Trump's failures continued
Trump’s indifference was
a direct contrast to Barack Obama, who had “
anointed a former vice presidential staffer, Ronald Klain, as a sort of ‘epidemic czar’ inside the White House, clearly stipulated the roles and budgets of various agencies, and placed incident commanders in charge in each Ebola-hit country and inside the United States.”
On January 29, Peter Navarro, an economic adviser to Donald Trump, sent a memo to the White House warning that
coronavirus could ******* up to 543,000 Americans. Despite Navarro’s memo, and the fact that the U.S. had yet to take any significant actions to counteract the coronavirus (28), Trump continued his narrative of false assurances with a tweet that he had “Just received a briefing on the Coronavirus in China from all of our GREAT agencies, who are also working closely with China. We will continue to monitor the ongoing developments. We have the best experts anywhere in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!” (29)
On Thursday, January 30, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a global health emergency while praising China’s efforts to contain the virus.
On a flight to campaign appearances in the Midwest, Trump received a call from Alex Azar, who warned him a second time (see #22) of the destructive potential of the pandemic.
Trump dismissed Azar as “alarmist.” Later that day, speaking in front of Michigan auto workers the day the WHO declared a global health emergency, the day the CDC
reported the first person-to-person transmission in the U.S., Trump said, “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for it. So that I can assure you.” (30)
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross doubled down on Trump’s denial,
telling Fox Business News that the virus “will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” (31)
Though Ross thought the virus would increase job growth, and Trump was confident that the U.S. had “very little problem” with the virus, the Trump Administration delivered one of a string of mixed messages (32) when they announced the formation of a Coronavirus Task ******* on the same day.
In contrast to the efficient and responsive crisis management model Obama had set up, where Ron Klain coordinated actions among diverse agencies, Trump’s commission had confusing lines of authority, where “
at least three different people—[Health and Human Services head Alex] Azar, Vice President Mike Pence and coronavirus task ******* coordinator Debbie Birx—can claim responsibility.” (33) In a crisis where immediate, decisive action was needed, the administration chose a slow-moving model choked with discussion and deliberation which focused on closing off borders
rather than test kits or medical supplies (34).
Klain offered a prescient prognosis of what was to come at the Atlantic Monthly: “The U.S. government has the tools, talent, and team to help fight the coronavirus abroad and minimize its impact at home. But the combination of Trump’s paranoia toward experienced government officials (who lack ‘loyalty’ to him), inattention to detail, opinionated rejection of science and evidence, and isolationist instincts may prove toxic when it comes to managing a global-health security challenge.
To succeed, Trump will have to trust the kind of government experts he has disdained to date, set aside his own terrible instincts, lead from the White House, and work closely with foreign leaders and global institutions—all things he has failed to do in his first 1,200 days in office.”
Writing in Foreign Policy the next day, January 31, Laurie Garrett (see #36) posed an important question: “The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, ‘What would we do?
How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?’”
Her government that day declared
a public health emergency and restricted Americans who had been in China over the past two weeks from re-entering the country.
Speaking to Fox’s Sean Hannity on February 2, Trump said, “We pretty much shut it down coming from China.”(35) In fact, as Ron Klain would mention to Congress a few days later,
over 100,000 people* had come to the States from China in the month before the ban, so “the horse is already out of the barn.” (*the Washington Post put this number even higher, at
300,000)
Trump would go on to brag repeatedly about the China ban as an example of a gutsy leadership move, but he wouldn’t restrict travel from Europe, which would provide
the bulk of New York’s cases, for six more weeks.
In a February 3 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Laurie Garrett explained that John Bolton’s dissolution of the pandemic response office (see #17) was done out of spite: “it was a big mistake by the Trump administration to obliterate the entire infrastructure of pandemic response that the Obama administration had created. Why did he do it? Well, it certainly wasn’t about the money, because it wasn’t a heavily-funded program. It was certainly because it was Obama’s program.” (36)
Pressed by Goodman to provide more detail about the Global Security Office, Garrett continued:
“It was a special division inside the National Security Council, a special division inside of the Department of Homeland Security…and collaborating centers in HHS, headquarters in Washington, the Office of Global Health Affairs, and the Commerce Department, Treasury Department. But what Obama understood, dealing with Ebola in 2014, is that any American response had to be an all-of-government response, that there were so many agencies overlapping, and they all had a little piece of the puzzle in the case of a pandemic….
