TRUMP BLUNDERS AND LIES THROUGH THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

Frank Rich: Trump Lies His Way Through a Pandemic

By Frank Rich@frankrichny

He’s doing about as well as you’d expect. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s response to coronavirus shortages, how the press should cover Trump’s exaggerations and failed promises, and how to hold primaries during a pandemic.

As the coronavirus-related layoffs and medical needs pile up, experts are concluding that a strong federal response is needed. Is the Trump administration capable of rising to the occasion?
The president who is leading this country into battle cares about no one but himself, continues to lie to Americans daily about the most basic imperatives of a public-health catastrophe, and presides over an administration staffed with incompetent, third-tier bootlickers and grifters. And I am not just talking about Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and Wilbur Ross. There are now three college seniors serving in White House positions, thanks to a new purge of ostensibly disloyal staffers being conducted by Trump’s former body man, the 29-year-old John McEntee, recently installed as director of the Presidential Personnel Office. Trump calls himself a “wartime president,” but his only previous wartime experience was partying during Vietnam, when he was spared military service because of “bone spurs.” Those bone spurs long ago migrated to his brain. If America rises to the occasion, it will be despite him, not because of him. We’re at the point where even if Trump were to start telling the truth, no one except the most mad-dog MAGA-ites would believe him.

Right now the country is waiting for a bomb to drop: that much-predicted turning point when the metastasis of illness and mass death in the U.S. could match the curve we’ve seen in Italy. Trump’s nonstop lies — and those of toadies like Pence — are not just intended to cover up the many failures to prepare for the looming apocalypse (“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”), or to blame those failures on China and Obama, or to luxuriate in unearned self-congratulation (“I’d rate it a 10”). What the lies are doing now is throwing gasoline on the gathering fire. Why in heaven’s name would Trump, having previously lied about the fast arrival of a vaccine, now tell anxious and desperate Americans two days in a row that unproven and unapproved drugs for malaria and arthritis might rapidly be a “game changer” for treating the coronavirus? Why would Pence, having previously made up fictitious numbers for the amount of tests available, now promise millions of hospital masks even as hospitals from Washington to Washington, D.C., say they will have to reuse masks because of the shortage and the government’s own Centers for Disease Control is suggesting that under-equipped hospitals use bandanas instead? Why does a president cite the Defense Protection Act, which allows him to commandeer industry to produce emergency supplies, while simultaneously telling the states to find much-needed ventilators on their own?

Trump’s answer to that last question was that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” He seemed not to understand that it’s ventilators that the nation’s hospitals urgently need, not the postal service. Such is his minimal comprehension of the urgent tasks at hand that Trump’s level of competence doesn’t rise to that of the skipper of the Titanic. The Titanic’s captain may have hit an iceberg, but at least he recognized the scientific reality that icebergs exist.

Up until now Trump’s motives for lying have been to (1) cover up what may prove the most catastrophic failure in the history of the American presidency; (2) to distract the country from the continuing failure in the effort to keep his reelection campaign afloat; (3) to boost the stock market. But another motive is emerging that’s entirely in keeping with the history to date of Trump’s kleptocratic White House: rewarding his family and cronies financially.

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Jared Kushner may well be once again at the center of that buckraking. One of the more damning stories of the week, reported by the Washington Post, is that Kushner has started his own shadow coronavirus operation within the White House that is getting in the way of the administration’s public efforts. Among its major achievements thus far is to destroy the credibility of Deborah Birx, the virus researcher whom Pence has called the “right arm” of his task force, by having her display an elaborate chart explaining how a non-existent Google website would speed testing. That Potemkin website had been invented by Kushner.

That may be just the visible tip of what Kushner is up to. He told the Post that he is bringing “an entrepreneurial approach” to the pandemic. Based on his and his father-in-law’s past behavior, we have every reason to believe that entrepreneurs in the Mar-a-Lago circuit, assuming they are not killed off by the virus, will benefit from any bailouts crafted by the White House and Republicans in Congress, starting perhaps with casino entrepreneurs like Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

This is in keeping with a president who remains passive as athletes and celebrities mysteriously cut the long line to be tested for the coronavirus. It is in keeping with a Vichy Republican Party where the senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler were dumping stocks pre-crash, seemingly exploiting inside information about the coming fiasco for huge personal profit while keeping their own voters in the dark about it. Today Tucker Carlson is receiving some applause for being a rare truth-teller on Fox News because last night he called out Burr in no uncertain terms: “There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis.”

True enough, but Burr, despicable as he is, amounts to at most a foot soldier in the criminal enterprise being run out of the White House.

By now, a number of promises Donald Trump has made directly to the press — universal access to testing, a nationwide medical-screening website, the deployment of hospital ships — have failed to pan out after initially receiving breathless headlines. Should the press change the way it covers Trump’s promises?
The challenge to the press remains what it’s been from the start: How do you challenge a lying president on the facts in real time when he is lying as fast as he can speak? The difference now is that more than ever lives are dependent on Americans getting the truth.

