White House truth-telling crucial now
When an American president is ill, the world holds its breath, and for good reason: No one individual has more global influence, for better or worse, than the leader of the world’s largest economy and strongest military.
Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Jimmy Carter collapsed while jogging. George H.W. Bush had gastroenteritis, and delivered a regrettable side effect to the lap of the Japanese prime minister during a banquet. In each case, financial markets wobbled and citizens worried until it was clear that the president had regained his health.
But the presidency of Donald Trump long ago unsettled the globe in ways more varied and extreme than you might imagine of anybody else in the Oval Office. We haven’t become immune to Trump-induced anxiety, but the uncertainty he provokes on even his most robust days has become regularized. If a presidential impeachment barely registers an effect on the national psyche, if the daily insults and wild policy fluctuations of the last 1,352 days ( but who’s counting ?) draw from many citizens no more than a shrug, why would what the White House calls “mild symptoms” of COVID -19 in the president make much of a mark? The news that the president and first lady have become the world’s most prominent COVID -19 patients should prompt us all to wish them a speedy recovery. In the words of Joe Biden, who more than most of us might have cause to hold Trump in low regard, “We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.” That’s really all we can do. What the White House can do in this moment, though, is something quite different, if uncharacteristic of this presidency: For the good of the world, it can adopt a posture of transparency and honesty. We are owed that when our president is struck down by an illness that has killed more than 208,000 Americans.
Of course, we should expect honest reports of a national leader’s health as a matter of course. But this is a president who, as a candidate, dictated a report that was falsely said at the time to be from his personal physician, describing his blood pressure as “astonishingly excellent” and stating “unequivocally” that Trump surely would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Since then, even routine reports on his health have struck many as hard to believe; his claimed height and weight in medical reports show Trump, 74, closely matching the physique of professional athletes like Tim Tebow and Mike Trout. Really?
Not that Trump is the only contemporary politician to shade the facts of his health. When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came down with COVID -19 last year, aides said he had a “mild” case and “minor symptoms” shortly before he was admitted to an intensive care unit. “Johnson has a notoriously fraught history with the truth,” British journalist Jon Allsop wrote then. Yesterday, noting Trump’s record of prevarication, Allsop cautioned, “The urge to speculate is understandable when journalists are unable to trust those in power.”
Pleading for clarity from this White House may be a fool’s errand. Trump’s track record of truth-telling is beyond awful: He has gushed more than 20,000 lies in office, The Washington Post reports. On the coronavirus, the impact of his misstatements has been deadly.
Cornell University researchers who reviewed 38 million articles about COVID -19 concluded, in a report released Thursday, that Trump has been the “single largest driver” of misunderstanding on the disease, responsible for 38 percent of the “misinformation conversations” about it. The most prevalent of the falsehoods, the research found, involved supposed “miracle cures,” like his touting of anti-malarial drugs and disinfectant consumption.
Even more damaging, of course, has been the president’s hostility to the simple act of wearing a face mask, which every medical expert says can save lives. In this week’s debate, he was at it again, seeming to denigrate Joe Biden for wearing one in public. Notably, Trump family members at the debate wore no masks. Nor did Trump aide Hope Hicks, who fell ill a day later and self-quarantined Wednesday night on Air Force One while flying back from a rally in Minnesota with Trump.
On Thursday night, Trump told Fox’s Sean Hannity how she may have gotten sick. “But it is very, very hard when you are with people from the military, or from law enforcement, and they come over to you and they want to hug you and kiss you because we really have done a good job for them,” he said. “You get close, and things happen.”
Or was he concocting a rationale for his own (then unrevealed illness? It’s hard to imagine that Trump, who has access to rapid testing and extraordinary government-paid medical care, wouldn’t have known 24 hours after an aide’s illness surfaced that he and his wife also were COVID -positive.
But I’m just speculating here, like those angry people who say Trump isn’t really sick at all — that this is the “October surprise” we’ve expected to change the trajectory of this campaign.
Clarity and truth-telling can squelch such rumor-mongering. Raise your hand if you think that’s what we will get from the White House in the days ahead. Anybody?