“…What the Obama administration realized was that you can’t corral multiple agencies and things from private sector as well as public sector to come to the aid of America, unless you have some one person in charge who’s really the manager of it all. And in his case, it was Ron Klain, who had worked under Vice President Biden. And he was designated, with an office inside the White House, to give orders and coordinate all these various things….Well, that was all eliminated. It’s gone. And now they’re hastily trying to recreate something.”
On February 4, the Wall Street Journal posted an
op-ed by Trump’s former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, titled “Stop a U.S. Coronavirus Outbreak Before It Starts,” in which he stressed the importance of ramping up testing for the virus so that public health officials would know where to focus their efforts.
That same day, the administration rolled out new regulatory guidelines. Any lab that wanted to test needed to meet strict criteria to get an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Though Trump had
gutted every environmental regulation in sight, and
scaled back oversight of Wall Street, his FDA over-regulated this crucial public health function (37),
forsing public health labs to re-run their tests, which would delay reporting of the number of confirmed cases (38), robbing public health officials of vital information about the spread of infection in their areas. The EUA also slowed down private labs by demanding that they get CDC approval before using their tests (39).
On February 5,
Democratic senators met with administration officials and proposed emergency funding “for essential preventative measures, including hiring local screening and testing staff, researching a vaccine and treatments and the stockpiling of needed medical supplies.”
HHS secretary Azar declined the funding, claiming it wasn’t needed (40).
After the meeting, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut
tweeted “Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.”
On February 6, the CDC shipped out
90 test kits. The World Health Organization shipped out 250,000.
On February 7, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted about “the transportation of nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies…including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials”—
to China. (These shipments represented just a fraction of the vital medical supplies, now desperately needed inside our borders, which were exported from the U.S. in January-March due to the Trump administration’s
failure to plan ahead and ban exports, as Germany, South Korea, and twenty-two others countries did, 41).
On February 9, “a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [CDC head Robert] Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors,
bearing little resemblance to the words of the president.”
On February 10, Trump repeated a false talking point multiple times. “Trump
said on Fox Business: ‘You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather.’” (42) He
told state governors: ‘You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.’ (43) And he
told supporters at a campaign rally: ‘Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that’s true.’” (44)
On February 11, Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell contradicted Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (see #31) when he said that the coronavirus would “very likely” impact America’s economy.
On February 12, the New York Times reported that
Trump’s CDC had sent state labs flawed test kits, further slowing down the testing process (45).
HHS secretary Alex Azar appeared before a Senate committee on February 13 and said, “As of today, I can announce that the CDC has begun working with health departments in five cities to use its flu surveillance network to begin testing individuals with flu-like symptoms for the Chinese coronavirus….This effort will help see whether there is broader spread than we have been able to detect so far.”
The statement gave the impression that the Trump administration was making progress in combating the virus, which was false, as the cities still lacked functional tests and the surveillance systems weren’t in place. Azar knew this, but was desperate to create positive spin for the administration (46).
On Valentine’s Day, as deaths from the virus were at 1,000 and climbing, Trump spoke before the National Border Control Council. He again wheeled out the false assertion that warm weather would douse the virus (47) and said, “We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It’s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good shape.” (48) Even as his administration was clearly fumbling the response (see #1-#46), he said, “And 61 percent of the voters approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. And, you know, we did a very early move on that. We did a — I was criticized by a lot of people at the beginning because we were the first. We’d never done it before.” (49)
On February 18, Atlantic contributor Peter Nicholas
offered perceptive summations of the Trump Administration’s failures of governance so far and the challenges ahead: “He has hollowed out federal agencies (see #7 and #10) and belittled expertise (50), prioritizing instead his own intuition and the demands of his political base. But he’ll need to rely on a bureaucracy he’s maligned to stop the virus’s spread.”
The article cited the ramifications of Trump’s allergy to bad news: “‘We have a president who doesn’t particularly care about competent administration, and who created a culture in which bad news is shut down,’ (51) says Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, whose state is home to one of multiple airports screening passengers for the coronavirus. ‘And when you’re dealing with a potential pandemic, you need to know all the bad news. If this disease ends up not overwhelming us, that would be a blessing. But it would not be because the Trump administration was ready. They were not.’”
Nicholas also addressed Trump’s continual lies and distortions about the scope of the virus: “Since Trump’s first upbeat assessment, the number of people sickened by the virus has spiraled. At the time of the CNBC interview (see #24), 17 people in China had died from the virus and about 540 were infected. Today, the death toll is about 1,900 and the number of infections tops 73,000. At least 15 cases have been reported in the U.S., and
an additional 14 Americans infected with the virus arrived yesterday following their evacuation from a cruise ship in Japan.”
