuits to overturn the election result and
ignore the will of 81 million Americans would continue.
The U.S. had over 1,500 reported COVID-related deaths
on Tuesday, November 24.
Over at the Washington Post, Hannah Natanson
looked at the dire shortcomings
of the shift to online education necessitated by Trump’s failure to get the
pandemic under control. In findings which had been mirrored in St. Paul and
Houston, schools in Fairfax County, VA were seeing an increase of 83% in F’s
since in-person learning had become unsafe. Children with disabilities had 111%
more F’s, while F’s among children learning English went up 106%. Latinx
children were harmed the most of any demographic, with 92% more F’s.
And these numbers were averages of all
students, K-12. The data for young children was especially troubling, with F’s
up 300% among middle-schoolers.
Natanson’s conclusion: “…the data confirms experts’
worst fears/predictions about online learning: That children who were already
engaged, and in stable/supportive home situations, will do just fine. BUT that
kids who were already struggling will take a deep, possibly irrecoverable
nosedive.”
The following day, Wednesday, November 25, the
U.S. had over 2,000 deaths
from COVID-19, while hospitalizations hit a record high—just shy of 90,000—3X
the hospitalization rate on October 1.
As had been the case all along, Americans of color
were disproportionately impacted by Trump’s failure to contain the pandemic.
Reporting for the Guardian, Nina Lakhani and Maanvi Singh looked at growing food insecurity in the U.S.
According to Lakhani and Singh, “demand for food aid” had increased 60% from
before the pandemic and “5.6 [million] households [had] struggled to put enough
food on the table in the past week.” Of these 5.6 million households, “27% of
black and 23% of Latino respondents with children reported not having enough to
eat sometimes or often over the past week – compared with 12% of white people.”
Hunger for families with children was “three times higher than in 2019.” (950)
Barack Obama had increased food stamp eligibility
during the Great Recession, but America’s poor in 2020 were saddled with a
Republican administration which was trying to reduce food stamp benefits
(see #875) and a Republican Senate which had blocked additional food assistance
for months by refusing to negotiate with House Democrats, who’d passed the
Heroes Act on May 15.
Ellen Vollinger of the Food Research & Action
Centre told the Guardian, “It’s difficult to understand the lack of
political will to address this when the county is in such a dire emergency.”
Another complication with food security was a lack of
volunteers to help run food clinics. On Thursday, November 26,
Thanksgiving, Orion Rummler reported that “Soup kitchens and
charities, usually brimming with holiday volunteers, are getting far
less help.” A big contributor to the problem was
that elderly volunteers weren’t able to risk coming out, due to Trump’s failure
to contain the pandemic. Feeding America, a national provider, said that 60% of
their food banks needed more volunteers. At risk were “50 million people in the
U.S., including 17 million children, [who] could become food insecure this year
due to the pandemic.” (951)
One of the stories with significant implications which
was buried in the slow holiday news cycle was the radical change at the U.S.
Supreme Court following Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to replace
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While Ginsburg had been alive, the court had ruled 5-4
that states could limit public religious gatherings, which had been found to be
potential super-spreader events.
After the elevation of Barrett, the court ruled that the desire
of churchgoers to worship in public was more important than the community need
for public safety, a decision the five right-wing members of the court would later
try to impose on other states. (952)
On Friday, November 27, the U.S. passed 90,000 COVID-19
hospitalizations for the first time, to 90,481, a number
which grew to 91,635 on Saturday, November 28.
By Monday, November 30, hospitalizations were up to 96,039,
twice the number on November 1, 3X the number on October 1.
The progress of COVID-19 vaccine trials was giving the
American public some hope, but the administration was doing the bare minimum
with the rollout. As with testing, PPE, and many other vital elements of the
U.S. response, the administration was outsourcing this complicated process to
states. As reported
by Sara Owermohle, Rachel Roubein, and Zachary Brennan, “The Trump
administration is shunting to the states hard decisions about which Americans
will get the limited early supplies of coronavirus vaccines — setting up a
confusing patchwork of distribution plans that could create unequal access to
the life-saving shots.” (953)
The administration had “decided to allocate scarce
early doses based on states’ total populations”—rather than on need—“forcing
hard choices in states with a greater proportion of residents at high risk — including
Black, Indigenous and Latino communities that have suffered disproportionate
rates of hospitalization and death from Covid-19.” (954)
Josh Michaud, referred to as “an associate director
for global health policy at Kaiser Family Foundation who has reviewed nearly
every state’s distribution plan,” told Politico, “It’s very obvious
that states are in different places when it comes to planning and identifying
who those people are.”
The decentralization of the vaccine process “translates
into an uneven rollout among states, that could shake the public’s already
fragile confidence in the government's coronavirus response and possibly even
in the vaccines themselves.”
The human impact of the right-wing theology about
local control—the belief that local governments always make the best
decisions—got a look on Tuesday, December 1 at ProPublica. In “States with Few Coronavirus Restrictions
Are Spreading the Virus Beyond Their Borders,” Armstrong
showed how Trump’s months of lies and minimization of the coronavirus had
filtered down to Republican leaders at the state level and ultimately, to their
citizens.
In focus were the borders between Democratic- and
Republican-run states (Washington-Idaho, Minnesota and South Dakota, Illinois
and Iowa). Specifically, the practice of irresponsible people from blue states
with strict health guidelines going to red states with few or no safety
measures, catching COVID, and bringing it back to their communities, as
thousands of the riders at South Dakota’s Sturgis motorcycle rally
had done to their fellow Minnesota residents. This was also happening in
Spokane, Washington, near the Idaho border, where infection rates were much
higher than in Seattle, which was further from right-wing, COVID-friendly
Idaho.
Referring to Trump’s unwillingness to enact minimum
federal guidelines for the states to follow, Dr. Ashish Jha (of Brown
University’s School of Public Health) told ProPublica, “What really
struck me [is] how hard it is to take the pandemic strategy as laid out by the
White House with every state on its own and ... implement it because every
state is not on its own, they are all interconnected.”
This approach represented a race to the bottom: “In
some ways, the whole country is essentially living with the strategy of the
least effective states because states interconnect and one state not doing a
good job will continue to spread the virus to other states….States can’t wall
themselves off.” (955)
That same day, Georgia’s voting system implementation
manager Gabe Sterling (a Republican who had voted for Trump) gave an impassioned press conference
in response to Trump’s constant claims that he’d been robbed of a win in the
state, which had generated threats to Georgia elections officials and their
families. Addressing Trump directly, Sterling said, “Mr.
President, as the secretary said yesterday, people aren’t giving you the
best advice of what’s actually going on the ground. It’s time to look forward.
If you want to run for reelection in four years, fine do it. But everything
we’re seeing right now, there’s not a path. Be the bigger man here and stop —
step in, tell your supporters, ‘Don’t be violent don’t intimidate.’ All that’s
wrong. It’s un-American.” In words that would prove remarkably prescient,
Sterling said that if Trump didn’t stop his toxic lies, “Someone’s gonna get
shot. Someone’s gonna get killed.”
On Wednesday, December 2, the United States continued to spiral downward,
with a record numbers of hospitalizations (100,667) and deaths (2,800).
In a virtual talk to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, CDC
head Robert Redfield said that December, January, and February would be
“the most difficult time in the public health history” of the United States.
Deaths increased to 2,879 on
Thursday, December 3.
Trump continued to be AWOL from the
battle with COVID-19, staying out of sight and focusing his public
messaging on gripes about the election (the New York Times would later report that Trump “posted or reposted about 145 messages on
Twitter lashing out at the results of an election he lost. He mentioned
the coronavirus pandemic now reaching its darkest hours four times — and even
then just to assert that he was right about the outbreak and the experts were
wrong.”)
Appearing on CNN Thursday, Republican senator Mitt
Romney took Trump to task
for his baseless claims of election fraud and lack of focus on the pandemic:
“It's
unfortunate that this became a political issue. It's not political. This is
public health….And, unfortunately, we have not made that message clear enough
to the American people. And people are dying because of it.” (956)
Friday, December 4
offered more of the same. As reported
by the Daily Mail, hospitalizations (101,276) and new infections
(227,885) hit new highs. The U.S. now had one-third of the new cases in the
world while making up just 5% of the world’s population.
