Trump’s first term as president has been so utterly eclipsed by the savagery of his second one that many people may have forgotten his deadly, abysmal mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. He delayed testing, mocked mask-wearing, spread conspiracy theories, undermined the work of scientists, and held campaign rallies that spread the virus. By one estimate, 58,000 Americans died because of his negligence — and maybe a lot more.
But if you do look back at that period — particularly the spring and summer of 2020 — a lot of the ways that Trump is approaching the war he started in Iran are incredibly familiar. (And so, although to a lesser extent, is the press coverage.)
Here’s the summary I put on top of the archive of my Trump and Covid coverage. Tell me if it rings a bell.
I wrote a lot about the coverage of Trump’s response to the pandemic, and here is what was clear all along: He had no real plan to restore the country to health other than to peddle false hope, predict a quick end, adopt fake deadlines and shift the blame to others. The most urgent need was to test, test, test, and either he didn’t get it or he didn’t want to know the results because they would “look bad”. The media blew its coverage by letting political reporters lead instead of health and science reporters. Political reporters paid way too much attention to whatever Trump said, such that whatever it was made headlines. They let Trump set the agenda instead of letting knowledgeable people do it. Political reporters also gave Trump way too much credit for trying. They covered up for his incoherence, ignorance, cluelessness, gaslighting, and yes, just plain stupidity. They failed to properly exploit their rare access to him by confronting him with facts and piercing his bubble. They remained complacent in the face of a massive death toll, instead of relentlessly demanding more forceful action.
Trump’s handling of the Iran crisis is even more condemnable than his handling of Covid – because he caused this one. He’s guilty of starting this war as well as bungling it.
But consider the similarities:
He launched the war with no discernible plan. His goals and his strategy change from minute to minute.
He keeps on peddling false hope and predicting a quick end. “This is a short excursion,” he said on March 7. “It’s going to be ended soon… it’s going to be finished pretty quickly,” he said on March 9. “This war has been won. The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news,” he said on March 24.
He sets fake deadlines. On March 21, he gave Iran “48 HOURS from this exact point in time” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or he would blow up their power plants (a war crime.) On March 23, he extended the deadline to March 27. Now it’s April 6.
While testing is not germane this time around, his aversion to accurate information persists. His daily two-minute “video montage” is said to “emphasize U.S. successes.”
The press coverage, meanwhile, is less credulous than it was during Covid. There have been several articles from our top newsrooms that at least mention his “shifting” and “conflicting” rationales for the war, and the “dizzying turnabouts” as he “has swung wildly between suggesting that the war could end soon and signaling it would escalate.”
But our top journalists continue to fundamentally cover up Trump’s derangement and incoherence. The man is lying almost constantly, gaslighting at full throttle, but the news coverage sanewashes his nonsense with euphemisms like “freestyle diplomacy.”
They cover this war largely as a political story, with most of the news coming out of the (lying) White House.
In their brief moments of access, they ask lame questions that get useless answers.
What they should be doing is confronting him — telling him the truth, on behalf of a public that resoundingly opposes the war. They should be trying to make sure he understands that the war is killing innocent people, terrorizing entire populations, destabilizing the globe, tanking the economy, and arguably strengthening Iran’s own tyrannical regime.
And they should demand to know what he’s doing to stop it. Because unlike Covid, Trump actually does have the ability to make this crisis go away.