Undeterred by scientific facts, Trump pushed the warm weather myth again on February 19: “I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.” (52)
On February 20, Politico
reported on the flawed test kits the CDC had sent out (see #45) and mentioned that the cost of the kits was so high ($250/each) that Trump’s Health and Human Services department was starting to run out of money (53)—which could have been avoided if Azar had accepted additional congressional funding proposed on February 5 (see #40).
The coronavirus task ******* met on February 21. Reviewing the escalation in cases abroad, the group “
concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing, even at the risk of severe disruption to the nation’s economy and the daily lives of millions of Americans.”
Early on the morning of February 23, Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard,
tweeted that “the US remains extremely limited in
#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of 100 public health labs have
@CDC test kits working (54) and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. (55) How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.” (56)
On Monday, February 24, trying to make up for previous short-sighted budget cuts (57), the administration “
asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funds to handle coronavirus in the United States. (To compare to a recent health crisis, the Obama administration requested $6 billion in emergency funding for the 2014 Ebola outbreak and eventually received $5.4 billion.) Though Democrats in Congress have pushed the administration to call for emergency coronavirus funding since early February, Politico states that ‘White House officials have been hesitant to press Congress for additional funding, with some hoping that the virus would burn itself out by the summer.’” (58)
The $2.5 billion request was a pittance, approximately 1/600th the size of Trump’s tax cut (59),
most of which went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Azar knew the funding was inadequate, but was hamstrung by administration officials who
didn’t grasp the seriousness of the virus and lacked pull with Trump to override them in favor of the public interest.
Even as the news grew worse, Trump continued to give false assurances, tweeting “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA….Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” (60). In fact, Trump had no idea if things were “under control” because his administration had failed to get functional test kits out.
That same day, the stock market had its
second biggest drop in its history.
The following day, February 25, the stock market cratered for the fourth consecutive day, losing 879 points to end at 27,081.
While the Dow Jones tanked, Nancy Messonier, the director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases,
made the case for community mitigation and told reporters that the virus would cause “severe” disruptions in American’s lives. Unaware that his public health officials were planning to propose mitigation efforts, Trump
scolded Messonier’s ultimate boss, Alex Azar, for the toll her announcement had on the stock market (61) and the next day demoted Azar, putting Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus task *******.
As a result of Trump’s temper tantrum, the task *******’s time-sensitive recommendations for social distancing, school closures, and cancellations of crowded events was put on hold. It would be three long, deadly weeks before Trump would finally announce social distancing recommendations on March 16 (62).
At a time when bipartisan harmony was more important than ever, Trump trolled Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on Twitter for pointing out that $2.5 billion wasn’t remotely adequate to the task: “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer is complaining, for publicity purposes only, that I should be asking for more money than $2.5 Billion to prepare for Coronavirus. If I asked for more he would say it is too much. He didn’t like my early travel closings. I was right. He is incompetent!” (63)
And even as it was
reported that “Trump spent the past 2 years slashing the government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus outbreak,” Trump tweeted that “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.” (64)
While in India that day, Trump told reporters, “You may ask about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country. We have very few people with it, and the people that have it are…getting better. They’re all getting better….As far as what we’re doing with the new virus, I think that we’re doing a great job.” (65)
Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow
echoed Trump’s lies and contradicted CDC officials when he told CNBC, “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight.” (66)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post
reported on the severe shortage of N95 masks American hospitals were facing due to onerous federal regulations (67) and a lack of support from the Trump administration (68), and the administration’s lack of a plan going forward, which was causing confusion and panic among state and local officials (69).
The next day, February 26, Politico
reported that the “U.S. isn’t ready to detect stealth coronavirus spread” due to poor coordination among crisis management staff, the administration’s failure to get functional test kits out in a timely fashion, and needlessly strict test criteria (see #37): “Just 12 of more than 100 public health labs in the U.S. are currently able to diagnose the coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, potentially slowing the response if the virus starts taking hold here. The faulty test has also delayed a plan to widely screen people with symptoms of respiratory illness who have tested negative for influenza to detect whether the coronavirus may be stealthily spreading.”
Only six states were testing for the virus and the testing was limited to people who had been to China or were experiencing symptoms, which was allowing the virus to spread undetected. Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch told Politico, “China tested 320,000 people in Guangdong over a three-week period. This is the scale we need to be thinking on.”
Meanwhile, Trump continued to compare coronavirus to the flu, though the virus has approximately
20 times the mortality rate (70), and told White House reporters, “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low….
