Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
Donald Trump, Mike Pence and members of the Coronavirus Task Force meet with representatives from pharmaceutical companies on March 2, 2020, in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
Warning: President Trump’s ignorant lies about the coronavirus can be hazardous to the health of Americans and the entire U.S. economy.
From the moment Trump took office, the greatest danger Americans faced was that, one day, their incompetent, dishonest president would be confronted with a real global crisis he couldn’t lie his way out of. The rapid spread of the coronavirus is just such an undeniable, real world crisis.
We know the public health crisis is real because Trump is denying it and minimizing the threat instead of exaggerating it. Trump’s racist political appeal has always intentionally inflamed irrational fears of white Americans about imaginary dangers from brown-skinned rapists and murderers crossing our southern border and Muslim terrorists streaming into our country (sometimes cleverly sneaking into Mexico and disguising themselves as Latinos fleeing poverty and gang violence to join bloodthirsty caravans secretly plotting to slaughter innocent Americans.)
Now with a deadly coronavirus pandemic really threatening American lives and livelihoods, Trump contradicts warnings of government health experts about the severe, national consequences looming. Trump, himself, increased the risks by dismantling the pandemic preparedness programs former President Barack Obama put in place after the Ebola crisis and slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, driving scientific research and medical expertise out of the government.
More Dishonesty
The worst drop during the worst week for the stock market since the Great Recession began in October 2008 occurred the day after Trump’s televised press conference last week in which the president dishonestly suggested there were only 15 Americans mildly affected by the coronavirus disease, COVID-19, who were recovering, and the disease could soon disappear entirely from the U.S. “When you have 15 people—and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero—that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” Trump boasted.
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The real reason so few cases were known was that only 445 Americans had been tested at that point. South Korea tested 66,652 people and found 1,766 confirmed cases. Only about a dozen state and local health clinics in the U.S. received working test kits from the federal government. Researchers now believe the coronavirus went undetected for at least six weeks in Washington State before resulting in the first six American fatalities over the weekend and on Monday, March 2, in a Kirkland, Wash., nursing center. Domestic testing now will rapidly increase with the number of infections and fatalities expected to rise dramatically, not disappear.
Trump continues to suggest the coronavirus is no worse than the common flu, even though the known fatalities of those infected worldwide indicate it is 20 times more deadly. Trump also falsely claimed in his press conference the U.S. was rapidly developing a vaccine that would soon be available. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, almost immediately took the microphone to correct the president. He said the vaccine would take about a year and half to develop and wouldn’t apply to the current epidemic.
Miracles in April
Trump tells gullible supporters at his hate rallies around the country the coronavirus will miraculously disappear in April when the weather gets warmer. President Xi Jinping of China, where nearly 3,000 people have died from the coronavirus, told him so. Xi “feels very confident,” according to Trump, that “during the month of April, the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus.” No one knows why Trump usually believes anything communist dictators like Xi or Russia’s President Vladimir Putin tell him, but health authorities are more dubious. They note the coronavirus is still spreading in Singapore where temperatures currently are in the 90s.
Trump still believes in miracles, but he’s starting to hedge his bets. Meeting with African American leaders late last week, his promise began to evaporate: “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear from our shores. You know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.” Trump sure doesn’t. Seriously, does that sound like a president who has any idea what to do to protect the country during a pandemic that not only threatens American lives, but could shut down factories around the world, cutting off supply chains and destroying international commerce?
Trump’s first concern, as usual, is for himself. He’s enraged federal health officials who have released accurate information about the public health threat that could damage his re-election prospects by ending the growing economy he inherited from Obama.
Trump’s ability to control public panic when people begin dying in communities will depend upon whether Americans can trust their president to tell them the truth about what is happening. Unfortunately, after Trump’s blizzard of more than 16,000 documented lies in the first three years of his presidency and his insistence on “happy talk” from federal officials about the pandemic, most Americans already know they can’t believe anything Trump says.
