Trump gives up on virus fight to focus on
economic recovery – and re-election
With Covid-19 deaths set to almost double this month,
the president is putting the stock market before lives, critics say
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Tue 5 May
2020 17.46 BSTFirst published on Tue 5 May 2020 14.03 BST
Donald
Trump is effectively abandoning a public health strategy for the coronavirus
pandemic and showing “clear willingness to trade lives for the Dow Jones”,
critics say.
A leaked
internal White House report predicts the daily death toll from the virus will
reach about 3,000 on 1 June, almost double the current tally of about 1,750,
the New York Times revealed on Monday.
Yet at the
same time, Trump has scrapped daily coronavirus task force briefings and
marginalized his medical experts in favour of economic officials flooding the
airwaves to urge states to reopen for business – even amid rising infection
rates.
On Tuesday
morning, before boarding Air Force One to visit a medical mask-making facility
in Arizona for his first long trip since late March when the outbreak escalated
in the US, Trump weighed a predicted surge in deaths against economic revival.
“There is
no great win, one way or the other, but I will tell you where there is a win,
we are going to build a country, I did it once, two months ago we had the best
economy in the history of the world, but we are going to do it again and that’s
what we’re starting … it’s going to happen pretty fast.”
The top US
public health expert on the White House coronavirus task force, Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned
in a CNN interview the previous evening that there will be a “rebound” of new
coronavirus cases in the US if the country rushes towards a “premature”
reopening of society and business.
“How many
deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you
want to be some form of normality sooner rather than later?” he asked.
And on
Tuesday morning New York governor Andrew Cuomo warned against what he called a
life or death “trade-off” when planning how and when to lift restrictions.
“The faster
we reopen the lower the economic costs, but the higher the human costs because
the more lives lost. That, my friends, is the decision we are really making,”
Cuomo said at his daily briefing.
Critics are
now sharply questioning the Trump administration approach to what Fauci called
“a very difficult choice” that weighs a death toll against economic
catastrophe.
“They’ve
decided in a very utilitarian kind of way that the political damage from a collapsed
economy is greater than the political damage from losing as many as 90,000 more
Americans just in June,” said Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist.
“We’re witnessing the full-scale application of a kind of grisly realpolitik
that is a clear willingness to trade lives for the Dow Jones.”
In a sign
of the shift, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie told CNN that
increased deaths could be worth it if the economy reopens. “Of course,
everybody wants to save every life they can – but the question is, towards what
end, ultimately?” said Christie, a Republican who led Donald Trump’s
presidential transition team in 2016. He added: “Are there ways that we can …
thread the needle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there
are going to be deaths no matter what?”
When Trump
declared a national emergency on 13 March, hopes rose that, for all the early
downplaying and missed testing opportunities, the federal government was
finally ready to attack the crisis with full force.
Trump
quickly branded himself a “wartime president” and, on 31 March, somberly braced
Americans for a “very, very painful two weeks” ahead. His daily White House
coronavirus taskforce briefings earned comparisons with campaign rallies,
sometimes running for more than two hours, but also featured respected experts,
Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, armed with graphics and science.
On 23
April, however, Trump pontificated about injecting disinfectant into
coronavirus patients, prompting worldwide disbelief and derision. The briefings
would never be the same again and over the past week have been replaced by
set-piece events touting an economic comeback.
On Sunday,
tellingly, when Trump held a Fox News virtual town hall entitled “America
Together: Returning to Work” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he was
accompanied not by Birx and Fauci but Vice-President Mike Pence and the
treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.
The
president has been egged on by Fox News hosts who question whether the virus is
any worse than the common flu, doubt the value of physical distancing and
contend that the economic shutdown, which has cost at least 30m jobs, shows the
cure is worse than the problem.
On
Saturday, a Washington Post report suggested Trump had been encouraged to pivot
from the health crisis to the economic fightback by an internal White House
analysis that suggested the daily death toll would peak in mid-April then fall
away significantly. His “decision-making has been guided largely by his
re-election prospects”, the Post added.
But death
toll predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation, a model favored by the White House, were raised on
Monday from 72,000 to 134,000 by the start of August because, it said, states
are relaxing physical distancing too soon.
Now,
critics say, Trump seems ready to shrug at the losses as collateral damage,
paying greater heed to his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, than Birx or Fauci.
Vice-President
Mike Pence and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, with phone, watch as
Donald Trump participates in a live Fox News virtual town hall called ‘America
Together: Returning to Work’.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Vice-President Mike Pence and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, with
phone, watch as Donald Trump participates in a Fox News virtual town hall.
Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
Wilson,
author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, warned: “They may end up making the
situation so bad with a second wave in the summer and a third wave in the fall
that we end up with a much worse set of economic challenges than if we’d taken
our bitter medicine and stayed shut down until we were through the early part
of this crisis.”
The grim
news remains inescapable but the administration hopes its economic message will
offer at least some counter-programming.
Joe
Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, said: “Almost by necessity,
they are changing their strategy. They are pinning all of their hopes on
getting the economy reopened, using their economic spokespeople and hoping that
the American public has a high toleration for the death count moving up. It
sounds terrible to say and even worse to do.
“I think
you won’t be seeing much from the scientists any more – the news is that bad –
and they’re just going to turn a blind eye to the fact that what they’re doing
is going to kill more people, because ultimately the way the president makes
decisions is what’s good for his re-election.”