When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (71) In reality, the States had 60 cases at the time, the number was increasing, and the real number was far greater but undetected due to the administration’s failure to get functional test kits out.
The poor communication among officials overseeing the coronavirus response continued, as “[Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar didn’t know until late in the afternoon that Vice President Mike Pence would be
in control of the process. The HHS secretary was reportedly ‘
blindsided’ by the news.” (72)
In picking Pence to lead the administration’s response to coronavirus, Trump referred to his vice president as an “expert” and someone with “a certain talent for this,” though Pence’s reluctance to support needle exchange and steep cuts to Planned Parenthood (which provides HIV testing in addition to birth control) as governor of Indiana
had contributed to an HIV outbreak there (73).
With Pence’s ascension, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn was finally brought into the coronavirus committee. For weeks the FDA’s powers to work with private companies to increase production of test kits, PPE, and other necessities
had been ignored (74).
As of February 27, 2,800 people had died from the virus, while 82,000 cases had been reported worldwide. Business Insider had
the following headline: “Trump defends huge [19%] cuts to the CDC’s budget (75) by saying the government can hire more doctors ‘when we need them’ during crises.” (76) Trump responded to criticisms of the budget cuts by saying, “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them….When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.” (77)
Despite the increasing gloom, Trump continued to play pretend. He told an audience attending an African American History Month event at the White House, “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s
like a miracle, it will disappear.” (78) He tweeted “Only a very small number in U.S., & China numbers look to be going down. All countries working well together!” (79)
On Friday, February 28, nearly two months after the administration had first been informed of the coronavirus, NBC
reported that the U.S. had done fewer than 500 tests, even as China had done over 300,000 and South Korea was doing 10,000 or more/day (80).
ProPublica offered one of many post-mortems to come, highlighting
the grave error the administration had made in bypassing World Health Organization test kits which were ready to go (81) in favor of CDC test kits, which weren’t:
“
The CDC announced on Feb. 14 that surveillance testing would begin in five key cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. That effort has not yet begun. (see #46)
“Until the middle of this week, only the CDC and the six state labs — in Illinois, Idaho, Tennessee, California, Nevada and Nebraska — were testing patients for the virus, according to Peter Kyriacopoulos, APHL’s senior director of public policy. Now, as many more state and local labs are in the process of setting up the testing kits, this capacity is expected to increase rapidly.
“There are other ways to expand the country’s testing capacity. Beyond the CDC and state labs, hospitals are also able to develop their own tests for diseases like COVID-19 and internally validate their effectiveness, with some oversight from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But because the CDC declared the virus a public health emergency, it triggered a set of federal rules that raises the bar for all tests, including those devised by local hospitals.
“So now, hospitals must validate their tests with the FDA — even if they copied the CDC protocol exactly. Hospital lab directors say the FDA validation process is onerous and is wasting precious time when they could be testing in their local communities.” (82)
As Margaret Hamburg (Obama’s FDA commissioner from 2009-2015) would later tell Olga Khazan of the Atlantic, “
the [FDA] could have proactively reached out to different national and international labs to see whether their tests could be approved for use in the U.S.,” but there’s no evidence that they did (83), and in fact the FDA “told one Seattle infectious-disease expert, Helen Chu,
to stop testing for the coronavirus entirely….Chu was not alone. Dozens of labs in the U.S. were eager to make tests and willing to test patients, but they were hamstrung by regulations for most of February, even as the virus crept silently across the nation.”
Uncertainty over the virus contributed to the markets having
their worst week since the crash of 2008.
Later that night, even as other countries had started social distancing in response to the virus, Trump put thousands of his supporters at risk of exposure with a political rally in North Charleston, South Carolina. It was one of
eight campaign events Trump would have after being notified of coronavirus.
Asked about administration efforts to combat coronavirus before the rally, Trump told Sinclair Broadcasting, “
I think it’s really going well. We did something very fortunate: we closed up to certain areas of the world very, very early — far earlier than we were supposed to. I took a lot of heat for doing it. It turned out to be the right move, and we only have 15 people and they are getting better, and hopefully they’re all better. There’s one who is quite sick, but maybe he’s gonna be fine….We’re prepared for the worst, but we think we’re going to be very fortunate.” (84) During the rally, Trump accused Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus and said
concern over the issue was a “hoax.” (85)
Trump’s chief of staff Nick Mulvaney used the same talking point that night, telling reporters at the Conservative Political Action conference, “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it [the coronavirus] today is [Democrats] think this is going to be what brings down the president….That’s what this is all about….I got a note today from a reporter saying, ‘What are you going to do today to calm the markets?’ I’m like, really, what I might do to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours.” (86)
The next day, Saturday February 29, the first American death at the hand of the coronavirus “hoax” was reported.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” the next day, March 1, Alex Azar
claimed that, “‘In terms of testing kits, we’ve already tested over 3,600 people for the virus. We now have the capability in the field to test 75,000 people, and within the next week or two we’ll have a radical expansion even beyond that.” Like most of the Trump administration’s public messaging, this was false (87). At the time, less than 1,000 tests had been completed. By comparison, South Korea, a country 1/6th the size of the U.S., which had discovered the virus within its borders on the same day—January 20—
had done over 80,000 tests.