Boston
Globe
reporter Hanna Krueger interviewed some of America’s top
infectious disease experts for a big picture perspective on the state of the
pandemic in the U.S. As Krueger noted, “The [United
States], and in particular [Boston], are home to some of the greatest public
health experts in the world, many of whom have spent their careers preparing
for a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.”
And yet, the pandemic had had a more
devastating impact on the United States than any other developed country, mainly
due to Trump’s incompetence/indifference and the culture of selfishness and
scientific illiteracy he had tapped into. Michael Mina (see #61-62), an assistant
professor of epidemiology and immunology at Harvard’s school of public health,
reflected the consensus: “At almost every step of
this pandemic, we have failed magnificently as a country….And in ways that we
just really didn’t need to fail.”
The
policies which were needed to get us out of this disaster were plain as day, but
the Trump administration had chosen failure:
“I’m just astounded by the dysfunction, the willingness to just
stay the course as hundreds of thousands of people die, and the unwillingness
to innovate in literally any way (957)….I’ve realized that when we need to rise
up as a country, we have truly no moral capacity to do it. It’s just the most
mind-bending, complete ‘Twilight Zone’ experience that makes you ask why the
hell we even bother.”
While much of the media attention was given to the
dizzying numbers, COVID-19 continued to wreak havoc in ways that weren’t as
headline-friendly. On Saturday, December 5, Lindsey Tanner of the AP explored
another grim consequence
of Trump’s failure to get a handle on the pandemic: the mental health toll on
Americans under 18.
According to Tanner, “With schools closed, routines
disrupted and parents anxious over lost income or uncertain futures, children
are shouldering new burdens many are unequipped to bear.”
Emergency rooms in Massachusetts had seen “four times
more children and teens in psychiatric crisis weekly than usual,” a trend
reflected nationwide. And when children arrive, “they often wait days in
emergency rooms because there aren’t enough psychiatric beds.” Ralph Buonopane
(described as “a mental health program director at Franciscan Hospital for
Children in Boston”) told the AP, “I’ve been director of this program for 21
years and worked in child psychiatric services since the 1980s and it is very
much unprecedented.” (958)
Also victimized by Trump’s abject failure of
leadership were millions of financially-strapped Americans. In a poll run by Highland
Solutions, 63% of respondents said they were living paycheck-to-paycheck. 47%
said they had depleted emergency savings. One-fourth said they had amassed more
than $10,000 in debt just to get by. 82% said they wouldn’t be able to afford a
sudden $500 expense.
As of Sunday, December 6, the U.S. had logged
over a million new infections in just the past five days, with an average of
190,948 cases over the prior week, a record.
Vaccines were on the way, but 40% of Americans were
expressing resistance to getting vaccinated, not least because of Trump’s lack
of scientific credibility (a credibility so tarnished that it was even being
called “a massive failure”
at Fox News).
And the vaccines which were going out in December
represented just a fraction of what states had been
promised by the administration, creating logistical
problems for the states (959) and shortchanging public safety. (960)
Supply chain problems were cited as one of the main
reasons the administration wouldn’t come close to meeting its vaccination rate
goals. It also came out that the administration had made an unforced error by
not securing more doses when they’d had a chance, potentially losing America’s
spot in line to other developed nations, which would extend the window of time
that tens of millions of Americans would be at risk for infection or worse
(961). As reported
by Sharon
LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, and Noah Weiland
of the New York Times, “The government was in July given the option to request 100
million to 500 million additional doses. But despite repeated warnings from
Pfizer officials that demand could vastly outstrip supply and amid urges to
pre-order more doses, the Trump administration turned down the offer, according
to several people familiar with the discussions.”
The administration tried to make up for these mistakes
on Monday, December 7, sort of, by having a summit which could firm up
public trust. The summit presented a great opportunity to heal the nation after
a bitter political battle, to calm peoples’ anxieties, to smooth the transition
during the middle of pandemic, but Trump reverted to his default pettiness, refusing to invite
president-elect Joe Biden or his coronavirus response team. (962)
One month after the AP had called the election for Biden,
Trump was still trying to undo the mass rejection he’d received from the U.S.
public, with over 81 million Americans having voted against him. The
president’s latest gambit was to pressure
the Republican speaker of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives to give him
the state’s electoral votes, though Biden had won Pennsylvania by 81,000
ballots.
While Trump played chicken with democracy, millions of
Americans suffered from the economic downturn resulting from his failure to get
the pandemic under control. Few sectors of the economy took a harder hit than
the restaurant industry.
In a public letter to Congress, the National
Restaurant Association announced
that “17% of restaurants—more than 110,000 establishments—are closed
permanently or long-term” and half of a million restaurants were in an
“economic freefall.” Of these businesses, the “vast majority of permanently
closed restaurants were well-established businesses, and fixtures in their
communities. On average these restaurants had been in business for 16 years,
and 16% had been open for at least 30 years.” Republican intransigence in
stimulus negotiations would make matters worse: “every month that passes
without a solution from Congress, thousands more restaurants will close their
doors for good.” (963)
Of those who were lucky enough to keep their
jobs, one in three had taken a pay cut,
according to a study reported on Tuesday, December 8.
And there were no signs that the rate of new infections
would subside enough to allow the economy to recover. The U.S. had just
experienced its deadliest week,
with an average of 2,249 daily deaths, more than Ireland, Denmark, Australia,
South Korea, Finland, Norway, and Hong Kong had had during the entire pandemic.
In rare good news, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court
rejected
Trump’s attempt to win Pennsylvania by getting Democratic mail ballots
invalidated.
On Wednesday, December 9 the United States had its “deadliest day,”
with over 3,000 deaths, 221,267 infections, and 106,688 hospitalizations, also
a record.
The numbers were staggering, but only told part of the
tale. Behind those 3,124 deaths were thousands of stories of grief and loss.
Todd Purdum looked at the psychic toll of these lonely and ugly
deaths in “Drive-by burials and FaceTime farewells: Grief in
the Covid era will weigh on the American psyche for years to come.”
Due to the circumstances surrounding COVID
deaths—patients and their loved ones unable to be together at the time of
death, healing events like funerals not held due to public health concerns, the
necessary isolation of the survivors after the death—many Americans were stuck
with prolonged grief disorder.
According to Purdum, “the negative health effects of unresolved grief on the human
cardiovascular and immune systems are well-established, along with heightened
risks for conditions such as anxiety, depression, substance use, and
post-traumatic stress disorder.” (964)
The nightmare continued on Thursday, December 10,
as Health and Human Services data revealed
that 200 U.S. hospitals were at full capacity while 1/3rd were “almost out of
ICU space.” That day, the U.S. again broke hospitalization records, increasing
to 107,248, which was harming Americans who needed hospital care for non-COVID
conditions. (965)
Susan Heavey of Reuters took stock of the horror movie unleashed by Trump’s indifference and
incompetence on Friday, December 11. In “U.S.
vaccine near, but deaths rising by 9/11 proportions each day,” Heavey reported
that the eye-popping daily death tolls—2,902 on Thursday—were expected to be
the norm for the foreseeable future, or until Americans were vaccinated. The University of
Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation was predicting that
the coronavirus would kill half a million Americans by April 1.
Monday, December 14 was
an eventful day. Trump hit his personal milestone of
300,000 official COVID-related deaths, the first American was vaccinated,
Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court rejected
Trump’s attempt to overcome a 20,000-vote deficit by invalidating lawfully-cast
ballots, and the electoral college officially proclaimed Joe Biden
president-elect. Mike Allen and Dion Rabouin of Axios related the epic
mess Trump would be leaving him:
“Biden will take office with thousands of people dying
daily, full vaccination months away, President Trump taunting him from the
Twitter sidelines, the government rattled by an epic cyberattack, China
asserting its power, and Americans divided like never before. To the victor
goes the spoils.”
In a victory speech, Biden exhibited a grace and empathy which
his soon-to-be predecessor utterly lacked, telling listeners,
“My heart goes out to all of you in this dark winter of the
pandemic, about to spend the holidays and the new year with a black hole in
your hearts.”
As fortunate as America was to soon have a president
who actually cared about his constituents, Trump’s toxic influence on the state
of the pandemic was certain to linger past his White House residence. On Tuesday,
December 15, for the second time in three weeks, Trump’s Supreme Court
appointees meddled with lower court decisions—this
time in Colorado and New Jersey—ruling that the desire of churchgoers to
worship in crowded public places was more important than the public safety of
their communities. (966, 967)
The big story on Wednesday, December 16 was “‘Like a Hand Grasping’: Trump Appointees Describe the
Crushing of the C.D.C.”
