From the start, President Trump has viewed the Covid-19 pandemic exclusively through the lens of how it could affect him, personally. In fact he has demonstrated that is the prism through which he calculates every single decision, big or small. No exceptions. Trump only does the right thing when that right thing accidentally happens to coincide with what in his view is best for him.
Early on, Trump decided that the best scenario for him was an ability to point to the numbers as evidence he was doing a great job, and the numbers are a function of testing. Above all, like everything, the pandemic was all about him, as were the “numbers”: ’It’s one case from China, it’s totally contained, we’ve shut it down; it’s 15 cases soon going to zero; I don’t want the 40 infected people from the cruise ship to come onshore because I don’t want the numbers’. 40 people on the Grand Princess that tested positive. 40. Trump was fuming at the prospect of 40 cases, not deaths, just cases, added to “his” numbers. We now have over 40,000 Americans dead, and mounting evidence suggests that number is significantly understated.
The president is caught in a self-induced catch-22.
Trump desperately needs the economy, his ostensible and largely fabricated singular achievement, to be reignited, and equally desperately wants to suppress the numbers of Coronavirus cases and deaths. More testing means bigger numbers–that he figured out early on, which explains the paucity of tests–yet exponentially more testing is the very thing needed to safely and responsibly send people back to work.
Incapable of acknowledging either the initial testing failure (failure isn’t quite the right word, let’s call it suppression), and equally incapable of admitting the ongoing problem of insufficient testing, or inadequacies going forward, Mr. Trump appears to be pursuing a strategy of just re-opening the economy regardless without anything close to adequate testing, or contact tracing, or treatment, or a vaccine.
This, in his degenerate mind, is his own, selfish, best remaining option. For him.
And it’s a killer.