As of Monday March 2, U.S. coronavirus deaths were up to six; globally over 90,000 cases had been reported.
Dr. Matt McCarthy, a physician at New York-Presbyterian, told CNBC that he still didn’t have any test kits (88): “‘This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by the middle of the week. There’s going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue.’ McCarthy added, ‘
They’re testing 10,000 a day in some countries, and we can’t get this off the ground….I’m a practitioner on the firing line, and I don’t have the tools to properly care for patients today.’”
Dr. Eva Lee, an infectious disease researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, commented in
a Red Dawn email (see #27) with Trump administration public health officials: “We need actions, actions, and more actions. We are going to have pockets of epicenters across the country, West coast, East coast and the South. Our policy leaders must act now. Please make it happen!”
At a campaign rally the same day in Charleston, North Carolina, Trump said, “We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies and they’re going to have vaccines, I think relatively soon. And they’re going to have something that makes you better and that’s going to actually take place, we think, even sooner.”
This was patently false (89), as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical expert on the coronavirus task *******, had told Trump earlier that day. Fauci estimated that it would take a year-and-a-half for a vaccine to emerge.
After solid gains on Monday, the Dow lost 800 points on Tuesday, March 3, bringing it down to 25,917 at day’s close. Speaking to reporters, Trump continued to minimize the virus, claiming, “There’s only one hot spot, and that’s also pretty much in a very — in a home, as you know, in a nursing home.” In fact, the nursing home in Washington state wasn’t the only cluster of known coronavirus activity, as California and Oregon had both reported areas of community contagion (90).
On Wednesday, March 4, the death toll in the U.S. reached ten and New York reported an infected community.
Speaking to airline executives at the White House, Trump
continued to downplay the extent of the crisis, saying, “Some people will have this at a very light level and won’t even go to a doctor or hospital, and they’ll get better. There are many people like that.” (91) He also blamed the Obama administration for the lag in testing, claiming an Obama regulation had slowed the administration down, which was false (92).
Trump’s lies and blame shifting continued in an interview with Sean Hannity which appeared later that day. Trump
falsely claimed that the Obama administration “didn’t do anything about” swine flu and that based purely on his intuition, science-based coronavirus fatality rates were flawed—”I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number — and this is just my hunch — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild, they’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people.” (93)
On Friday, March 6, reported cases in the U.S. passed 300 and deaths were up to 17, including the first on the East Coast.
The Atlantic ran a post-mortem about
the administration’s failure to get functional test kits out called “The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing.”
Two months after the Trump administration had first been notified of the coronavirus and one month after a task ******* had been formed (see #34), only 1,895 tests could be verified, a fraction of the 10,000-20,000 tests South Korea was performing daily.
According to the authors, “The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries….The net effect of these choices is that the country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. (94) This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long been
a global leader in public-health transparency.”
Earlier in the day, Trump had appeared at a signing ceremony for the Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, which would dedicate $8.3 billion to fighting the coronavirus. The funding was more than three times what the administration had requested (see #57) and yet still a pittance relative to the scope of the virus, roughly
1/180th of the amount Trump spent on his tax cut, the bulk of which went to the upper 1% (95).
Many public health officials felt the appropriations came a month too late (96), shortchanging localities of crucial resources for testing and personal protective equipment. (see #40)
At the signing, Trump offered false assurances and minimized the scope of the public health disaster that he was spending $8.3 billion on, saying, “And in terms of deaths, I don’t know what the count is today. Is it eleven? Eleven people? And in terms of cases, it’s very, very few.” (97)
After the signing, Trump visited CDC headquarters in Atlanta, where
he continued to lie about test kits: “Anybody that needs a test can have a test. They are all set. They have them out there. In addition to that they are making millions more as we speak but as of right now and yesterday anybody that needs a test that is the important thing and the test are all perfect like the letter was perfect.” (98)
Asked about the passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship docked in San Francisco who were ****** to stay on the ship for the time being, Trump expressed concern that allowing them onshore, where they would be added to the number of confirmed cases, would make him look bad: “I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship. That wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship, either. OK? It wasn’t their fault either. And they’re mostly Americans, so I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.” (99)
Trump also said “I hear the numbers are getting much better in Italy,”
though the country was entering a lockdown and would experience two hundred more deaths over the weekend to come.