Will Americans ever forgive Trump for his
heartless lack of compassion?
While the nation grieves, the US president has spent
less than five minutes expressing compassion for those who are suffering
Francine
Prose
Tue 5 May
2020 11.22 BSTLast modified on Tue 5 May 2020 18.51 BST
To exist at
this moment is to navigate (or try to fend off) the flood of grief that
threatens to submerge even our rare, buoyant moments. We mourn the death of
friends and relatives, the absence of human contact and the everyday pleasures
we once took for granted. We can’t stop thinking about the tens of thousands of
families facing hunger, bankruptcy and homelessness even as they struggle to
endure the loss of someone they dearly loved.
What’s
striking, if not surprising, is that this deluge of sorrow has run dry at the
door to the Oval Office.
One’s heart
goes out to the reporters who have sifted through the Donald Trump’s press
briefings on the current pandemic – hour after hour of bombast, self-promotion,
vitriol, lies and recklessly unscientific speculation – for any evidence of
sympathy for those who are in pain. It’s hardly a shock to learn that our
president’s expressions of care and compassion have occupied a total of less
than five minutes, out of all that time.
After all,
a man who mocked a disabled journalist and boasted about grabbing women wasn’t
elected for the depths of his kindness and the purity of his moral conscience.
And it seems unrealistically optimistic to have hoped that the extremity of
this crisis should have inspired, in our leader, a deep and essential change of
heart.
Arguably,
few politicians seek (and are elected to) office out of an excess of
compassion. Even those who respond to catastrophe in more appropriately “human”
ways – George W Bush mourning the victims of 9/11, Obama tearing up at the site
of the Sandy Hook school shooting – have been parochial in their sympathies;
there was little ceremonial grieving for the innocent child-casualties of our
bombing and drone strikes in the Middle East.
And yet we
can’t help thinking how much less worried we would be if a humane, competent,
well-informed adult was making the decisions that affect us all. Though we’ve learned
that Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned away refugees from Hitler’s Europe, we
can still imagine how comforting it was, for those who lived through the Great
Depression, hearing his radio speeches: absorbing their message of reassurance
and hope, his determination to comprehend and mitigate the sufferings of our
nation.
Trump’s
enraged, self-infatuated maunderings are the opposite of Roosevelt’s calm
resolve. Yet ultimately our president’s failure of empathy is less disturbing
than the ways in which it appears to resonate with his supporters. He and his
allies have framed our response to the crisis in terms of partisan politics, to
imply (incorrectly, as the polls suggest) that tough conservatives are eager to
get back to work sooner than scaredy-cat, stay-at-home progressives.
The
flag-waving, gun-toting, defiantly unmasked protesters storming the capitol
buildings in Michigan and Wisconsin would seem to support that view. This, too,
is a situation that could have been defused by a president who projected
sympathy, who persuaded his listeners, as Roosevelt did, that the pain of those
who have lost jobs and businesses is shared by us all. Instead we see Trump’s
efforts to stoke rage and bitterness because he suspects that it might help
solidify his base.
It may be
that the deepening polarization in our country – the suspicion, grievance and
rage that the president is spouting and encouraging – is less political than
spiritual. These divides go deeper than how we vote; they express our core
beliefs about our responsibility to those with whom we share this brief span on
this damaged planet. As Slate editor Tom Scocca posted on Twitter:
“Conservatives have by now been conditioned to believe that thinking about
other people ‘s needs or interests in any way is tyranny by definition,” a
sentiment echoed by Emily Raboteau in the Huffington Post: “I can’t debate
someone into caring about what happens to our fellow human beings.”
It’s hard to imagine anything more grotesque
than using the pandemic as an excuse to further the ongoing campaign to
separate families and exclude asylum seekers and other immigrants
This idea
that empathy and altruism are expressions of weakness and naivety is nothing
new; it’s the foundation of novelist Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and it received a
major boost during the Reagan-Bush years, when “trickle-down” economics did
little to stem the growing problem of homelessness. But it’s never seemed so
virulent as it does today, perhaps because it has never been so openly
advocated – so blatantly demonstrated – by our president. It’s hard to think of
anything more corrupt or corrupting than to boast about one’s success when (as
I write this) more than 60,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. It’s hard to
imagine anything more grotesque than using the pandemic as an excuse to further
the ongoing campaign to separate families and exclude asylum seekers and other
immigrants.
What’s most
frightening to me is that the lack of empathy – the selfishness, the
resentment, the hope that others will suffer even more than we are suffering –
is itself a kind of virus: contagious, dangerous, possibly even lethal. I’ve
heard people say that the Wisconsin and Michigan protesters – shouting shoulder
to shoulder, refusing to observe the simple rules of social distancing – won’t
learn how profoundly Trump has betrayed them until they themselves contract the
virus that they have been encouraged to downplay. I’ve even heard it said how
unfair it is that our overweight, out-of-shape politicians – too vain to wear a
mask, flouting scientific advice and the dictates of common sense – have proved
immune to the disease that has felled so many decent, generous people.
But such
statements echo the absence of compassion that Trump, by tweet and by example,
is encouraging us to feel. It’s become another thing to resist. I don’t want to
wish that anyone will learn that particular hard lesson, in that particularly
hard way: not the governors opening their states for business before it’s safe,
not the demonstrators on the state capitol steps, not our president. Despite my
own anger, frustration and fear, I still can’t bring myself to claim suffering
as a success.
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