Coronavirus crisis: Trump’s terrible response is putting American lives in danger
It should have been the start of “the hammer” coming down in America on the coronavirus curve. Monday was meant to be the day when federal and state government began to pressure people to stay home and help avoid the healthcare apocalypse that’s predicted for the weeks ahead. Except, that didn’t quite happen.
Instead, in rode the fourth horseman of the apocalypse on Sunday night, in the form of Steve Hilton – the former spin guru to David Cameron – and now a host on Fox News, to talk about America’s response to the coronavirus.
As is so often the case across America’s political divide, the language and arguments of one side can be deliberately twisted in favour of the other. It’s the usual gamesmanship that passes for commentary: clever, engaged, but often not entirely credible. It’s how the criticisms of Trump-Russia become twisted into a narrative about Biden-Ukraine.
We all know that we face not one crisis but two. We have the virus but also the very real damage being done to the economy as we battle the virus. What Hilton did, quite adroitly, was talk to the Biden-Ukraine partisans while adopting the language of the epidemiologists to talk about “flattening” the “economic curve”.
“You know that famous phrase, ‘The cure is worse than the disease?’ That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards,” he told Fox viewers. “You think it’s just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people.”
It was emotive stuff, delivered convincingly – but, taken in isolation, it was one of those arguments that hasn’t gained much traction for good reason. This was, puzzlingly, an architect of austerity in Britain after the 2010 general election preaching a version of economic humanism, but even more troubling was the way Hilton dismissed respected epidemiologists as “the ruling class”. It would have sounded tired in 2019. In 2020, it sounds positively dangerous.
Outside the Fox bubble, the world has also moved on from considering the coronavirus as a virulent disease that can be kept quarantined away from our economies. We now understand the danger posed lies in the virus’s transmissibility, which means it can get everywhere at once, rapidly resulting in systemic failures.
The science and politics of this have, admittedly, taken weeks to settle but both scientists and politicians are beginning to organise a more coherent response as strides are made towards better testing mechanisms. Once we can get on top of the asymptomatic nature of the virus’s spread, life (and markets) will begin to settle into a new normality, even if we face a period of stringent community testing until a vaccine hopefully becomes a reality in 2021.
That, however, is science. Hilton was arguing pure politics and playing to his audience, at least one of whom was listening. Proving the case that he is guided by the last person whispering into his ear (again, not advised), the channel’s one significant viewer decided to turn the American COVID-19 response around in the space of a nasal swab.
That viewer was, of course, none other than the 45th President of the Republic. Donald Trump was soon tweeting out a version of the Hilton argument: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”
Next day, he would repeatedly walk that back and then push it forward in typically Trumpian formulations of either/and. It set the tone for a truly baffling press conference.
On the other side of the Atlantic yesterday evening, Prime Minister Johnson appeared on TV in Britain and produced his best performance of the crisis, leaning into the powers at his disposal while not abandoning his liberal convictions in order to deliver a coherent plan. Over in America, the President’s message was that America had learned a great lesson but, now suitably educated on the nature of pandemics, the nation could move on.
“We’ve learned a lot, there’s so much discipline now,” Trump said. “Nobody ever said don’t shake hands – I did, actually, before I became a politician […] then it gets hard not doing it – there’s a great discipline that this county had learned with distancing, with having to do with shaking hands. I think a lot of this is going to stay until long after the virus has gone.”
Trump is already bored with the virus. He is annoyed at the damage being done to his economy. He is annoyed at the bad press he’s getting for a virus he blames on the Chinese. He hates the media for holding him responsible for the federal response. He is frustrated and beginning to act like the guy who’ll take anything he finds in the cupboard if he thinks it might cure him.
His inability to wait for the science is appalling. This was only day eight of Trump’s timetable. He is now giving the nation until day fifteen (the end of the week) to get it sorted before, he claims, he’ll consider turning America back on.
“We have to open our country because that causes problems that, in my opinion, could be far bigger problems,” he said. “This is a severe medical situation that could cause problems far beyond the medical and then increase the medical problems to things that have nothing to do with this original medical problem. We can’t let that happen to our country.”
Trump’s message had all the precision of an uncontained sneeze and ably demonstrated why many in America are now looking elsewhere for leadership and, particularly, towards New York’s no-nonsense governor Andrew Cuomo.
Significantly absent from the White House conference yesterday was Anthony Fauci, who has become the face of America’s response to the virus as well as the face of America’s scientific community’s response to the President. Fauci spoke to the journal Science last week, his words making headlines on Sunday when he admitted to frustration at the misinformation coming out of the White House. “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” he is reported to have said of Trump.
The President might yet fire America’s most famous immunologist. He might not. The very fact this is part of the debate is another symptom of how America’s response is confused, undermined by the personal animosities of the man who promised to protect America.
In the end, America’s main news networks curtailed their coverage of the press conference on Tuesday. That, surely, is the most damning statement of all. NBC went first, followed by CNN and, shortly after, MSNBC. Only Fox News carried on pumping Trump’s misinformation into American homes.
It’s easy to laugh it off as part of that American culture war that can look ridiculous from afar, but news emerged on Tuesday which highlighted the real harm being done. It was reported that in Arizona, a man died and a woman remains in critical condition after swallowing “chloroquine phosphate”, which they believed would protect them from Coronavirus. Trump had repeatedly talked and tweeted about chloroquine as if it is a miracle cure. He likes it because the Federal Drug Administration has already cleared it for use as a treatment for malaria. It would be quick and cheap – two of Trump’s favourite words.
He might have good reasons to be optimistic. Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine have indeed shown promise in trials when prescribed by doctors and in the right form. Unfortunately for the Arizona couple, they’d ingested chloroquine phosphate which is used to clean aquariums. It appears that details do matter, even in Trump’s America.