Based on interviews with
Republican appointees Kyle McGowan and Amanda Campbell, the New York Times
exposé offered yet
another first-hand glimpse at the ways the Trump administration had trampled on
science in service to spin.
McGowan said the dismantling of the CDC was slow and
insidious, not swift:
“Everyone
wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was
sidelined. It didn’t happen that way….It was more of like a hand grasping
something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that,
middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.”
Among
other things revealed in the piece were the harassment and marginalization of
career employees Dr. Anne Schuchat (see #5) and Dr. Nancy Messonier (see #65)
for telling the truth about the state of the pandemic (968), White House
attempts to limit the CDC’s budget in stimulus talks (969), and the “endless
loop” of non-scientists in the administration who loosened public safety
guidelines to appease business interests, meddled with updates to guidelines, and
manipulated the weekly Morbidity and Mortality Reports. (see #723)
McGowan
told the Times, “Damage has been done to the C.D.C. that will take years
to undo….And that’s terrible to hear, because it happened under my time there.”
The human costs of these deceitful maneuvers were reflected
in Wednesday’s human carnage:
a record 3,656 Americans dead, a record 247,403 infections, a record 113,069
hospitalizations.
The heightened state of the pandemic and the
greater-than-ever chance of catching COVID-19 couldn’t be more obvious, but due
to months of Trump’s minimizing (970), and a misplaced decision to put loyalty
to Trump over community health, a critical mass of Republican voters continued
to exhibit startling levels of ignorance about the pandemic (see #145,
#204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323. #325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440, #452,
#534, #s 566-567, #641, #739, #942, #s945-946, #955).
As detailed
by Neal Rothschild on Thursday, December 17, with a few exceptions, red
state online readers tended to have little interest in stories about the
coronavirus, no matter how heavily impacted their state was, while blue state
readers chose to be informed about the pandemic, even when they didn’t live in
a hotspot. All ten states which showed more interest (in the pandemic) than
cases were blue, while all ten states which showed more cases than interest
were red, other than Arizona, which Biden had won by .3%. Jim Anderson, the CEO
of SocialFlow, euphemistically told Axios, “It’s clear that
stories about COVID simply don’t animate red state residents the same way
they do those in blue states.”
As of Friday, December 18, 3,000 daily COVID-19
deaths and over 200,000 new cases had become the new normal,
unemployment was increasing,
and 77% of Americans believed the country was
in an existential crisis. It would have been a perfect time
for the president, or any president with a modicum of decency, to try to comfort
the American public, to show that he cared, to outline what he was doing to
turn things around.
Trump was not that president. (971)
As the human condition in the country he presided over
continued to worsen, Trump held a meeting with Michael Flynn, the disgraced
(and pardoned)
former national security advisor who’d pled guilty to lying to the FBI (twice), in which they
discussed Trump overturning his landslide election loss
by declaring martial law.
The same day that Trump tried to wriggle out of ballot
box accountability for his failure to contain the pandemic, the public became
aware of another major administration screw-up, as it came out that the first
rollout of vaccines would contain just 25-40% of the doses that had been promised.
(see #959-960) According to
Mike Allen of Axios, “The snafu reveals communication gaps between the
Trump administration and Pfizer, and between the administration and the states.”
The botched rollout of the vaccine offered Trump
another opportunity to apologize to the American public, or to at least console
them, for administration mistakes that prolonged death and suffering and
anxiety.
Instead, Trump chose to pass the buck, forcing a
heavily-decorated four-star general—Operation Warp Speed leader Gustave Perna—to prostrate himself before cameras
on Saturday, December 19.
Behind this one failure was a history of failures
flowing from the inadequacies of Donald Trump, who was among the most
unqualified people to ever run for president. A Washington Post deep dive
showed how the personal intersected with the political to create horrific human
tragedy.
In “The inside story of how Trump’s denial,
mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter,” Post
reporters Yasmeen
Abutaleb, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Philip Rucker gave an in-depth
account of administration decisions which had caused illness or death for
millions of Americans.
The
pandemic had been mishandled from the start:
“The
best chance to control an outbreak is at the very beginning. But U.S. officials
squandered that opportunity in February for two key reasons. The first was the
CDC’s failure to deploy a working
coronavirus test, and the second was the task force’s almost singular focus
on repatriating Americans from China and cruise ships, rather than on preparing
the United States for an inevitable outbreak.
“A
review of task force agendas from that time demonstrates a disproportionate
focus on cruise ships, masks and other bureaucratic and logistical issues,
rather than on more practical public health steps such as testing, contact
tracing and targeted efforts to prevent the virus’s spread. That allowed the
virus to spread undetected for all of February, several officials and experts
said, as it seeded itself in New York, Washington state, California, New
Orleans and other populous areas. And from then on, the country was perpetually
behind the virus.” (972)
In
the middle of March, Robert Kadlec (the assistant secretary for preparedness
and response at the Department of Health and Human Services) came up with the
idea of shipping masks to every household in the U.S. Working with Jerry Cook
of the clothing manufacturer Hanes, they created a plan to manufacture 650
million masks—five for each household—which “would bear an HHS logo, contain a
microbiocide that would kill the virus, and say: ‘Do your part, help stop the
spread.’”
The
plan was approved by leaders at FEMA and doctors on the coronavirus task force,
but killed by non-medical members of the White House task force. (973)
Flash
forward to mid-November. Though “their warnings had gone largely unheeded for
months in the dormant West Wing,” Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn,
and Robert Redfield went to chief of staff Mark Meadows with desperate pleas to
do something, anything, to fight the pandemic. Meadows “told the doctors
he did not believe their troubling data assessment. And he accused them of
outlining problems without prescribing solutions.
“The
doctors explained that the solutions were simple and had long been clear —
among them, to leverage the power of the presidential bully pulpit to persuade
all Americans to wear masks, especially the legions of Trump supporters
refusing to do so, and to dramatically expand testing.”
After
some pushing and prodding, Mike Pence agreed to let the doctors hold a November
19 press conference—“something they had not done since the summer. But much to
the doctors’ dismay, Pence did not forcefully implore people to wear masks, nor
did the administration take meaningful action on testing. (974)
“As
for the president, he did not appear at all.” (975)
Trump’s
absence was of a piece with his failures throughout the pandemic:
“The catastrophe began
with Trump’s initial refusal to take seriously the threat of a
once-in-a-century pandemic. But, as officials detailed, it has been compounded
over time by a host of damaging presidential traits — his skepticism of
science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal
politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management
style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking,
allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those
around him.” (976)
A
close advisor to Trump told the Post, “I think he’s just done with
covid….I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just
exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”
On Monday, December 21, Trump loyalist William
Barr, the outgoing attorney general, said he saw “no reason”
a special counsel should be appointed to investigate the mythical “election fraud”
Trump kept foaming at the mouth about. Barr’s view was shared by several dozen
judges of both parties—including conservative Republican judges appointed by
Trump—who had rejected
attempts by Trump’s lawyers to toss out Democratic votes in swing states based
on curious readings of election law.
Unconcerned by the reality that Biden had won a clear
electoral college victory and beat Trump by 7 million ballots in the popular
vote, House Republicans met with the
president to game out a means by which they could try to toss out the will of
the people and overturn Joe Biden’s convincing victory.
While the GOP schemed to make the U.S. a dictatorship,
the Democratic head of the House select subcommittee on coronavirus, Jim
Clyburn, released administration documents which showed that “Trump appointees [had] attempted to ‘alter
or block’ at least 13 scientific reports on the coronavirus as outbreaks surged
across the spring and summer.” (see #825)
According to reporter Dan Diamond, these moves were hardly
rogue affairs, as “Top political officials at [Health and Human Services] and
[the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] not only tolerated these
efforts, but in some cases aided them.”
Documents targeted for censorship by administration
officials included “reports on the
use of masks, the spread of Covid-19 in children, the virus’ transmission
during an April 7 primary election in Milwaukee and other reports that were
seen as politically sensitive.”
Clyburn “issued subpoenas
to Azar and Redfield, ordering them by Dec. 30 to produce ‘full and
unredacted’ documents that Clyburn said his panel has sought for
months.”