This is less a problem for print-oriented news organizations, which have more time to get it right, than television news, both broadcast and cable, and of course the leaders (if that is the correct term) of social media behemoths that transmit false information at warp speed. Change is needed, and it will require collaboration of the best brains in the news business to reinvent practices and formats. Even hours after Trump had floated bogus miracle drugs before the public yesterday, at least one network evening news broadcast was teasing the story with a hopeful headline before disemboweling it.

Despite concerns from medical professionals about risks to public health, three states held their Democratic primaries on Tuesday. At least five others have announced postponements, and more are considering delays. Should voting go forward?
I will confess to finding this perhaps the least-pressing question of our time. Both parties have their presidential nominees. Obviously states must — and can — find workarounds to conduct elections that allow voters to weigh in, even if ceremonially in the case of presidential primaries, without endangering anyone’s health. But when even Tulsi Gabbard has quit the race, it’s clear this circus has left town.

One of the most tired cliches in conservative politics is that we should run government like a business. Donald Trump’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic is a perfect demonstration of how pernicious that philosophy can be when applied to governance.

Much has already been said about how Donald Trump’s personality flaws and questionable policy obsessions have hampered America’s response to the growing pandemic. His narcissism leaves him unable to consider anything but his own political fortunes; his racism makes him treat an international medical problem like a clash-of-civilizations and border control problem; his incuriosity makes him unable to digest new information and respond with flexibility, must less act foresight to head off problems. Whole books could be—and likely will be—written about how the convergent moral failings of the president and his favorite conservative infotainment networks have contributed to a ruinously incompetent response to the burgeoning pandemic crisis.

Even in more competent and empathetic hands, the Trump (and more broadly, the conservative) approach to governing philosophy would still run counter to the demands of the moment, at a time of crisis requiring foresight and intervention by public sector.

At every step of the way, Trump and the conservative media have treated the coronavirus as a PR problem, a political problem, and a business problem. They have tried to downplay the severity of the disease, tell people to continue life like everything is normal, continue flying and going on cruise lines, and boost the markets however possible. Friday’s bizarre press conference was little more than an infomercial for some of the top health-related businesses in the Dow Jones average, with a parade of CEOs talking about their commitment to doing vague somethings about the pandemic right before the closing bell. It worked, at least for now: the Dow surged as a result of the upbeat corporate presentation. For weeks now the administration has slow-played testing under the theory that lower reported numbers would somehow look better and magically change the actual reality on the ground until the problem went away.

Like so much of modern American business culture, the ethic here is short-sighted and self-serving at best, and cruel, callous, and malevolent at worst. Today’s fast-moving capital markets are explicitly designed to be reactive rather than proactive, and every incentive built into them is to push for growth at all costs. Problems are meant to be pushed to the side and out of sight so the good times can keep rolling at the top; inconvenient costs are externalized and socialized on the backs of workers, the impoverished, and the environment. In the best of times, this dynamic creates massive inequalities and injustices that the market doesn’t notice, because the victims most affected are insignificant to—and go unnoticed by—the invisible hand. In the worst of times, however, it utterly hobbles a society’s ability to respond to crises that require active management before they can be directly felt in the marketplace.

The coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis are similar here: by the time the capital markets notice there is enough of a problem here to affect their bottom lines, it will be far too late to actually solve the problem. It’s true of any problem with an exponential curve whose solution requires acting well before the curve turns irrevocably steep, but where the action to prevent it would impact corporate profits.

Conservative ideology generally is incapable of handling problems like this. The philosophy of minimal government and just-in-time responses through privatized action is doomed to fail when the challenge requires redundancy, massive public investments, and temporary inconvenience to private sector profiteering. Paying for a pandemic response office, universal healthcare, a larger number of available hospital beds, and such would be inconvenient for some executives and their tax burdens, but it’s invaluable for social justice—and to keep people alive when systems are stressed. The same analogy can be made, but on a much bigger and more consequential scale, for climate change: adopting a Green New Deal may be expensive and inconvenient for some yacht owners today, but it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in disaster costs tomorrow.

Republicans and their conservative media allies have become so used to the “sweep-it-under-rug-and-say-whatever-you-have-to” approach to problems that they’ve forgotten how to do anything else. It’s not just a cruel dismissal of the needs of the young, the stranger, and the unfortunate: it’s also an entire culture of refusing to see problems that run contrary to their ideological framework. Every political problem can be solved by providing their base a comfortable alternative reality.

Donald Trump’s own personal brand of narcissism, pathological lying, and blunt ignorance is just an extra dollop of dangerously cruel incompetence. Outside of Trump, the conservative movement’s reaction to coronavirus reveals an ideology that has not been fit to deal with inconvenient problems for decades—whether it be climate change, the costs of education, healthcare and housing, or even other epidemics like the AIDS outbreak in the Reagan era.

Of course, a virus doesn’t care what presidents say, what University of Chicago economists write, or Fox News talking heads broadcast. A virus does what it does. Exponential curves are what they are. Sometimes, reality intrudes no matter what alternative realities are created, and no matter what actions are taken to try to sweep it under the rug so the champagne can still flow at Wall Street after-parties. A pandemic like this can kill the rich and the poor alike.

Even for the well-heeled, running a government like a business only works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the consequences are beyond disastrous not just for the economy, but for life itself