On Saturday, March 7, Politico led with “
Trump’s mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis,” an in-depth feature by Dan Diamond exploring the impact of the Trump administration’s internal dysfunctions on their crisis management response.
Diamond’s exposé revealed that Mike Pence and other administration officials had wanted to evacuate the Grand Princess cruise ship (see #99) in order to keep the passengers who didn’t have coronavirus from getting it from those who did, but that Trump had overruled his advisors because he didn’t want the number of reported cases to increase.
The article stated that “As the outbreak has grown, Trump has become attached to the daily count of coronavirus cases and how the United States compares to other nations, reiterating that he wants the U.S. numbers kept as low as possible. Health officials have found explicit ways to oblige him by highlighting the most optimistic outcomes in briefings (100), and their agencies have tamped down on promised transparency. The CDC has stopped detailing how many people in the country have been tested for the virus (101), and its
online dashboard is running well behind the number of U.S. cases
tracked by Johns Hopkins and even lags the European Union’s
own estimate of U.S. cases.”
The article confirmed that onerous regulations (see #37) and Trump’s lack of policy engagement (see #1) were key elements in the test delays and that “Trump’s aides discouraged [HHS Secretary Alex] Azar from briefing the president about the coronavirus threat back in January” (see #22) because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” (see #51)
“…The pressure to earn Trump’s approval can be a distraction at best and an obsession at worst: Azar, having just survived a bruising clash with a deputy [Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] and sensing that his job was on the line [see #59], spent part of January making appearances on conservative TV outlets and taking other steps to shore up his anti-abortion bona fides and win approval from the president, even as the global coronavirus outbreak grew stronger.
“Around the same time, Azar had concluded that the new coronavirus posed a public health risk and tried to share an urgent message with the president: The potential outbreak could leave tens of thousands of Americans sickened and many dead.
“The jockeying for Trump’s favor was part of the cause of Azar’s destructive feud with Verma, as the two tried to box each other out of events touting Trump initiatives. Now, officials including Azar, Verma and other senior leaders are ****** to spend time shoring up their positions with the president and his deputies at a moment when they should be focused on a shared goal: stopping a potential pandemic. (102)
“‘The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,’ said one adviser to a senior health official involved in the coronavirus response. ‘This is the world he’s made.’” (103)
The closing paragraph read “‘If this sort of dysfunction exists as part of the everyday operations—then, yes, during a true crisis the problems are magnified and exacerbated,’ said a former Trump HHS official. ‘And with extremely detrimental consequences.’”
The following day, March 8, as international cases had passed 100,000 and the importance of social distancing was becoming increasingly obvious, HUD secretary Ben Carson was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about the advisability of Trump holding rallies where thousands of people were crammed together. Carson, a neurosurgeon who knew better,
chose Trump’s favored talking point over public safety: “…going to a rally, if you’re a healthy individual and you’re taking the precautions that have been placed out there, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t go. However, if you belong to one of those categories of high risk, obviously, you need to think twice about that.” (104)
As of Monday, March 9, the tally in the U.S. was over 700 cases reported and 26 deaths. The Dow lost 2,000 points that day,
the biggest one-day loss in history.
Former Republican senator and governor
Judd Gregg offered a sober appraisal of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus:
“The budget he recently submitted to Congress savaged the BioShield account (105). This is the program that was set up after the SARS epidemic and anthrax events well over a decade ago to allow the federal government to fund research on pharmaceutical responses to biological attacks or a pandemic outbreak.
“The program was needed because this type of research is extremely expensive and has little commercial upside. The ******* developed are unique and narrowly targeted.
“Thus, in order to get this research up and running, Congress and the prior administrations created the program. In this instance, Congress actually anticipated a serious issue and began addressing it effectively.
“But the president and his people got it wrong. In their usual naive and uninformed style, they have tried to eviscerate the program.
“This action came in the face of significant warnings from the intelligence community that a biological attack is one of the primary threats we face from terrorists. And now we know a pandemic is also a primary threat.”