On Tuesday, December 22, the U.S. recorded
3,401 COVID-19 deaths and a record 117,777 hospitalizations.
Mike Stobbe of the AP reported
that the United States had had three million deaths in 2020, 400,000 more than
2019. Some small amount of the increase could be attributed to an increase in
overdose deaths in 2020, but the vast majority were due to the coronavirus. The
official U.S. death toll was 318,000, but this failed to account for tens of
thousands of COVID-related deaths which hadn’t been captured
in the data, as the people had never been diagnosed.
The ripple effect a small sample of that 318,000 had on their families was shared
in “A holiday haunted by loss” by Susan Dominus on Wednesday, December 23.
Accompanied by family photos, the piece profiled seven families who had lost loved
ones to COVID-19, a story of holiday grief shared by hundreds of thousands of
Americans, many more than would have been the case with a competent U.S.
response to the pandemic. (977)
A poll released on Thursday, December 24,
showed that this widespread sense of loss had sunk in outside of the Trump cult,
as 50% of Americans polled by USA Today felt that history would view
Trump as a “failed president.”
Numbers reported by Oriana Gonzalez in “The neediest holiday season”
on Friday, December 25, Christmas 2020, offered a window into why Trump
was held in such low esteem by such a sizable number of his constituents.
According to Gonzalez, “13% of all adults in the country — 27 million — said
their households didn't have enough food during the last week,” a four-fold
increase over Christmas 2019. Eight million Americans had fallen into poverty
in 2020, “the biggest one-year increase in the 60 years that the government has
been tracking poverty.” And renters were struggling: “Between 2.4 million and 5
million U.S. households are at risk of eviction in January alone” and “By next
year, roughly 12 million will owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and
utilities.” (978)
On Sunday, December 27, after six days of empty
posturing, Trump finally signed the second stimulus bill. His delay achieved nothing of substance
(he signed exactly the same bill that had been put on his desk six days
earlier), but it did allow unemployment benefits to temporarily expire for 14
million Americans and robbed recipients of one week of the additional $300
add-on. (979)
The most revealing drop on Sunday came from Peter Maas
of the Intercept, which reported on the Trump administration’s effort to
keep the American public in the dark
about the extent of the pandemic by blocking photojournalists from hospitals:
“In the pandemic’s early days, when hospitals were
first inundated with media requests, the prevailing HIPAA guidelines were quite
restrictive, even on matters that had nothing to do with media access. Those
guidelines predated the Trump administration and were not written for a
pandemic. But the scale of the Covid-19 crisis quickly forced the Trump
administration to loosen a wide range of privacy restrictions on medical
providers — except, as it turned out, the ones that kept Americans from
viscerally seeing the ailing and the dying.
“For instance, HHS allowed hospitals to share
Covid-19 information with first responders and
with organizations
involved in Covid-19 testing. Hospitals were told
that they would not face sanctions for sharing
information with the families or friends of
Covid-19 patients. Doctors were freed to discuss or transfer patient
information with technologies
that were not secure, such as email, FaceTime, and Skype. As
it relaxed these restrictions, the agency said that medical providers
would not
be punished for breaches of patient confidentiality if
they acted in good faith during the pandemic.”
Media coverage which could be unflattering to the
administration was held to a far higher privacy standard:
“The government’s permissiveness
did not extend to journalists. The media guidelines announced by Severino in
May reinforced HIPAA’s restrictions and warned hospitals that violations could
bring fines in the millions of dollars. The announcement was not reported by
general-interest publications, but news outlets for the health care
industry noticed what
had happened. The headline of one of those industry stories was blunt: ‘Patient Privacy Prevails Over Covid-19
Media Coverage.’”
Censorship of the press had
contributed to a major portion of the U.S public being woefully ignorant of the
human impact of the pandemic: “…the
relative paucity of videos and photographs of the pandemic’s victims might help
explain why Covid-19 skepticism has thrived as the death toll in America
reaches the level of a 9/11 every day.
“‘For society to respond in ways
commensurate with the importance of this pandemic, we have to see it,’ wrote art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. ‘For us
to be transformed by it, it has to penetrate our hearts as well as our minds.
Images force us to contend with the unspeakable. They help humanize clinical
statistics, to make them comprehensible.’”
The Trump administration’s blackout of
hospitals had unmistakable parallels to the Bush administration’s blackout of
the caskets of dead soldiers
returning from Iraq:
“The unifying principle between repressing photography
of a war and photography of a pandemic is that a population that cannot see
human carnage will not object as strongly to its perpetuation and will not care
as much about the incompetence that brought it on. Hospitals and nursing homes
may not have the mendacious intent of the U.S. military, but their actions have
a similar effect of making it nearly impossible for ordinary Americans to be
confronted with visual evidence of the true cost of the calamity that’s
unfolding.” (980)
Censorship couldn’t conceal the fact that December had
been the deadliest month of the pandemic,
though there were still several days to go. To date, 63,000 Americans had died
from COVID in December, far more than the 36,964 who’d passed away in November.
Appearing on CNN Sunday, the day the U.S. passed 19
million official infections, Anthony Fauci said, “When you're dealing with a baseline
of 200,000 new cases a day and about 2,000 deaths per day, with the
hospitalizations over 120,000, we are really at a very critical point.”
Making matters worse was the aggressive denial of
significant portions of the country. Reporting on Monday, December 28,
Frank Morris of NPR looked at how months of Trump’s lies and distortions
had infected rural Kansas.
Rural hospitals were struggling even before the
pandemic (132 had closed since 2010). The hostility directed toward medical
professionals by right-wing local officials and members of the public who
refused to acknowledge public health science had led to an exodus of
badly-needed healthcare workers as “More than a quarter of all the public health
administrators in Kansas quit, retired or got fired this year.” (981)
Alan
Morgan, the National Rural Health Association’s CEO, told NPR this wasn’t
unique to Kansas:
“In
community after community, after community, all I hear about is workforce,
workforce, workforce losing clinical staff, trying to attract clinical staff
into these communities. It is taking up the full time of our members right
now.”
The
head of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs, Chris Merrett said of these
workers, “They are really the lifeblood of any community and a
rural community in particular….These are well-paid individuals who are the ones
who are buying cars, buying homes, and really part of that economic anchor of
your community.”
In essence, “Merrett [said] towns that let
pandemic politics drive medical professionals away are choosing what he calls
‘toxic individualism’ over the common good.”
Hospitals were taking a hit countrywide. On Tuesday,
December 29, the U.S. had 124,686 people in hospitals,
a record,
with COVID-infected patients increasing from 16% of ICU patients in September
to 40% by the end of the year. The trendline made it likely that “some hospitals”
would soon “have to ration nurses, respirators and care.”
On the day that over 3,000 Americans died
and 195,194 got infected,
largely because of his failures of governance, Trump’s lawyers appealed to the
U.S. Supreme Court to let the gerrymander-created Republican
legislature override the will of the voters in Wisconsin, a
state where Joe Biden had had a 21,000+ vote victory even after the GOP
legislature had put a gauntlet of measures
in place to suppress the Democratic vote.
While Trump made another attempt to “win” a state he
had lost at the ballot box, a review of absentee ballots in Georgia (a state
Trump had lost by 12,000 votes) “didn’t find a single fraudulent absentee
ballot during an audit of over 15,000 voter
signatures.”
Sadly, as audit after recount after audit showed that
Biden had won clearly and convincingly, Trump’s assaults on 232 years of
democratic precedents were given media life on Wednesday, December
30 by Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who agreed to join a
Republican challenge of the electoral college certification on January 6. The
GOP’s tactics—called “Trump’s Embarrassing Electoral College
Hustle” by the conservative Wall Street Journal
editorial page, and deconstructed state-by-state
by conservative Republican senator Ben Sasse—had virtually no chance
of accomplishing anything, but they did help Hawley raise money
and gave him a leg up on corralling Trump supporters in his expected 2024
presidential run by demonstrating his loyalty to a lost cause.
While Republicans continued their attacks on democracy,
Americans died by the thousands. Wednesday saw a record number of deaths
(3,903). Also reported on Wednesday was the discovery of an especially virulent new strain
of the coronavirus in California and Colorado.
New Year’s Eve, Thursday, December 31, offered
two fly-on-the-wall pieces about how America had become the world’s poster boy
for how not to handle a pandemic.
