Trump’s punishment of coronavirus truth-tellers puts all of us at risk
There are many reasons the United States has become the world capital of the coronavirus: We have 4 percent of the world’s population and 32 percent of its confirmed coronavirus cases. Some institutional problems, such as underinvestment in public health, go back decades. But if I had to choose just one critical failing, it would be President Donald Trump’s pathological proclivity for happy talk and his inveterate unwillingness to face unpleasant facts.
In-depth reporting on the administration’s coronavirus response from The Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, shows that the president ignored 70 days of warnings about the coronavirus beginning in early January. He kept insisting, as he said on March 10, that “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
We now know the president’s Alfred E. Neuman act — “What, me worry?” — wasn’t just for public consumption. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Trump was “furious” after Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Feb. 25 that the coronavirus was rapidly spreading and that “the disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump called Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and threatened to fire Messonnier. The next day, he announced that Vice President Mike Pence would take over the federal government’s coronavirus task force from Azar, and the CDC soon stopped giving public briefings. The irony is that, if the Journal’s reporting is accurate, Azar was failing in his job precisely because, unlike Messonnier, he was telling Trump what he wanted to hear — that “all was going well and that the virus was contained.”
You would think Trump might have learned something about the dangers of swilling his own moonshine. He should be chagrined to have so many of his premature claims of success routinely mocked. (Feb. 10: “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”) But no. Trump is unembarrassable and uneducable.
On Tuesday, CDC Director Robert Redfield warned in an interview with The Post that the second wave of the coronavirus next winter could be even worse than what we are now experiencing, because it will coincide with flu season. Rather than accept the validity of this grave warning and prepare accordingly, Trump insisted that Redfield had been “totally misquoted.” He even marched Redfield to the White House lectern on Wednesday to get him to recant. Redfield’s insistence that he had been accurately quoted constitutes an act of courage, even if he did try to soften his words: “I didn’t say that this was going to be worse,” he said. “I said it was going to be more difficult.”
The party line is that we are “winning” even as the body bags and the unemployment claims pile up — and woe to any administration official who says otherwise. The White House coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx, has gotten the message. On Tuesday she echoed Trump’s claim that “Our mortality rate remains roughly half of that of many other countries and (is) one of the lowest of any country in the world.” That’s false. As The Post notes, “Out of the 134 countries for which Johns Hopkins University has collected data, the United States ranks 33rd highest. Fully 101 countries have a lower rate.”
But Birx has to go along with the president or else suffer the fate of Rick Bright, who was dismissed this week as the chief of the Department of Health and Human Services unit overseeing a coronavirus vaccine. Bright said Wednesday that he was transferred to a lesser position because he had been skeptical of hydroxychloroquine, an unproven drug that Trump has touted as a miracle cure. (A new study shows that coronavirus patients taking the drug had higher death rates than those who did not.) “I believe this transfer,” Bright said, “was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”
Trump is doing with the coronavirus what he does with everything else, from real estate deals to trade deals: He is spinning like crazy to win the news cycle — and never mind the facts. But the cost of his pervasive dishonesty is higher now than ever before. He is putting Americans at grave risk of losing their lives and livelihoods because, even at this late date, he refuses to tackle the pandemic with the urgency and honesty it demands. It should be no surprise, for example, that Trump is not doing nearly enough to ramp up grossly inadequate levels of testing because he falsely said six weeks ago that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.”
President Pangloss’ happy talk isn’t making the situation better. It’s making it far worse. His lies — and his reprisals against truth-tellers — are threats to public health.
Max Boot, a Post columnist, is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a global affairs analyst for CNN.