On Tuesday, the United States will pass nine million cases of COVID-19. More than nine months since the pandemic began, and even including a renewed surge in many parts of Europe, the United States still have more than a fifth of all cases on the planet. Also on Tuesday, Donald Trump is again insisting that America is “turning the corner.” In a way, he’s right. He’s just not saying what’s on the other side.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ statement that “we are not going to control the pandemic,” may have seemed like a slip when he said it. But it was certainly truthful. Dating back to the first weeks of COVID-19, it became clear that not taking any serious action to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus was the official policy of the Trump White House. It still is. But for the final week of the campaign, Trump has decided to go all in on making that message public.
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As COVID-19 cases explode to record levels, Trump is taking action. He’s taking the same action that he took against mounting evidence of his extortion of sex workers, the same action he took in defending his fake university, the same action he took in pretending that the Trump Foundation wasn’t a scam, the same approach he’s take again and again … denial.
As Paul Krugman pointed out at The New York Times, Trump’s COVID-19 denialism uses much of the same language as his denial of the climate crisis. That includes making claims—as Trump did again on Tuesday morning—that the pandemic is being hyped by the media just to hurt him.
In both rallies and on Twitter, Trump complains that the media wants to talk about “Covid, Covid, Covid” rather than other, more important topics. Like the Nobel Prize that he most certainly did not win. At these same events, Trump is feeding false claims that deaths from COVID-19 are being exaggerated, and bizarrely that “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” for claiming that a patient died of COVID-19.
It’s media hype. It’s not that bad. And of course, just as Trump told California officials that “it will start getting cooler,” he’s still telling America that the virus is going to “go away.” That claim even capped Trump’s rambling answers to COVID-19 question at the final debate.
Also just like the climate crisis, Trump has Fox News and the rest of right-wing media in there pitching for him. From the outset, Fox has had pundits on the air making utterly false claims about the threat represented by the pandemic and insisting that the virus is no worse than the flu—a claim that is still being repeated by Trump supporters both online and at his rallies.
The climate/COVID-19 crossover doesn’t stop with Fox. Many of the same conservative groups that have helped construct false narratives to slow action against the climate crisis—the Hoover Institute, the American Institute for Economic Research, the American Enterprise Institute—are also on the front lines of spreading false reports about COVID-19. That has included not just supporting the push for “herd immunity,” but reports going back to the beginning of the outbreak that have suggested that the virus isn’t that bad, or many people are already immune, or we’re much closer to herd immunity than the numbers might indicate, or … anything that justifies keeping business open, open, open.
Which is, of course, the biggest overlap between COVID-19 and the climate crisis: The valuing of corporate interests over human lives. It’s no surprise that the same groups that supported orders that actually prevent considering sea level rise when planning new infrastructure, also supported orders to force workers back onto the job even when it was quite literally killing them by the hundreds.
As Politico reports, Trump is focused not on fighting the pandemic, but on what the White House calls “the devastating effects of lockdowns.” Meaning exactly and explicitly placing dollars over lives. To wring the last hours out of threatened workers, Trump has promised that everyone will get “for free” the same treatment that he received—treatment valued at about $500,000. That’s not going to happen. There are fewer than 50,000 doses in the world of the monoclonal antibody treatments given to Trump, Chris Christie, and other Republican politicians. And, of course, Trump promises that a vaccine is coming “in a few weeks.” Which is literally the same promise he’s been making since March.
There may be no official Republican platform for 2020, and Trump’s campaign website may lack anything at all like a policy section, but that doesn’t mean his plans are not clear. Do Nothing Donald will continue to do nothing but talk. Americans will keep right on dying.