Reporter Dan Diamond talked about Trump’s dismantling of his Health and
Human Services department pre-2020, such that “when America’s health agencies confronted
the ultimate challenge — the worst global pandemic in a century — they had
already been battered by internal divisions, feuds and suspicions.” (982)
The consistent thread:
“Trump appointees sidelined, ignored or pushed out career health officials in
favor of policies demanded by the White House, a dynamic that would repeat
itself throughout the pandemic.
“Years before Trump's
deputies pressured
scientists to
rush the president's preferred malaria drugs as Covid-19 treatments without
evidence of their effectiveness, Trump's deputies pressured health officials to
kill a variety of health programs — from Obamacare ads to teen pregnancy
prevention — driven by their own beliefs rather than data showing that the
programs didn't work.”
Tom
Novotny, a former assistant surgeon general who was then the deputy assistant
secretary of health, resigned after being demoted in 2017. His “forced
retirement shook members of his core eight-person team, which focused on a
broad range of public health issues, from implementing national strategies on
autism and pain to helping fight the Zika outbreak.”
The administration often
replaced seasoned professionals with political hacks who didn’t know what they
were doing: “One persistent challenge inside the health department: simply
teaching a series of Trump appointees, many brand-new to federal service or
deeply skeptical of it, how the government worked.”
Novotny’s exit haunted
the agency during the pandemic: “some current officials said the loss of
Novotny has especially been felt amid Covid-19. The CDC veteran with global
health ties could have been a particularly useful, high-level staffer amid a
pandemic that's taxed every corner of the department.”
Trump
appointees’ shift to prioritizing short-term political needs over science and
public health was leaving a mess for Joe Biden: “…as President-elect Joe Biden
prepares to take office, his incoming team faces a massive repair job: a
demoralized health department, filled with tens of thousands of career staff
who have been fighting the pandemic for a year — and often fighting the Trump
administration for nearly three years before that.” (983)
The New York Times
published another autopsy of the
administration’s failed approach to COVID-19: “Trump’s Focus as the
Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him?”
Where Diamond had focused on systemic
failures, the Times piece lasered in on the impact Trump’s human
inadequacies had had on administration policies. The key point was “Throughout late summer
and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose,
and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in
the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to
a single question: What would it mean for him?”
The article covered some well-trodden
ground—Trump’s complaints about testing making him look bad, Trump’s fixation
on getting a major vaccine announcement before election day (no matter how
shoddy the research had been), the toxic effect of Dr. Scott Atlas on the
morale of Trump’s public health team, the counterproductive infighting which
surrounded Trump (and that Trump sometimes encouraged).
Two anecdotes stood out.
During the summer, Trump had been
presented with data from his own pollster showing that a majority of
Republican voters would support a mask mandate. Based purely on his intuition
(and the hunches of his most ideologically-extreme advisors), Trump overlooked
hard data and decided that his base would bridle at a mask mandate. Thereafter,
even when infections skyrocketed, Trump wouldn’t wear a mask in public and
continually belittled masks, leading Republican voters around the country to do
the same. (984)
A second key inflection point was Trump’s
transfer from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center back to the White House in
October:
“After he recovered from his bout with the virus, some
of his top aides, including [Jared] Kushner and Jason Miller, a senior campaign
strategist, thought the illness offered an opportunity to demonstrate the kind
of compassion and resolve about the pandemic’s toll that Mr. Trump had so far
failed to show.
When Mr. Trump returned from the hospital, his
communications aides, with the help of Ivanka Trump, his daughter, urged him to
deliver a national address in which he would say: ‘I had it. It was tough, it
kicked my ass, but we’re going to get through it.’”
Trump instead chose to downplay the threat of
COVID-19 and present himself as a “Macho Man” for
overcoming the virus (with elite medical
care and experimental therapies not available to 99.9% of the American public).
(985)
Ultimately, “The
result…was a lose-lose situation. Mr. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could rise to
the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge
of his tenure.”
Unfortunately
for America, poor governance came with major human consequences in the final
chapter of Trump’s presidency. Barely more than half of the 20 million doses
promised by years’ end had been shipped, and of the 11 million doses which had
been shipped out, only two million had been administered. The reasons for the
failed start to vaccinations were the same reasons the U.S. had done such a
terrible job with testing and PPE: the administration had outsourced a complicated process
which would have been more effectively handled by the federal government (see
#953), then underfunded the states.
States’
public health systems were already overwhelmed, and not versed in rapid, mass
vaccine administration. As health journalist Natalie Rahhal put it, “when it came to actually getting vaccines into the
arms of Americans, the federal government punted, requiring states to submit
plans to it last month, specifying just how they planned to vaccinate millions
of residents, track who had gotten one or two doses, and ensure proper storage
of vaccines at freezing or ultra-cold temperatures.”
And
while the administration had seen fit to pass a two trillion-dollar tax
cut, overwhelmingly tilted to the wealthy, states had been given only $340
million—a fraction
of the $8 billion they’d asked for—to vaccinate their citizens. (986)
Dr.
Ashish Jha (see #256, #614, #955) told a reporter, “This
is not how you handle the biggest health, economic, political and social crisis
the country has faced in decades….There's a lack of seriousness.”
The lack of seriousness continued to come at a
horrible human cost. On Friday, January 1, 2021, the U.S. passed 20,000,000 official infections,
twice the amount of the nearest country (India), which has 4X the population of
the U.S., and nearly 10X the next-highest developed country (France). Only 3.17
million Americans had been vaccinated, and 77,000 Americans had died in
December alone. The administration’s most acute failures (see #878-880)
affected our most vulnerable citizens—the elderly in nursing homes and
long-term care facilities—20,455 of whom lost their lives
in December.
Late on Friday, a Republican lawsuit to allow Mike
Pence—president of the Senate—to choose which electoral college votes to accept
on January 6 was tossed out by a Trump-appointed judge.
A more accurate picture of the scale of COVID-19
deaths emerged on Saturday, January 2, 2021.
As reported
by Tommy Christopher, America’s first-in-the-world total of official deaths
(374,780) was a major undercount. According to Trump’s own CDC, the number of
excess deaths for 2020 was 470,000.
Among the many, many victims of Trump’s failures were public schools.
School closures necessitated by public health concerns were convincing many
parents—especially parents with money—to transfer their children to private
schools, which are held to lower public health standards. Survey data showed
that only 5% of private schools began fall classes virtually, as compared to
62% of public schools. As a result, public schools were losing funding at the
very moment when they needed it most (since local governments were bleeding
revenue and getting no help from the federal government) and the opportunity
gap between rich and poor children was widening. (987)
While vital American institutions continued to be
eroded by the surging pandemic, 11 Republican senators announced that they
would try to erode democracy
by joining Republican presidential aspirant Josh Hawley in challenging Joe
Biden’s election win on January 6. Of his grandstanding Republican colleagues,
senator Mitt Romney said, “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the
political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic.
The congressional power to reject electors is reserved for the most extreme and
unusual circumstances. These are far from it.”
One
of Trump’s egregious ploys made worldwide news on Sunday, January 3, 2021
when a recording of a phone call between Trump and Georgia’s conservative
Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger was leaked to the
Washington Post. In the call, Trump made a slew of debunked claims about the presidential
vote in Georgia and told Raffensperger, “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes”—exactly
the number needed for Trump to steal the state from Biden.
While the political
universe reeled, Kimberly Kindy, Ted Mellnik, and reported
on another administration policy which was worsening the pandemic:
“The Trump administration allowed 15 poultry plants to
increase slaughter line speeds during the pandemic, an action that boosts
production and makes it more difficult for workers to maintain space between
one another. It also appears to have hastened the spread of the coronavirus.”
A Washington Post analysis found that the
plants with increased line speeds were “10 times as likely to have coronavirus
cases than poultry plants without the line-speed waivers.”
The connection between increased line speeds and
increased infections was clear:
“Workers say the fast line speeds make it difficult,
sometimes impossible, for them to socially distance during their eight-hour
shifts as they struggle to work faster. Most of these plants are
also large, employing thousands of workers who work in tight quarters, creating
conditions that can fuel the spread of the virus.”
As with COVID-19 cases across the country, meat plant
hot spots disproportionately impacted Americans of color:
“More than 60 percent of meat plant workers are
Black, Latino, Asian American or Native American, according to Labor Department
data. About 37.5 percent are immigrants with limited or no English
proficiency.”
