Former Vice President Joe Biden will “listen to the scientists,” Donald Trump mocked on Sunday at a Carson City, Nevada, rally. Really, that’s the line of attack: Biden will listen to scientists in handling the coronavirus pandemic. There’s no danger of that from Trump, for sure. Trump has repeatedly found new ways to sideline scientists and damage the public health response. We’ve seen time and time again during Trump’s time in the White House that he likes for his advisers to be at one another’s throats. Now, he’s doing it with tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives on the line.
Trump and White House officials have repeatedly pressured the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put out messages more in line with Trump’s wishes than with reality, attacking the FDA for not moving ahead with a vaccine on a timeline defined by the November 3 elections. And Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and Fox News commentator with no qualifications in public health or virology, has risen above actual experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx—Birx had tried to stay in Trump’s good graces by compromising the science, but even she wouldn’t bend far enough and Atlas rose to favor with his promotion of a herd immunity strategy that would lead to mass death beyond what we’ve already seen.
At one point, Birx complained to Mike Pence about Atlas’ influence and poor advice, The Washington Post reports. However, “Pence did not take sides, but rather told Atlas and Birx to bring data bolstering their perspectives to the task force and to work out their disagreements themselves, according to two senior administration officials.”
In other words, Pence punted and turned it into a debate between expertise and anti-science partisanship, which, with Trump ultimately in charge, can only ever be won by the latter.
Some states’ public health response is better than Trump would want—after mocking Biden for saying he’d listen to the scientists on Sunday, Trump bragged about the direction of the economy, blaming Democratic governors of some states for trying to hurt his reelection chance by continuing public health restrictions that he insisted were a drag on the economy. But plenty of Republican governors are employing the kind of disastrous strategy Trump favors.
Preventing people from endangering public health is “not a job for government,” said North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, even as his state ran out of ICU beds. In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds says, “We can’t let COVID-19 dominate our lives.” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is insisting that increased testing is responsible for the rise of cases in her state, with no explanation for how increased testing would be contributing to rising hospitalizations and deaths.
These Republican governors preach “personal responsibility” over public health policy from their governments, but Republican leaders aren’t even modeling personal responsibility. Case in point, Donald freakin’ Trump, who got COVID-19 after refusing to wear masks and holding a superspreader event at the White House—Dr. Fauci said that, seeing the lack of precautions at the Amy Coney Barrett event, he was “absolutely not” surprised that Trump got sick.
Unfortunately, Trump’s insistence on the economy over public health is showing up much more clearly on the public health side—he’s created a massive disaster with the United States at 220,000 dead, while the economy remains terrible for working people. Trump is being Trump, running coronavirus response as he’s run everything else. In this case, we can see the death toll of his incompetence and contempt rising day by day.