A compelling and coherent narrative is finally emerging to explain the Trump administration’s flailing response to the coronavirus crisis.
It’s consistent with what we know about Trump’s pathological need for admiration, and with what we know about the culture of sycophancy and fear he has created among the people who answer to him.
And it should become an explicit element of every incremental story about the crisis going forward.
In short: Trump bet on containment rather than mobilization. It was a bad bet. But in Trump’s mind, it was a “tremendous success”. As a result, top health officials fearful of his wrath assured him it was working, rather than preparing for its inevitable failure. Now, Trump is fully invested in making coronavirus disappear, even while it continues its spread. But the only way to do that is to slow-walk testing, put a chokehold on the release of information, repeatedly insist that everyone says he’s doing a good job, and hope for a miracle.
Where we are now is the result of Trump’s bad judgement, compounded by extreme, obsessive vanity — and an executive-branch culture in which officials are too terrified to contradict him.
And make no mistake: his subordinates remain under clear orders to make it all go away. As he put it last week: “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
Time Magazine’s Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan reported this out with enviable clarity, writing that Trump’s moves to keep coronavirus out of the United States were doomed from the get-go, despite his constant assurances that it was working.
But it wasn’t, and the administration’s rosy messaging was fundamentally at odds with a growing cacophony of alarm bells inside and outside the U.S. government. Since January, epidemiologists, former U.S. public health officials and experts have been warning, publicly and privately, that the administration’s insistence that containment was—and should remain—the primary way to confront an emerging infectious disease was a grave mistake.
What those experts told Bergengruen and Hennigan is that Trump’s January 31 decision to block the entry of foreigners from China and quarantine Americans returning from there was not in itself a bad idea – but only to the extent that it bought some some time to put together an effective response.
An effective response, experts say, would have required that administration officials capitalized on the temporary delay of new infections offered by containment strategies in order to aggressively prepare for inevitable outbreaks. But not one of the dozens of experts, doctors or former public health officials who spoke with TIME thought that the Trump administration used that delay effectively.
As a result:
Experts say the U.S. response is now likely weeks—if not months—behind schedule.
New York Times op-ed writer Michelle Goldberg cut right to the heart of it in her Friday column:
[I]t seems as if in the midst of this burgeoning crisis, we’re seeing a coordinated, whole-of-government campaign to protect the president from being contradicted.
What now?
Going forward, Trump administration officials are still under pressure to only say things that fit into Trump’s fantasy narrative, which he described at that first, largely incoherent, coronavirus briefing on Feb. 26:
We have, through some very good early decisions — decisions that were actually ridiculed at the beginning — we closed up our borders to flights coming in from certain areas, areas that were hit by the coronavirus and hit pretty hard. And we did it very early. A lot of people thought we shouldn’t have done it that early, and we did, and it turned out to be a very good thing.…
Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.…
We’re going to spend whatever is appropriate. Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. And again, we’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought….
And again, 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.
Eight days, 200 cases and a dozen deaths later, Trump answered questions about coronavirus during Thursday night’s Fox News town hall by repeatedly insisting that his performance is being widely praised – saying so six times in one three-minute stretch:
Well, actually, we were giving — I think really given tremendous marks — if you look at Gallup poll, you look at other polls — for the way we’ve handled it.…
[W]e’ve been given rave reviews….
So we were really given tremendous marks…
Again, we’ve gotten the highest poll numbers of anybody for this kind of a thing. …
We’ve been given A-pluses for that….
Well, I think people are viewing us as having done a very good job.
That is what matters to him more than anything – that he can brag about external validation.
So some officials will continue to enthusiastically parrot what Trump says — regardless of the possible effects on their credibility or the country – in order to keep the boss happy. Economic adviser Larry Kudlow is flatly in that category, as journalist and pandemic expert Laurie Garrett noted on Twitter:
Based on what, you moron?
I am feeling my head explode over messaging from @WhiteHouse .
Do these people realize they will be held accountable for chaos and deaths? https://t.co/kbWefMCNs7— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 6, 2020
And as long as Trump refuses to let anything interfere with his fantasy, the government response will remain crippled.
Ah “presswatchers,” whose theme is that the media should be even MORE biased. By the way, Froomkin, when the expanded testing shows that Trump was correct about the mortality rate being a lot lower than 1%, will you come back and note that he was correct? Of course not. You have a terrible case of TDS, just like all of your media friends. You are an arrogant, smug, untrustworthy fool, and so are your buddies.
So, what’s going to happen is that the pandemic will turn out to be really contagious (moreso than fluu) and deadly (moreso than flu) and the hospitals will be overwhelmed and a couple million people will die, or it’s going to fizzle out and Trump will be vindicated. We really can’t tell yet which it’s going to be. All the reporting so far is FUD; fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s a typical American press feeding frenzy. The short-sighted for-profit health system (and those so-called “non-profits” are just the same, except the profit goes to management instead of shareholders) is not going to spend any money on protective gear or installing more beds. They cannot produce thousands of new nurses in months. There is, as yet, no medicine which treats SARS CoV 2 virus, so they can’t stock up on that. It’s a systemic problem. It’s interesting to learn how Trump is lying about this or that, but the real problem is the system has wrongly aligned incentives, and is not agile.