Despite increased infection spread at the 15 pilot
plants, the administration was trying to roll the policy out nationwide:
“Days after Trump lost his bid for reelection, the
USDA sent a proposed regulation to allow all poultry plants to increase line
speeds to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, seeking its
approval.”
Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA (Occupational Safety
and Health Administration) employee, told the Post, “The fact that the
agency sent this new proposed rule right after the election to the White House for
clearance is a clear signal that they are trying to ram this rule through
before the new administration can shut it down.” (988)
The cumulative impact of the administration’s
pandemic-related decisions and abdications was reflected in data reported on Monday,
January 4, 2021. According to
Reuters, in the week which ended Sunday, 18,400 Americans had lost their lives
to COVID-19, 1.5 million new infections had been reported (a 16.5%
increase from the week prior), and 13.6% of tests had been positive, with
Trump-supporting states Iowa (64%), Idaho (56%), and Alabama (47%) leading the
way. 126,000 Americans were
hospitalized, a 25% increase from a month earlier.
And Trump wasn’t done. While attendees at Joe Biden’s
Georgia campaign event that day all had masks on, Trump held another
super-spreader rally where most of the attendees did not. (989)
As all eyes were on the Peach state Senate races,
Byung J. Pak, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Georgia, suddenly resigned,
citing “unforeseen circumstances.” It would later come out that Pak had been
forced out by the Trump administration because “he didn’t do enough to help President
Trump overturn” his loss in the state.
The vaccine rollout continued to lag well behind
expectations. As of Tuesday, January 5, 2021 only 14%
of the doses sent to nursing homes had been administered. Ashley Gold and Sara
Fischer of Axios reported
on the gap left by the administration’s decision to outsource vaccine
administration to underfunded (see #986) and underprepared (see #953) states.
Trump’s abdication of federal duty was leaving much of
the public in the dark about the vaccination process:
“Millions of lives, along with the country’s economic
recovery, depend on a speedy and successful rollout of the vaccine. But as
people hunt for scarce information about vaccine availability and delivery
processes, the lack of coordinated communication risks opening an information
vacuum — into which misinformation could easily pour.”
Procedures which should have been mapped out months in
advance by the resource-rich federal government were now being done on the fly
by ill-equipped local officials. (990) As one example, counties in Florida were
relying on Eventbrite, “a platform known for selling concert tickets and
coordinating happy hours, to schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments,” which was
“not an ideal approach for some populations, including seniors who aren't
internet-savvy.” (991)
Big tech platforms, riddled with public health disinformation
and lax fact-checking, were not a good fit, which left the responsibility (by
default) on local pharmacies.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-founder of the non-partisan
site factcheck.org, told Axios, “We're going to have to think through
systems that will reach people when they need information that's highly
specific — and in this case, time sensitive….We'll need to institutionalize
that structure and keep track of it.” Of the current state of vaccine
confusion, Jamieson said, “The fact that we don't already have it is a real
indictment….We should've thought this through before.”
Wednesday, January 6, 2021,
was one of the most shameful days in American history.
The official electoral college vote certification,
traditionally a purely ceremonial ritual, took a disturbing turn thanks to
Donald Trump and his allies in state legislatures,
Congress,
and far-right social media.
After riling up Republican voters for two months with craven lies
about the election having been stolen (claims which had been rejected for lack
of evidence in 60 judicial cases,
by Republican and Democratic judges), the GOP had arranged one final, grand
charade: a “Stop the Steal” rally followed by a
“Save America March” as a prelude to 13 Republican senators and 140 House
members formally challenging Joe Biden’s 7-million ballot win by recycling
Trump’s debunked claims. Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser had requested
National Guard backup, but Trump’s Defense Department had handcuffed
the Guard’s mission even before the event took place.
On the day of the certification, Trump called vice
president Mike Pence, who would preside over the ceremony, and told him,
“You can
either go down in history as a patriot…or you can go down in history as a
pussy.”
Pence
chose to go down in history as a patriot. Just before the count began, he released a public letter stating the
obvious—that he lacked the Constitutional authority to
unilaterally decide which electoral votes to accept or reject.
Any mention of The Constitution and long-established democratic
precedents were absent from the speeches at Trump’s super-spreader rally on the
Mall, which preyed on white, right-wing victimhood and featured numerous incitements to violence.
Leading things off, Republican representative Mo Brooks said, “Today is the day
American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” Referring to
congressional Republicans who intended to honor the election results by not
challenging Biden’s legitimate win, Donald Trump, Jr. said, “We’re coming for
you, and we’re going to have a good time doing it” and that if they didn’t
change their minds and oppose certification “I’m gonna be in your
backyard in a couple of months.” Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told the crowd,
“Let’s have trial by combat,” which was “an eerie reference to battles to the
death in the series ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Talking
tough from behind bulletproof glass, Trump spewed a
litany of baseless assertions about the election, “used the words ‘fight’ or ‘fighting’ at least 20 times,” said “You’ll never
take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength. You have to be
strong,” and finished with a call to action:
“We will never give up; we will never concede….We will
stop the steal. We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going
to the Capitol…We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones…the
kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
As could be expected, the violent rhetoric whipped the
MAGA-ites into a frenzy. After traversing Pennsylvania Avenue, hundreds of
Trump supporters—heavily represented by right-wing hate
groups, inlaid with
incognito law enforcement and military
members—busted through a police line to storm the Capitol,
the first hostile takeover of America’s seat of government since 1814.
Once inside, the insurrectionists stopped the
certification of Biden’s win, assaulted Capitol police officers,
assaulted journalists,
terrorized members of Congress and congressional aides,
and contributed to multiple members
of Congress getting COVID-19. Some of the insurrectionists carried zip-tie handcuffs
or weapons, and targeted the offices of specific members of Congress, in hopes of kidnapping them,
or worse. There were indications that some plotters may have had help
from Republican House members.
Because Washington, D.C. is not a state (due to
Republicans blocking statehood), it has no governor and thus couldn’t call up a
state National Guard. It was left to Capitol police chief Steven Sund to beg
administration officials in the Department of Defense for backup. Multiple requests
from Sund were denied.
Several Republicans, including senator Lindsey Graham,
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, and former advisor Kellyanne Conway
called the White House to try to get Trump to act, but Trump wasn’t taking
calls because he was wrapped up in watching the coup attempt he’d
fomented on TV. As one aide told the Washington Post,
“‘He was
hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV….If it’s TiVo, he just
hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just
watching it all unfold.’”
Not
only was Trump unreachable, he was “confused about why other
people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters
pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building” and talking to
the other people in the room about “a path by which he was going to stay in
office after January 20.” Right around the time of the breach, Trump called senator Mike Lee. He
was intending to reach Republican senator Tommy Tuberville, to push Tuberville
to obstruct the electoral college vote certification whenever it could safely
resume. (Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani would make another call to Lee, later in the
day, with the same purpose).
Twenty-five
minutes into the breach, as “America Firsters and
other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and
reveling in their own astounding impunity,” Trump tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have
the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our
Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not
the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously
certify….USA demands the truth!”
Two hours into the
breach
Trump relented, sort of, releasing a video which reiterated false
claims about the “fraudulent election” he’d lost, asked his followers to “go
home,” and said, “We love you. You’re very special.”
Four hours into the breach, with the Capitol still
under siege, Trump tweeted “These are the things and events that
happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously &
viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly
treated for so long….Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day
forever!”
After an inexplicably long delay,
with the assistance of Mike Pence
(since Trump had “resisted requests”
to stop the violence), the National Guard was called up. The
Capitol was finally cleared six hours after it had been
breached.
Dozens
of police officers had been injured,
millions of dollars in damage had been done to the citadel of American
democracy, and six people would die, including two Capitol police officers, one of
whom was an Iraq War vet who had been bashed in the head with a fire
extinguisher. If not for the bravery of
significantly-outnumbered capitol police officers, the toll would have been far
worse, as rioters came within a hair’s breadth
of getting their hands on Mike Pence and members of Congress.
Ultimately, the insurrection was unsuccessful. Once
the Capitol was secured, Congress certified Joe Biden’s win, despite the objections of
2/3rds of House Republicans and eight
Republican senators who doubled down on the false election
fraud narrative which had jeopardized their safety just hours earlier.
