Systemic falsehoods haunt the president
Trump’s health updates are met with skepticism
Donald Trump’s presidency began with a falsehood, and now, thousands of misstatements later, that history of prevarication is undermining the administration at a time when trust is needed most.
As the president continued to suffer the effects of COVID -19 — the true extent of his ailment and condition being two of many unanswered questions — the news media and the country it serves were lost Saturday in a fog of contradiction and misinformation.
It was nothing new. As of this summer, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker tallied more than 20,000 false or misleading claims made by the president since assuming office — a major reason he’s struggling for reelection. But that made the obfuscation no less fraught.
“There are moments in which the president and the office of the presidency and the White House in general need to be trusted, because the country needs to know that we have a president who is capable of discharging the functions of the office,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political communications expert at the University of Pennsylvania.
“If that trust doesn’t exist,” she said, “we cannot trust the statements that reassure he’s in fact capable of discharging his duties.”
Kevin Madden, a communications strategist with experience on Capitol Hill and who served on three Republican presidential campaigns, was blunter still. “The chickens,” he said, “are coming home to roost.”
This was not, however, the harmless and easily disprovable claim that Trump’s inaugural crowd size surpassed any in history. Rather, it was a literal life-and-death matter involving a virus that has killed more than 209,000 Americans and now infects the president of the United States and many powerful people in his Republican Party.
Watching Saturday ’s briefing by a phalanx of white-coated doctors gave Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at UC San Francisco, what he called “CDC deja vu” — a reference to the way Trump and others in the administration have consistently undercut the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in hopes of putting the best gloss on the global health crisis.
“Here is a previously trusted institution, a physician talking about the president, who is engaged in total spin,” Wachter said of Dr. Sean Conley, Trump’s personal physician, who soon after the briefing had to clarify the evasive and overly rosy statements he made to reporters.
“People make mistakes. That happens,” Wachter said. “But not in situations where you are about to speak to the world about the status of the president. It makes them look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”
Judd Deere, the administration’s deputy press secretary, said, “The White House is fully committed to providing transparent and regular updates on the president’s condition and recovery.”
Trump and his team are not alone in withholding pertinent health information.
President Grover Cleveland had clandestine surgery on a yacht to remove a cancerous growth in his mouth. Franklin D. Roosevelt hid outward signs of his paralysis from polio and never disclosed the poor health conditions that led to his death early in his fourth term. When Ronald Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt in 1981, the White House hid how close he came to dying.
But Trump stands apart, as he has in so many ways, with his voluminous catalog of falsehoods.
A Gallup survey in June found that about a third of Americans, 36 percent, considered the president to be honest and trustworthy. By comparison, a quarter of Americans said that about President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial after he lied about an affair with a White House intern.
Trump’s rating, to no surprise, reflects a deep partisan divide. Democrats have always given Trump rock-bottom ratings, in contrast with the much more favorable views of Republicans. But even some within the GOP have grown dubious of their party leader. In 2017, more than 8 in 10 Republicans thought Trump was trustworthy; three years later, that number fell to just about 7 in 10.