On Tuesday afternoon, the White House issued a statement that named “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” as one of Donald Trump’s big “accomplishments from the first term.” Apparently if you turn the corner enough times, magic really does occur. Or dizziness.
The claim of victory comes as the nation is seeing a broad-based “third surge” that has taken the number of new cases to record highs. Deaths always lag behind new cases, but after eight weeks of straight increases in COVID-19 across the nation, fatalities are also rising, reaching levels not seen since mid-August. So far this week, the nation is trending over 12,000 cases a day higher than last week, making another new record on Thursday or Friday a near certainty, and bringing the nation close to 100,000 cases a day as the election draws near. All those new cases mean that healthcare resources are strained to the limits, with full ICUs and states preparing to implement triage.
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Still, both Trump and his campaign surrogates are concerned that all the press around a pandemic that has sickened 9 million Americans and now killed over 230,000 is “exorbitantly negative.” People are ignoring the fun, lighthearted side of the disease. “Like Barron Trump is a case,” said Trump. “He has sniffles. He was sniffling, one Kleenex, that’s all he needed … and he was better.” The people suffering major long-term neurological damage after a bout with COVID-19 will surely laugh at that one. If they still can.
With six days to go before the election, Trump is pushing harder than ever that COVID-19 is nothing but a media hoax. Only this time, even people within the White House are pushing back.
As The Daily Beast reports, officials on the Coronavirus Task Force are taking the claims about “defeating” the pandemic as a “personal slight.” They’re also taking it with a fair bit of confusion, as they can’t see how anyone—even Donald Trump—can push a line about “ending” the pandemic while cases are at record highs and still rising. After all, it has only been three days since Mark Meadows made what seemed to be a formal decree of surrender to COVID-19 when he said, “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Pivoting to a victory celebration just seems … bizarre.
While the new White House statement brags about Trump’s “decisive action,” the truth is it has been his strategy to do nothing. Nothing, that is, except complain about governors who did try to take action. And while the same statement says that Trump has “engaged scientists and health professionals” to understand and “defeat” COVID-19, a report at The Washington Post details how the White House has, from the outset, manipulated the news about the pandemic and downplayed its seriousness.
The Post story looks back to the Feb. 25 announcement in which Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that “disruption to everyday life may be severe” and “we expect we will see community spread in this country.” It shows how Trump’s team leapt into action, not to address the pandemic, but to stifle Messonnier and spread a more upbeat message.
If the task force members cited by Daily Beast still want to stay anonymous, the Post report leans heavily on someone who has stepped out as a vocal, public critic of the White House reaction: Olivia Troye, a former top aide to Mike Pence. Troye is open about how Pence was picked initially to chair the task force not out of some expertise, but because Trump wanted someone who would “stay in line” with his messaging. But the most disturbing thing may be what she had to say about Trump’s initial reaction when informed about the threat of the 2019 novel coronavirus.
“He asked the right questions early on. He said how bad is this? How does this compare to the flu? How does it spread?” said Troye. “I saw a man who normally I had seen in various situations sometimes act irrationally or say things publicly. But in that moment he was serious ...”
Trump understood the threat. He collected the right information. But he reacted, not to save Americans, but to prop up the stock market and take the route he saw as most effective to bolster his chances at reelection—even if that meant softpeddling the crisis and allowing hundreds of thousands to die.
On Wednesday morning, assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services Brett Giroir also spoke up against the message that the White House has been pushing and addressed Trump’s claims. In an interview on NBC’s Today, Giroir was asked about a tweet from Trump saying that cases are up only because “we test, test, test” and the the whole thing is “a fake news media conspiracy.”
Giroir started off by saying that the apparently low level of cases in March and April was “probably false” and the result of insufficient testing, but that doesn’t mean we’re not seeing even more cases in October. “We do believe, and the data shows, that the cases are going up,” said Girior. “It’s not just a function of testing. Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up. And we know that too because hospitalizations are going up ... And we do know deaths are increasing, unfortunately. So, we do assess that the cases are actually going up, they’re real, because hospitalizations and deaths are starting to go up. ”
Giroir also insisted that “nobody is waving the white flag.” He might want to speak to Meadows about that one. Or he could call up the White House. Because they’ve decided to wave the victory flag and call it a day.