One way the insurrection was successful for the
administration: Trump’s ugliest and most consequential political stunt hid his
failures to contain COVID-19. Wednesday was the deadliest day of the pandemic
with 3,964 deaths.
Thursday, January 7, 2021 was even worse,
as the U.S. recorded more than 4,000 daily deaths for the first time, along
with 266,197 new infections and 132,370 hospitalizations, “more than were hospitalized at the peak
of the spring and summer surges combined.”
As shocking as these numbers were, they were buried
under the avalanche of stories about the unending psychodrama of the Trump
presidency.
Prodded by aides who tapped into his concern about potential legal
problems from his role in the assault on the Capitol building,
Trump signaled that he was done contesting his 7-million ballot election loss
in a video released to the public:
“A
new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th. My focus now turns to
ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls
for healing and reconciliation.”
On Friday, January 8, 2021, it was reported
that the “greatest economy in the history of our
country” had shed 140,000 jobs in December due to Trump’s
failure to contain the coronavirus. New daily infections
hit an all-time high of 293,104. Life under Trump was so miserable that one in six Americans had tried therapy
for the first time in 2020. (992)
As House Democrats announced plans for a second
impeachment, a Marist poll
found that 69% of Republicans felt that Trump deserved no or “not very much”
blame for the assault on America’s Capitol building he had incited. Sadly for
Trump’s obtuse supporters, his key disinformation pipeline was cut off when
Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account
due to a “risk
of further incitement of violence,” specifically the possibility that Trump’s
tweets could add fuel to right-wing mobs’ plans to attack government capitols
in the states and D.C. in the days leading up to—and on—Joe Biden’s
inauguration day.
As
of Monday, January 11, 2021, the U.S. was still lagging on its vaccine
rollout. In September, Trump had said the U.S would
manufacture 100 million doses by the end of the year. Two months later, Health
and Human Services head Alex Azar aimed lower, for 40 million, a
number Azar reduced just a few weeks after
that to 20 million. Eleven days into the new year, with the state of the
pandemic desperate (200,000+ new infections and thousands of deaths daily),
only nine million Americans had been vaccinated.
In
an open letter to Azar, Senate
Democrats said the U.S. “cannot afford
for this vaccination campaign to continue to be hindered by the lack of
planning, communication, and leadership we have seen so far.” As was known by
public health officials before the rollout, “Federal responsibility does not
end with delivery of vaccines to states, as you have suggested….Vaccine
administration must be a close partnership between the federal government and
state, Tribal, and local governments, with the federal government stepping up
to ensure that all needs are met.”
A lack of communication
had resulted in some American hospitals receiving syringes from Operation Warp
Speed which could “only extract five doses” from Pfizer vials containing six or seven
shots. As a result, hospitals were having to toss out extra doses, even as they
didn’t know whether they would have enough vaccine to do a second round for
people who’d had their first shots. (993)
The
administration’s mismanagement and dereliction of duty (see #1-#993) were reflected
in America’s high official death toll relative to the rest of the developed
world. As reported by German Lopez of Vox, though Europe had
seen major spikes over the past few months, their leaders had managed to
contain the pandemic during the summer, something Trump had failed to do.
According to Lopez, “If the U.S. had Canada’s death rate, more
than 225,000 of Americans who’d died of COVID would still be with us.” If the
U.S. had managed the pandemic as well as Germany, 212,000 fewer Americans would
have died. If the U.S. had Japan’s death rate, “fewer than 10,000 Americans would
have died of the disease.”
The
conclusion was inescapable: “when the numbers are added up, the US remains an
extraordinary failure in its handling of Covid-19.”
And
U.S. leadership was guaranteed to remain a failure for the duration of Trump’s
presidency, as Trump continued to show no interest in governing. As one White
House official told Politico, “Since the election,
the day-to-day stuff as far as signing [executive orders] and focusing on
policy has definitely waned because his focus has been on the election and
overturning those results.” Now that his efforts to steal the election were
finally over, the “supremely self-absorbed” Trump was doing next to nothing:
“Since Dec. 23, [Trump’s
official] schedule has included 15 variations of the language: ‘President Trump
will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make
many calls and have many meetings.’ A former White House official said the
language was inserted at Trump’s directive in order to give off the appearance
of him being busy.”
Joe
Biden’s pandemic response team was eager to clean up Trump’s mess, but they had
been blocked from attending Operation Warp Speed meetings by the Trump
administration, who had limited them to briefings (994). Following press
disclosure of these petty and counterproductive tactics, the administration had
finally decided to
allow Biden’s team to attend the meetings in person—two months after
Biden had been declared president-elect and just one week before he was to take
office.
Biden
would have his work cut out for him. On Tuesday, January 12, 2021, as a
new strain of the virus which was 70% more transmissible than earlier variants
started to spread and hospitalizations hovered around 130,000, twice what they’d been
two months earlier, the U.S. had the highest daily death toll of the
pandemic: 4,327.
What
limited actions the administration was taking in response to the
coronavirus were just making things worse. As reported by Alice Miranda
Ollstein and Rachel Roubein of Politico, “Trump administration health officials blindsided states on
Tuesday with an abrupt and dramatic shift in how they’ll distribute coronavirus
vaccines that may set up new hurdles for the Biden transition team.”
Seemingly out of the
blue, the administration, which had set states up to fail by not assisting with
logistics (see #953) or funding (see #986), was “[planning] to punish
states that don’t move fast enough on vaccinations or that fail to provide the
government real-time reports on inoculations.”
The administration was
also making an abrupt shift away from prioritizing hard-hit communities of
color and people in the trenches, “[tearing] up a game plan crafted by Centers
for Disease Control advisers that states have used to make decisions. Some public
health experts on that committee said they’re concerned the new system could
amount to a free-for-all that favors the wealthy and connected and could shut
out essential workers, teachers and other groups that were previously in the
first tiers.” (995)
In
addition to making an already-complicated process more confusing, “Some health
officials also fear that basing states’ vaccine allocation on their
distribution speed will create perverse incentives — leading states, for
example, to defer the slower work of identifying and vaccinating undocumented
workers, the homeless, rural residents and other at-risk groups. (996)
“‘The
harder to reach populations are in so many ways the most important to reach
populations, but that wouldn’t show up on the balance sheet of how fast you’re
doing this,’ warned Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs
at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. ‘The more
people we get vaccinated the faster we get to herd immunity, but if we’re doing
that while we’re perpetuating disparities — getting all the easy folks and
leaving the harder folks for later — that’s not a just way to go.’”
As
ever, news reports of the administration’s incompetence had to compete with
stories of presidential psychosis. In his first interaction with the press
since the coup attempt, Trump dismissed the direct connection between
his incendiary January 6 speech and the insurrection it caused, telling
reporters, “People thought what I
said was totally appropriate.”
Liz
Cheney, the chair of the House GOP Conference (who had voted with Trump
93% of the time during his four years in office), begged to differ. On the
eve of a House impeachment vote, she released a statement indicating that she
would support impeachment:
“On
January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct
the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral
votes. This insurrection caused injury, death and destruction in the most
sacred space in our Republic.
“Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is
enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the
mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.
None of this would have happened without the President. The President could
have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.
There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of
his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
On Wednesday, January 13, 2021, Trump paid for
his betrayal to his office and his oath to the Constitution by becoming the first president in American history
to be impeached twice.
Not considered an impeachable offense in D.C., but
perhaps even worse in terms of human impact, was Trump’s failure to contain the
pandemic. As reported
by German Lopez of Vox, the third wave of coronavirus had a crushing
grip on the U.S. Official deaths were at 380,000 and climbing, the highest in the world by far,
and every state was behind the curve in protecting public health. Looking at
three key metrics—new infection rates, infection spread, positivity rates on
tests—Lopez found that not one single state met all three benchmarks. Infection
spread was too high in 29 states. Only three states had positivity rates of
less than 5%. Infection rates were too high in all 50 states.
Among a long list of failures (see #1-#996), Trump’s
insistence on re-opening the economy prematurely while refusing to address
public health concerns had been perhaps the most tragic in its dimensions:
“The
effects are felt not just in terms of more infections, critical illnesses, new
chronic conditions, and deaths, but in the long-term financial impact as the
economy struggles, many people still refuse to go out, and businesses resist
reopening during a pandemic.”
As University of Chicago infectious diseases doctor
Jade Pagkas-Bather told Lopez, “Dead people don’t shop. They don’t spend money. They don’t
invest in things….When you fail to invest in the health of your population, then
there are longitudinal downstream effects.”
