Opinion
A President in the Hospital and a Nation in the
Dark
This whole administration is a superspreader event.
Frank Bruni
By Frank
Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
Oct. 5,
2020
The
coronavirus’s rampage through America threw a spotlight on its failings — on
the galling inequality, the fatal partisanship, the susceptibility to fiction
and the way in which rugged individualism had curdled into plain old
selfishness.
The
coronavirus’s rampage through the White House has had the same effect. What we
have seen over recent days is Donald Trump’s presidency in miniature, his worst
traits distilled. Two in particular — mendacity and recklessness — are on
especially unsettling display.
When
exactly did the president get sick and precisely how sick did he get? That’s
knowable, but we still don’t really know it. He’s in the hospital. We’re in the
dark.
How many
people might he have exposed to the coronavirus since first experiencing
symptoms himself? We’re still plumbing that mystery. We’re still doing that
tally.
What is
clear amid all this defensive murkiness is that Trump’s dismissive attitude
toward the virus became its accomplice, as his disdain for masks and perverse
sense of invincibility translated into a packed calendar of events and blasé
behavior by the people attending them that amounted to epidemiological suicide.
Illness
isn’t illuminating him, not to judge by a stunt he pulled early Sunday evening,
when he left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center briefly to ride past
and wave at supporters outside. Although he wore a mask, “Every single person
in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just
now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending
physician at Walter Reed, wrote on Twitter. “They might get sick. They may die.
For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for
theater. This is insanity.”
Reviewing
the timeline of the president’s activities leading up to his positive
coronavirus test, journalists have focused, for good reason, on the Rose Garden
ceremony on Sept. 26 at which he introduced his latest Supreme Court nominee,
Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to the nation. At least a half-dozen people who have
tested positive for the coronavirus over the past few days were there, in a
crowd where neither social distancing nor face covering was enforced. It may
have been a superspreader event.
But the
crazy part is that Trump’s next five days were a sequence of potential
superspreader events, because his look-Ma-no-mask presidency is its own
potential superspreader event: the rallies, the big convention speech outside
the White House, the sessions of debate prep and the debate itself, at which
the safety protocol decreed that everyone in the audience wear a mask.
Trump’s
family members and Trump’s chief of staff did not and, according to the
debate’s moderator, Chris Wallace, waved away an official from the Cleveland
Clinic who offered masks to them. Wallace recounted that situation on “Fox News
Sunday,” asking a Trump adviser if they think that “rules for everybody else”
don’t apply to them.
Great
question. With an obvious answer. They are trapped by their own denialism,
which demands that they model the lack of concern that they push on voters, and
they elevate looking undaunted over being smart, confidence over prudence,
because that’s the administration’s way.
Besides,
masks would have incensed Trump, who, based on his debate performance, needed
to be cooled down, not fired up. As Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman reported in
The Times, he created a “top-down culture of fear” about exhibiting any worry
about infection. “If you wanted to make the boss happy,” Karni and Haberman
wrote, “you left the mask at home.”
That’s a
metaphor for a whole lot more. If you want to make the boss happy, you tell him
that his inauguration drew many more people than it did. You tell him bad news
is fake. You tell him the polls are off. You tell him Robert Mueller’s
investigation is a hoax. You tell him that President Obama spied on his
campaign.
You become
Attorney General Bill Barr, a one-man factory of exonerations and excuses. You
abet his existence in an alternate reality, where the sun is always shining and
will magically zap an inconvenient virus into oblivion.
President
Trump’s aides abetted him all the way to Walter Reed, supplemental oxygen,
steroids and remdesivir. In the course of making the boss happy, they helped
make him sick.
A
president’s diagnosis with a serious illness should be a moment of at least
temporary conciliation, unity and healing, when political adversaries put away
their weapons, journalists muffle their alarms and Americans say a public
prayer for a speedy recovery.
But Trump’s
path to this point and his manner at this point prevent that. They compel the
telling of hard truths, because they’re so reflective of the mistakes made in
battling this pandemic.
“What I
hope is that what we have seen with the president is a cautionary tale for
people” and that more of them “wear a mask to help other people,” one governor
said publicly. That governor was a Republican, Mike DeWine, of Ohio.
I’ve heard
nothing yet from Trump or senior White House officials that suggests that
necessary lessons have been learned — that a commitment to a new
conscientiousness has been made. As of early Sunday evening, they’d offered
absolutely no public information or assurances about contact tracing for all
the people who’d attended Trump events recently or crossed paths with him.
On Saturday
evening Trump tweeted out a four-minute video in which he had the good grace to
thank the medical professionals tending to him and the many Americans who’d
sent kind wishes his way.
Nevertheless,
he persisted in his irresponsibility. Instead of promoting mask wearing and
proper social distancing — a message that would have had tremendous power,
given the circumstances of its delivery — he defended all those crammed events
of his, saying the alternative was sequestering himself upstairs in the White
House and abdicating his duties.
“I had no
choice,” he said, preposterously. There’s a middle ground between hiding out
and a schedule that summons maskless throngs and dispenses with all caution. He
just didn’t care to inhabit it.
And while
he found no time in that video to discuss proper protection against the
coronavirus, he did reassure Americans that medical advances, such as new
treatments, would save the day. “They’re miracles, coming from God,” he said.
That statement isn’t an incentive to behave better. It’s an invitation to
nonchalance.
Early
Sunday evening, he released another video, just over a minute long. Again, no
mention of masks. No mention of social distancing. But lavish
self-congratulation.
“We have
enthusiasm like probably nobody has ever had — people that love the job we’re
doing,” he said of his administration’s supporters. “We have more enthusiasm
than maybe anybody.”
It’s
certainly not the fruit of candor or transparency. He and his administration
have demonstrated neither since the tweet in the wee hours of Friday morning
when he told the world that he had the coronavirus.
Physicians
and administration officials have contradicted one another. They have
contradicted themselves. They have moved and muddled the timeline of his first
symptoms and treatments. They have given us every reason to wonder about a
cover-up and made calm impossible and trust a joke.
“What is
the actual state of President Trump’s health — now and over the past 24 hours?”
Jonathan Swan of Axios wrote late Saturday. “It’s one of the most high-stakes
questions in the world, and I cannot answer it, despite having spent since 5
a.m. on Friday on my phone with sources inside and close to the White House.”
In fact,
Swan added, some of those sources merely echoed and amplified his wonderment.
“They’re
utterly perplexed about what’s going on,” he wrote. “They, like us, have little
confidence in what they are being told.”
To my ears
they’re not just talking about Trump’s current illness. They’re talking about
his administration’s sickness from the start.
Frank Bruni
has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs — including White
House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic — before becoming
a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books. @FrankBruni • Facebook
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