More downstream effects were felt and reported on Thursday,
January 14, 2021. The “greatest economy in the history of our
country” continued to sputter due to Trump’s
failure to contain the pandemic, with new unemployment
claims jumping to 965,000, an enormous increase from the week before and the
highest weekly total since August. The U.S. was averaging 250,000 new cases a
day and staggering daily death totals (sometimes in excess of 4,000 Americans) and yet, the pandemic
was “almost certainly about to get worse.”
Kristian Anderson of the Scripps Research Institute told a reporter from
statnews.com, “I’m very, very concerned that we’ve now gone from a virus that we could
control to a virus that we really can’t, unless we do something very dramatic.”
While
Trump tried to make matters worse with a rule to impose “term limits” on federal scientists
who refused to march in lockstep with right-wing talking points (997), president-elect
Joe Biden elevated his top science advisor post to a cabinet position and rolled out a
dramatic and comprehensive proposal to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion
stimulus plan represented a major shift from Trump’s grossly inadequate
approach to an aggressive federal response. Most of the policies in the plan
had been passed by House Democrats many months earlier and either outright
blocked or severely underfunded by Senate Republicans. Included were expanded
child tax credits and a $1,400 check for American adults, $350 billion for
state and local governments deep in the red, $130 billion to help schools open
safely, $50 billion to step up America’s sluggish testing schedule, $20 billion
to help FEMA and the National
Guard
jumpstart America’s sluggish vaccination schedule, billions for PPE and contact
tracing, funding for 100,000 public health workers, increases in unemployment
payouts, as well as assistance with childcare, emergency and paid leave, and
rent and utility bill relief.
As
one member of the Biden team told Politico, “What we’re inheriting from
the Trump administration is much worse than we could have imagined (998)….More
than 10 months later, they still don’t have the basics down. There are not
enough tests. Frontline workers are still reusing N95 masks and other PPE.
States are scrambling because there was no plan to get needles in arms and
there’s been very little coordination. We’re going to do just the opposite.”
Help was on the way, but
America was stuck with the Trump administration for another five long and
damaging days. As of Friday, January 15, 2021, thousands of Americans
were dying daily from COVID-19 and public health officials were predicting that
a more transmissible new
variant of the virus was likely
to be the main strain by March. While the most powerful person in the world dumped his job duties on
the vice president and discussed martial law with the My Pillow guy, more administration
failures came to light.
Betsy McKay, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Stephanie Armour of
the Wall Street Journal helped explain the reasons for America’s glacially slow pace of
vaccinations in “Covid-19 Vaccine Leaders Waited
Months to Approve Distribution Plans.”
Trump’s CDC had intended to help states begin planning
mass vaccinations in June, but “officials at Operation Warp Speed rebuffed the
agency’s plan for distributing vaccines. They adopted a similar plan in August
only after exploring other options—and then held the release of the CDC’s
playbook for states for two weeks for additional clearance and to put it out
with another document…”
This delay, among other things, had left a “public-private
partnership…scrambling to speed up vaccinations, adjusting eligibility
guidelines while states race to increase their abilities to administer doses on
a large scale.” (999)
Exacerbating states’ challenges with mass vaccine
administration was a lack of vaccine supply. On Tuesday, Health and Human
Services head Alex Azar had said that the administration would soon be “releasing the
entire supply for order by states, rather than holding second doses in reserve.”
Three days later, Friday Azar
contradicted Tuesday Azar, telling a reporter that in fact, “There’s not a reserve
stockpile.”
According to Kristen Holmes and
Sara Murray of CNN, Azar’s revelation “blindsided many of the officials who
have been tasked with creating plans to administer vaccines at the state and
local level.” (1,000)
As
one example of many, Colorado, which had been expecting 210,000 doses the
following week, would now have only 79,000. Patrick Allen, Oregon’s health
director, spoke for beleaguered public health officials in states all across
the country:
“It's
just so disappointing….People are desperate for the vaccine, and we have worked
so hard to be able to expand who's eligible, and to not be able to do it is
just crushing right now.”
The
pandemic carnage continued on Saturday,
January 16, 2021, as Trump added another 3,353 COVID-related deaths to his astonishing and tragic
totals.
In
rare good news, data from the research firm Zignal Labs showed that the ban on
Donald Trump’s Twitter account—and suspensions of other far-right social media
propaganda organs—had helped reduce disinformation
about the presidential election by 73%.
Unfortunately,
other purveyors of right-wing disinformation were getting off scot-free. In
fact, some were being subsidized by the U.S. federal government. As reported by Elizabeth Dwoskin and Aaron Gregg of the
Washington Post on Monday, January 18, 2021, five corporations
with anti-vax messaging were being
funded through the Paycheck Protection Program at the very moment when vaccination
lies had the most potential to hurt public health.
Trump’s
Small Business Administration knew about the misallocation of taxpayer money
but was doing nothing to stop it (though they’d had a fit about Planned
Parenthood getting money). Erica Dewald of the nonprofit Vaccine Your Family
told the Post, “These organizations have been sowing the
seeds of doubt about vaccines and public health for years…Now, in the middle of
a pandemic, they are accepting funds for the chaos they’ve helped to create.”
(1,001)
On Tuesday, January
19, 2021, Donald Trump hit his personal milestone of 400,000 dead from
COVID-19 and posted the lowest Gallup approval
rating of his presidency
(34%), which was even lower than his average approval rating (41%)—the lowest
average of any president since the beginning of Gallup polls. Trump also had
the distinction of being the only president in Gallup poll history to never
reach an approval rating of 50%.
The reasons for Trump’s
low approval ratings were clear.
After inheriting a
country basking in peace and prosperity, Donald Trump was leaving a broken
America. As of Inauguration Day, Wednesday, January 20, 2021, high
unemployment was increasing rapidly. Eight million Americans had fallen into poverty in the past
year and 15 million had lost their
employer-based healthcare. Tens of millions of Americans were at risk of food insecurity,
including millions of children. And the United States was the most polarized it had been in the history of Gallup polling,
thanks in large part to the 30,000 (often divisive) lies Trump had told in just four years, lies which
had left tens of millions of Republican voters dangerously out of touch
with reality. (see #145,
#204, #283, #307, #313, #s 319-323. #325, #330, #339, #347, #387, #440, #452,
#534, #s 566-567, #641, #739, #942, #s 945-946, #955, #970, #981, #984).
Because of the January
6 insurrection incited by Trump and new threats from his most extreme
supporters, state capitols were boarded up and on alert and D.C. was armed to the teeth, with 25,000 National Guard
personnel, active duty troops, and secret service swarming. The FBI felt it necessary to vet National Guard
troops for right-wing
extremism and journalists covering the inauguration were gearing up with gas masks and bulletproof
vests.
The sorest of sore
losers, Trump was the first president in
152 years not to attend his successor’s inauguration. But his presence would be felt from moment
one of Biden’s presidency, as the pandemic fueled by his grotesque levels of
incompetence, indifference, and dishonesty continued to ravage
America, with daily infection
totals in the U.S. higher than the total number of infections
transmitted in Greece, South Korea, Norway, Finland, Australia, Hong Kong,
Iceland, New Zealand, and Taiwan.
Trump’s legacy?
Death, destruction, a
nation torn asunder.
In the words of Michael
D’Antonio, author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,
“This is a person whose name will be synonymous
with betrayal and anti-democratic, anti-American thinking. What’s so amazing is
here’s this guy who literally hugged the flag and talked about traitors and
treason and enemies of the people and we’ve never had a public figure who’s
been more of an enemy of America than Donald Trump.”
EPILOGUE
In sum, the United States had the absolute worst
leader at the absolute worst time.
Amid the greatest crisis this country has faced since World War II, America was rudderless, our fate in the hands of a hollow, ignorant, self-centered, and mercurial man with no empathy or sense of honor who neutered or fired the experts that could have mitigated the impacts of the pandemic while empowering sycophants and political hacks.
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 U.S. federal government, or put long-term public health needs ahead of short-term campaign wants, or formed anything resembling a coherent national response, or learned from their mistakes, America’s scale of suffering and grief would have been similar to other developed countries, 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 the whole of Trump’s pandemic response:
“Terry, the question might not be what went wrong; it's what went right?”
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
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)
No comments:
Post a Comment